The Eurozone Crisis Thread

boom tsakalatos

eurozone just dropped the hammer

I did a higher level course in economics but I have to admit that ultimately I do not have a clue what's going on. Even to the point that I'm like "what is this debt?" Or even "what is money any more?" I mean I love that Picketty interview because it's fearless, I want to believe. But wtf is going on? I feel so stupid when I read about it.

good op-ed from a Greek friend of mine:

http://www.euractiv.com/sections/eu-priorities-2020/search-vision-europe-316063

so the chinese stock market crashed today. i'm sure these are isolated incidents

Or even "what is money any more?"

srsly

China has its own economic issues that don't hinge on Greek debt

re "what is money any more?" i feel like that's the least confusing bit about all of this. Greece doesn't have a sovereign currency so they can't do any of the things a country might normally do to restart their economy.

no one said anything about hinging. but a stable european market helps not hurts the chinese market

from what i understand european markets have been relatively stable throughout this ordeal

nah i think mordy's right, china just had a big bubble

not saying the bubble popped because germany might be pushing greece out of the european union. (if they do, that might be a real ordeal.) the specter of european chaos doesn't help, is what i'm saying -- which is one of the reasons europe united in the first place, if i'm remembering correctly

World markets were hit on Wednesday by a meltdown in Chinese markets, a slump in commodities and questions over whether Europe could save Greece.

European trading got off to a steady start, even though stocks had plunged 6.75 percent in China .CSI300, where the country's regulator warned investors were being gripped by "panic sentiment".

That put all of Asia into a tailspin. Hong Kong .HSI dropped 8 percent, and Japan's Nikkei .N225 and stocks in Australia .AXJO took heavy blows, leaving investors only the yen JPY= and safe-haven government bonds for refuge. The yen rose to a six-week high against the dollar.

i don't get that Greece is enough of a player in the world economy that it really matters - the concerns are more things like whether a Grexit will lead to a idk Spexit or Itexit or whatever, then actual ripples from Greece itself (and I wonder if a lot of that risk has already been built into the market - how much the EU will really suffer at this pt if the Grexit happens)

Burningmoney.gif

from NYT:

Europe is in “limbo and despair” as it awaits the next episode in the Greek crisis, said Carsten Brzeski, an economist in Frankfurt with ING-DiBa.

“It’s like the movie ‘Groundhog Day,’ ” Mr. Brzeski said. “We wake up from yet another Eurogroup emergency meeting on Greece, and the world still looks exactly the same.”

“Our base case is still a ‘Eurofudge,’ ” Mr. Brzeski said, with a slightly better than 50 percent probability that “they’ll find some kind of a deal.”

I love how "Eurofudge" is an actual term people throw around

again, not alleging causation, much less even relationship (as with the chinese market crashing), but today the NYSE stopped functioning

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3153716/New-York-Stock-Exchange-halts-trading.html

"The outage came amid a flurry of other technical issues across the business world on Wednesday.

"Earlier in the day, United Airlines temporarily grounded all planes worldwide over a 'network connectivity issue.' About 4,900 flights were affected.

"By noon, The Wall Street Journal's homepage had crashed. A 504 error message displayed when visitors attempted to reach WSJ.com."

apollo is angry!

from what i understand european markets have been relatively stable throughout this ordeal

market behavior is predictive, not reliably so, because predicting the future is never reliable, but it is based on investors' guesses about the future, and crashes are generated out of fears for the future.

who knows what the chinese market fears atm, other than losing money, but a jittery market can be pushed over the edge by almost anything. it doesn't even matter if the fears are well grounded in reality, because a crash generates its own reality just as a bubble does in the opposite direction.

So Tsipras has capitulated on basically everything then? What a victory for democracy.

a victory for market finance capitalism is a victory for democracy! nai!

for realz germans should respond to this peace gesture by lowering interest rates, like picketty says. tempura mutantur et nos mutamur in illis

can't believe them voting their debt away didnt work, crashing blow for democracy

Will help to keep them in power though, I imagine.

... which will annoy the Troika, so compensatory LOLz there. Anyway, this been heavily spun as a capitulation and I'm not sure whether it is or not, too complicated for me.

Ultimately their "choice" was austerity as directed by the troika vs the even greater austerity required for when they ran completely out of money and their banking system collapsed and not even the most foolhardy of governments would plump for the latter.

what a great democracy! do you want to stay in the eurozone? circle one. yes / no yes

so I guess the lesson is sovereign debt stops working when you have a non-sovereign currency

germany laid waste to europe 70 years ago, which i guess is irrelevant when everyone but the greeks recovered fast enough for the german banks from the 2008 bush/cheney crash

^^^ also that sovereignty stops working when you have a non-sovereign currency xp

also that finance is a game of musical chairs, and the smallest countries lose

if the greeks exit the european zone, they should sue for a trillion dollars for the rights back to the continent name they came up. the former european zone can call themselves prussia or the holy german empire

yeah you should stop with the German/ww2/prussia shit its pretty dumb

what do you call a europe without greece then?

http://forward.com/workspace/assets/images/articles/w-nazimustache.jpg.jpg

LOL!!!!!!!

what do you call a europe without greece then?

I don't know what you mean, they're not going anywhere.

Ultimately their "choice" was austerity as directed by the troika vs the even greater austerity required for when they ran completely out of money and their banking system collapsed and not even the most foolhardy of governments would plump for the latter.

― Matt DC, Friday, 10 July 2015 15:05 (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what a great democracy! do you want to stay in the eurozone? circle one. yes / no yes

― Mordy, Friday, 10 July 2015 15:23 (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

matt: this was always the choice, syriza pretending otherwise was their great sin in all this imo

mordy: that referendum was asking a question that p much didn't have a real-life scenario attached, idk if there's any point even acknowledging it happened.

syriza has a major point about the banks lowering their interest rates on greek debt

matt: this was always the choice, syriza pretending otherwise was their great sin in all this imo

KKE otm

yeah you should stop with the German/ww2/prussia shit its pretty dumb

didn't work out well 4 them it's true- also they ran up a load of debts

pay up, you lazy greeks!

The euro climbed to a one-week high against the yen of 137.27 yen and was last at 136.99, up 2.4 percent. The euro zone common currency was on track for its largest one-day gain since April 2013. Against the dollar, the euro was up 1.2 percent at $1.1167. MSCI's all-country equities world index jumped 1.3 percent. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 171 points, or 0.97 percent, to 17,719.62, the S&P 500 gained 20.37 points, or 0.99 percent, to 2,071.68 and the Nasdaq Composite added 58.10 points, or 1.18 percent, to 4,980.50. European shares were up 1.8 percent.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/10/us-markets-global-idUSKCN0PJ2ZW20150710

Chinese stocks were also buoyed by a raft of support measures from Beijing that appeared to calm investors. Panic selling had slashed a third of the value off mainland markets since its peak in June. China's worries have spread to other markets, with iron ore the hardest-hit industrial commodity and oil prices also hit.

I wonder at what point Tsipras accepted he would have to cave. There are rumours he was hoping the lose the referendum so as to have an "honourable" way out.

I think the referendum was a bargaining tool to scare Merkel et al into giving into their demands but they called their bluff. Still, some debt restructuring, right?

The idea that it was possible to proceed on austerity alone without investors making any concessions on debt restructuring was a wrongheaded notion from the first. There was brinksmanship on both sides, but when your position is as strong as the troika, employing brinksmanship just to gratify your sense of moral superiority is kind of like playing internet hardman with an entire country. Greece's brinksmanship was at least more defensible, because they really are standing on a brink.

they called their bluff

yup

employing brinksmanship just to gratify your sense of moral superiority

don't think this is quite or entirely accurate characterization of troika's considerations/ calculations here

morality aside, for one thing, there was potential that greece might set precedent for other countries to follow-- big reason why i've felt imf/eu would/could not make anything other than minimal concessions (if any) in response to greece's desperate gambit

^^^ Is exactly what this is about, deterring other countries from electing far-left governments - any substantial concessions to Syriza would effectively have rubber-stamped an enormous redistribution of money from northern European countries to southern ones. Northern European countries that appear to only be in favour of greater political union when it suits them.

I don't think this will deter people from electing Podemos or other parties on anti-austerity tickets such as Sinn Fein, and Syriza are still there - ultimately Tsipras is being a politician and this is still a long game.

Existentially long game

If the troika was concerned before about Greece potentially dragging their feet and not implementing the 'necessary structural reforms', well, now the government has a clear democratic mandate to drag their feet and not implement reforms.

That's all very well but barring a complete 180 in German or Greek public opinion there's no plausible end to this crisis that doesn't involve one government or another going against the democratic will of its people. And I have a feeling it's unlikely to be the guys with the money.

Major debt relief and another bailout would be both the morally and pragmatically correct thing to do but how is that going to happen with the German public so vociferously opposed? Could any other institution do more here? Serious question.

Markets distort democracy even during good times by effectively allowing governments to opt out of unpopular tax and/or spending decisions, until suddenly they can't any more. I can't remember any example of a government consulting the electorate on borrowing or making it an electoral issue during a boom.