The Eurozone Crisis Thread

Cops at lagarde's apartment?

Heard something about that too...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/20/christine-lagarde-flat-raided-police

yves smith gives her take:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/cyprus-bailout-stupidity-short-sightedness-something-else.html

14. Even despite all the arbitrariness above, at least it solves the problem right???

Absolutely not. You will haircut 10% of deposits on day 1 to make up a capital shortfall and promptly watch 30% of the rest of the deposits flee the country, leading to a much bigger capital hole that Europe will have to fill.

In addition, this will severely cramp Cyprus’s main economic driver the last 2 years (selling real estate, tourism and accounting services to Russians) so any concept that it will make the debt “more sustainable” comes from a lunatic place in financial modeling. Cyprus is a 78% services-based economy. So, if you assume that GDP growth is exactly the same before and after you confiscate the assets of your clients, well, I have a solvent Cypriot bank to sell to you…

This is so obviously risky, that the more paranoid commentators believe it is a deliberate plan by Germany to end up as a multi-deca-billion creditor to Cyprus to which the pledging its oil and gas reserves is the only solution. I don’t think this is the case, but boy it is getting hard to believe that they are this short-sighted.

all the front pages in germany today are of the demos in cyprus where people held up pictures of merkel in nazi uniform, etc. the german elections later this year are going to be oh boy.

why don't the ppl in cyprus realize that this isn't the germans fault but the fault of an elite of ideologues???

doesn't sell papers.

Definitely German colonisation that isn't a paranoid fantasy

Would welcome it tbh

Could do worse than bratwurst and on-time trains tbh

Dunphy's demand of staunton takes new and sinister significance

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/03/22/cyprus-what-are-the-russians-playing-at/

I don’t pretend to understand Russian politics, but

*speculates furiously about Russian politics*

Cyprus now has a binary choice: become a gimp state for Russian gangsta finance, or turn fully towards Europe, close down much of its shady banking sector and rebuild its economy on something more sustainable.

yeah, something more sustainable - exploitation of natural resources (gas) + labor.

With Cyprus facing a Monday deadline to avoid a banking collapse, the government and its international negotiators devised a plan late Saturday to seize a portion of savers’ deposits above 100,000 euros at all banks in the country, in a bid to raise money for an urgently needed bailout.

A one-time levy of 20 percent would be placed on uninsured deposits at one of the nation’s biggest banks, the Bank of Cyprus, to help raise 5.8 billion euros demanded by the lenders to secure a 10 billion euro, or $12.9 billion, lifeline. A separate tax of 4 percent would be assessed on uninsured deposits at all other banks, including the 26 foreign banks that operate in Cyprus.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-22/jpmorgan-inevitability-europe-wide-capital-controls

cool zone

you know, it's remarkable how differently i feel about this savings theft levy now that it's only on accounts of 100,000 or more

Amazing they didn't see the PR disaster of the original plan. Too many people involved who think losing €100 from your savings is bugger-all, I suspect.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21771229

bulgarians are setting themselves on fire

*yawn* http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20912616

http://i.imgur.com/K9DVGLg.jpg

Germans otm

rmde at german bougies staying in rental in perpetuity

Stable housing market tho iirc, with v strong tenancy rights

Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus probably have a much higher percentage of people in their late twenties and thirties still living with their parents.

the net worths for those countries are optimistic/outdated

This is absolutely nuts if true:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/04/yanis-varoufakis-greek-banksters-in-action-on-the-latest-twist-in-the-story-of-mafia-style-terror-spreading-through-the-greek-polity.html

On 11th September 2012, late at night, a group of 4 or 5 people staked out my home. It was only accidentally that I avoided being ambushed (my motorcycle had a flat tire and I thus returned home in a friend’s car). Upon noticing the stalkers I called the police and asked them to come quietly. The police arrived noisily and went to a nearby house first, thus giving the men plenty of time to make their escape. For days, the police refused to investigate properly or to call eyewitnesses to make a statement (later, after I published the story, they did). Since then, I have been denied police protection (unlike most other journalists) and have had to resort to private security.

Soon after the failed ambush, a woman visited my office insisting that I should see her to discuss “the bankers’ designs” on me. I decided to meet with her. She was a frightened woman who claimed to be in grave personal danger. She said that she had been, and was, part of a group comprising former agents and salaried members of the Greek intelligence services, connected to business interests who worked on, at first, wrecking my public image and, later on, planning my physical demise. She added that it was her who, following specific orders, had forged the document ‘proving’ that I was on the payroll of the secret service – a document which her group then circulated to the various blogs that used it.

According to her testimony to me, a group stationed in Skopja was engaged to “see me off”. Part of the same plot concerned the defamation of another woman, a former bank manager with The Bank, who had been fired on false charges of embezzlement because, in truth, she possessed damning evidence concerning The Chairman’s family’s activities. Their plan, vis-a-vis this former bank manager was to plant narcotics in a restaurant that she owned on the island of Zakynthos and to orchestrate a very public arrest so that, in the future, if she ever revealed her evidence against The Chairman’s family, the press could dismiss her as a ‘drug dealer’. To prove her story, my interlocutor handed over a sequence of photographs that were the result of the surveillance of the former bank manager taken by «her group». The woman further claimed that she had not dared distance herself from that group but she was afraid that she would be killed upon completing her ‘tasks’.

And some depressing lols from the comments:

‘Insults even below the belt flew through the air, glasses full of water were broken while even a microphone felt also victim to extreme-right testosterone. The parliament room turned into an “American bar”, an expression Greeks use to describe a place where everybody can come and do whatever one wants. The “circus” started on Thursday after a meeting break and after Venizelos told reporters why the meeting was interrupted. Instead of speaking about some disagreements, he told reporters:

“There are tensions due to testosterone; it’s a matter of endocrinology. In any case, medical science has not concluded whether psychiatry precedes endocrinology or vice versa.”

When the meeting resumed, Ilias Kasidiaris, Golden Dawn MP, took the floor and said” I want to denounce that Mr. Venizelos speaks insultingly about the committee members… It’s you, Venizelos, lacking testosterone.”

Venizelos: I can’t follow such sexist behavior, Mr. Chairman, protect me.

Kasidiaris: I am a man; I’m not a hustler, I ‘m not a fraudster

Venizelos: But you are a fascist. The parliament cannot be in dialogue with such Nazi behaviors

Kasidiaris throws down glass full of water, breaks the microphone and beating his hand on the table

Kasidiaris: Shut up, your are ridiculous and fat

Venizelos: Mr. Chairman, protect me

Chairman to Kasidiaris: I withdraw from you the right to speak.

Kasidiaris left the meeting, Chairman Markogiannakis told reporters later, stressing “that was fascism in action.”

François Hollande, current president of the Republic, sat pillion to trysts with his mistress in the flat of a moll of a Corsican gangster killed in a shoot-out on the island last year.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/perry-anderson/the-italian-disaster

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/15/currency-markets-switzerland-franc

I think the exchange rate vs the USD is now marginally worse than at the bottom of the 2005 dip. Nightmare for British companies selling to Europe.

i'm currently working in CH but spend a fair amount of time back in the UK. most other people i work with are foreign researchers, so everyone is in quite good spirits today. let's see how long it lasts...probably until our US parent company can no longer afford to pay swiss salaries.

Turns out 37% of Polish household debt is owed in CHF

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21639760-poles-were-slow-get-out-swiss-franc-mortgages-now-they-are-paying-price-currency-risk?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/currencyrisk

€1.1tn QE package announced. Will be interesting to track FX rate over the next few days.

German economists at Davos are reportedly seething, understandably so.

this is the same figure commonly predicted last week

someone clever tell me why I'm feeling terrified at ireland selling bonds at negative rates

The basic idea of negative rates is that banks may have been parking their money in government bonds, even at extremely low interest rates or even at no return, rather than lend it to its own customers, such as businesses or consumers who wish to spend it. If government bonds are set at negative interest rates, those banks will be forced to pay for the privilege of parking money, creating more incentive to loan money into the economy, where it will circulate.

The main reason to be terrified is that this negative rate strategy only makes sense in an economy that is already in a deflationary spiral, or is seen to be poised on the edge of deflation. Deflation is bad, bad news in general. Money slows down or stops circulating in a deflation. People in debt are especially at risk.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v14/n19/wynne-godley/maastricht-and-all-that

http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/greece-ireland-economics/3805

Then there’s agribusiness. Irish agriculture, from a country of 3 million people, produces enough to feed 50m worldwide and growing. If you look at the the profile of imports and exports from Ireland to Britain, it’s much the same via mix and per-capita GDP as the trade between the north and south of Britain. In other words – hugely controversial to say politically – Britain and Ireland are close to being a single economy with two currencies. - See more at: http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/greece-ireland-economics/3805#sthash.323jo1Ai.dpuf

this ending: "If you wanted to create such mayhem in an economically destroyed country, you would probably not want that country, simultaneously, to enjoy the most pro-Russian political culture in Europe, and be one border away from the Islamic State, with 42,000 Syrian migrants a month landing on its island outposts for good measure."

got that back to front

that's clearly a reference to this

In a shock escalation of the rhetoric surrounding bailout talks in Brussels, the Greek defence minister Panos Kammenos vowed: “If they strike us, we will strike them.”

European creditors told Athens to stop “wasting time” putting forward its proposals for economic reforms pledged by the new left-wing Syriza-led coalition government.

If an agreement cannot be reached, the International Monetary Fund has said it will discontinue payments on a £172 billion bailout, forcing Greece to go bust and crash out of the eurozone. Mr Kammenos said: “If they deal a blow to Greece, then they should know the the migrants will get papers to go to Berlin.”

“If Europe leaves us in the crisis, we will flood it with migrants, and it will be even worse for Berlin if in that wave of millions of economic migrants there will be some jihadists of the Islamic State too.

grexitan standoff

it's like game of thrones but isis are the dragons and golden dawn are the zombies

what a weird threat. xenophobestakes

fascism is coming

among greeks there's no love lost on the germans

Kammenos is from the right-wing anti-austerity party. Syriza were one seat from an overall majority.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/guardian-view-euro-crisis-greek-exit-would-be-europes-tragedy

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/17/tsipras-to-meet-putin-over-bailout-loan-as-fears-of-greek-exit-from-eu-mount