rolling european politics thread 2011

'we're all to blame, look at all the designer specs and mercs'

Yeah, this is a line peddled a lot around here this past few years.

Mainly by people and the offspring of the people not paying back enormous private debt, and therefore pretty much net beneficiaries of a bankruptcy/debt forgiveness/bank bailout/publicise private debt to support collapsing system/'oh shit how much now everything is fucked' cycle

We've got a lot of these ppl. They're doing ok, ime. Very few of them land in front of me looking for ever-shrinking housing supports, very few of them work beside me for an ever-shrinking wage.

i mean, these are the cunts that gave us jedward- we have entire towns full of the likes ffs

I feel most sorry for the people of Portugal. They don't seem to have had a mickey mouse speculative boom or a grossly dysfunctional corrupt and incompetent state apparatus, yet they still seem to have been lumped with austerity and a fiscal crisis, despite seeming to be as poor as ever.

I think they did have a speculative boom. A Portuguese friend of mine tells me that Porto and Lisbon suddenly sprouted loads of bankers and fancy restaurants around the turn of the millenium.

But he also said the notoriously laid-back attitude of Portuguese builders actually acted as a brake on property speculation specifically.. getting a flat renovated takes like three years of phone calls and arguments

National stereotypes to the rescue.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13899740

Interesting stuff happening in Kyiv at the moment.

hottest head of state ever?

"The sovereignty of Greece will be massively limited," [Eurogroup chairman Jean-Claude Juncker] told Germany's Focus magazine. ...

"For the forthcoming wave of privatizations they will need, for example, a solution based on a model of Germany's 'Treuhand agency'," Juncker said, referring to the privatization agency that sold off 14,000 East German firms between 1990 and 1994. ...

Treuhand was supposed to sell state property at a profit but closed with a huge deficit and a legacy of bitterness among the legions of workers whose jobs it destroyed. Four million Germans were employed by Treuhand-owned companies in 1990 but only about 1.5 million jobs were left by 1994.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/03/us-eurogroup-greece-idUSTRE76219J20110703

situation obviously sucks hard but im going to come out and say that maaaaaybe the east german economy of 1990 wasn't on the firmest of footings...

Germany in 1990 is such a sui generis that it seems odd to try to use it as a model for anything.

mayne what's your point?

that greece shd default really. i don't think they have a hope in hell of pulling off these austerity measures, which won't actually make their economy functional but bail out investors. clearly it needs to remodel its economy: how to do that without social and political breakdown i leave to the geniuses.

it's guaranteed that they will default. they literally have no way of paying off their debts. the question is, how much looting can the EU get away with before that occurs? the austerity stuff is an excuse for that looting (i.e. privatization); the annual greek budget deficit is actually not very large. what this bailout ensures is that the looting can continue apace.

(didn't mean to be snarky, i just didn't see what point you were making with your east germany comment)

i mean i am really not kidding - the whole point of the "bailout" is to ensure that massive privatizations can go forward before greece collapses completely.

shd be retitled 'rolling into the shitbin' imo

with an undercard of 'ireland vs the church'- just announced

hard to come up with anything here but 'i am so fucking appalled' + a reference to 'they live'

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/1937-1937-1937

The Telegraph has a leaked draft of the eurozone rescue plan for Greece. The financial engineering is Rube Goldbergish and unconvincing. But here’s what leaped out at me:

9. All euro area Member States will adhere strictly to the agreed fiscal targets, improve competitiveness and address macro-economic imbalances. Deficits in all countries except those under a programme will be brought below 3% by 2013 at the latest.

OK, so we’re going to demand harsh austerity in the debt-crisis countries; and meanwhile, we’re also going to have austerity in the non-debt-crisis countries.

Plus, the ECB is raising rates.

So demand will be depressed in both crisis and non-crisis economies; this will lead to a vigorous recovery through … what?

The Serious People are determined to destroy all the advanced economies in the name of prudence.

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi took advantage of a government press conference last night to push his own shares. He said if he had savings he'd fill his boots with Mediaset, which was now "utterly undervalued".

this guy

osbourne's plan to hold onto RBS just a little bit longer is..... not lookin so wise

funny how the famous yet unnamed "investors" on both sides of the atlantic appear to be in a fullblown baffled panic, looking at the other side for cues

i.e. america looking at european bond rates, and europeans holding their breath for NFP figures

i think a question that might be worth asking is, who are these "investors" and why do they run the world? and why do they have billions of basically idle money lying around when unemployment is up everywhere and businesses are in a slump?

Would be interesting to know how much of that is pension funds.

yeah it's mainly professionally invested funds, right?

is there any overlap between professionally invested funds and "hot money"? -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_money

i was sincere in wanting to know the composition of these giant money flows

out of my league, really

my vague understanding is that hot money flows in and out of countries are on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars every day

Guys are we seriously not talking about this right now? If we are, I can't find the thread...

we are not afaik

Maybe there's an 'occupy athens' thread i'm missing tho

is there a good outline of all the possible scenarios atp w/r/t greece staying/leaving in the eurozone?

scorchedearth.jpg

kinda want greece to peace out of the 'zone b/c fuck germany

otm

Kinda want ireland to have a referendum on the debt issue

we paid $1bn in matured unsecured bonds in a failed bank yesterday, for instance

Don't think i'd have voted for that

kinda want greece to peace out of the 'zone b/c fuck germany

― max, Thursday, 3 November 2011 15:11 (39 minutes ago) Bookmark

How so?

Ha ha, Frum thinks germany's the villain

my default poition is that anyone pushing for bank debt to be pushed into public balance sheets is the villain, tbh

www.economist.com/node/21533445

Brief article about what a good little country we are

*Tousles hair, hands over an apple*

yeah, something like that.

We're essentially trying to use deflation as a accelerant of growth. With exports at c.70% of gdp we'd better fuckin hope nobody else joins in.

Kinda want ireland to have a referendum on the debt issue

it is not really an issue readily reducible to a referendum question. Referendums by their nature tend to be fairly simple X or Y questions (more usually X or Not X, in Ireland's case), while running a country is a more complex business involving a large number of choices that cannot really be reduced to "pay the debt or not pay the debt".

Shit just real, etc.
Financial crisis forces Berlusconi to delay release of latest love song CD

xp depends on what you're labelling as 'debt' dv

bye bye berlusconi!

Could use a mod edit to include 2012...or a new thread, whatever.

bye bye Greece? junior partner in the coalition saying he can't vote for more pain, govt could fall this w/e?

At the moment the vote wouldn't collapse, but seeing a lot of postponed meetings etc. Main thing is the Greek coalition still needs to find ~ 300m Euros worth of savings meaning even deeper austerity.

Wdn't surprise if this flirtation with technocracy turned into autocracy quite quickly.

i think france is like, can we please do this after the election?

it's funny how the rhine has pretty much held onto its status as the fulcrum of european power

Hollande might have his work done for him by the election. Greece could leave next month, leading to contagion...