It’s quite astonishing to watch the German Parliament, the Bundestag, voting on Friday 30 November, with the overwhelming majority of 473 deputies in 584 present, saying yes to a third in a row aid programme for Greece, while all the major media insist, that the public opinion in this country is against any help Berlin should […]Bundestag kick starts the next episode of the Greek tragedy
November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment
It’s quite astonishing to watch the German Parliament, the Bundestag, voting on Friday 30 November, with the overwhelming majority of 473 deputies in 584 present, saying yes to a third in a row aid programme for Greece, while all the major media insist, that the public opinion in this country is against any help Berlin should […]Christmas spending: Who can afford not to cut?
November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment
European Union consumers will be very careful with their Christmas gifts shopping lists this year, says an in-depth analysis of Wall Steer Journal’s Europe Edition, based mainly on data from a relevant survey of Deloitte LLP. With unemployment reaching unheard before levels above 25% in Greece and Spain and skyrocketing in other weak EU economies, the […]How many more financial crises in the West can the world stand?
November 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment
“After five years of crisis the world economy is weakening again”, states bluntly the very first phrase of the editorial of OECD’s latest economic report, published on 28 November. Actually it couldn’t be differently, because the US economy doesn’t seem to respond well to therapy and Europe is in a much worse state. But let’s […]What happens when the Eurogroup decides to help Greece
November 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Once more Eurozone and Greece made it. Using “creative accounting” they agreed that the over indebted country’s loan load will be drastically reduced after one…decade! Says the Eurogroup statement of 27 November 2012 on Greece: …in 2022 the debt to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) ratio will be substantially lower than 110%. But this is just […]Markets are more sensitive to Greece’s woes than Merkel
November 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Greece’s three official creditors, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Union are actually two and in last analysis only one, the ECB. In reality all the other sixteen Eurozone governments plus the EU institutions and the IMF, haven’t given away not even one cent to Greece. They have only issued guarantees […]How Greece was destroyed
November 24, 2012 by 1 Comment
Right from the beginning, the scenario of the Greek financial tragedy was criticised as fake. Towards the end of 2009, the newly elected government of George Papandreou, son and grandson of prime ministers, found out that his PASOK socialist party had won the election on populist promises that could not be fulfilled. Papandreou […]The undead banks
November 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment
History has proved that ideology and logic (science) are in direct conflict. If you want to serve them both the outcome is usually a monster or a statement of the obvious. Take for example the soviet science, full of proletarian ideology at its apex during the Stalinist period. Its most cherished achievement was the experiments […]Lagarde’s metamorphoses, not a laughing matter
November 16, 2012 by 2 Comments
International politico-economic relations is a tricky field, with the major players constantly changing stance, according to their short term interests, putting aside whatever honourable principles are left in their decision making procedures. And all that being discussed and decided upon, by a handful of people behind closed doors. If those people were not playing with […]On the euro but out of it?
November 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The fact that Greece reached the exit of Eurozone more than once during the past months and a Grexit (exit of Greece from Eurozone) is still not excluded did not stop the European Central Bank from keeping the country on the euro. This time however for decorative reasons. The ECB used the most ancient depiction […]Long live Eurozone’s bank supervisor down with the EU budget supremo
November 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment
EU leaders in their last summit of mid-October appeared ready to make another systemic blunder. After creating a limping Eurozone, with a common currency but not common rules for sovereign debt issues, now they discuss the institutionalisation of a common EU budget and a Brussels “supremo of Finance”. And all that with no political legitimacy. […]The world to teach Germans to…un-German
September 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Italians and Greeks are trained tax dodgers for millennia now, while Spanish banks lately discovered how to usurp their depositors’ money. No wonder then why the three Mediterranean nations found it difficult to endure the Teutonic straight euro money jacket. As for the Portuguese and the Irish they both followed those Med attitudes and the […]Eurozone again whipped by Greek winds
June 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The details of Private Sector Participation (PSI) in the haircut of the Greek debt is presently the critical issue, on which will be judged not only the prospects of Athens regaining sometime in 2015 the possibility of self-financing its debts, but the outcome of negotiations over the PSI will also define the overall abilities of […]
