It’s just been that kind of morning.
Reuters;
Stocks tumbled about 2 percent on Tuesday after the deal to rescue Greece and prevent a wider sovereign debt crisis was thrown into disarray.”
Adding to the gloomy sentiment, factory activity in Asia’s big export economies slowed to their weakest rate in nearly three years in October, while UK manufacturing suffered a sharp decline, reigniting fears of a global slowdown.
The gurus at CNBC are already busy telling us that Morgan Stanley is not going down hard like MF Global… They are ‘sure’ that the Fed will backstop them.
Thank you CNBC for the prenews.
You know what? This may be the best thing in the end. We all know that Greece would eventually default. What’s so bad about bring the house of cards down this way?
I say bring it on. It’s going to come someday.
Greece, in a moment of stupidity, votes down the bailout, thinking the Euros will have to cough up even more money so the Greeks can live the life the want but haven’t earned.
The French & Germans pull their financial support.
On the first Government payday after the vote, hundreds of thousands of Greek Civil Servants are told their regular bank deposited pay checks would be “a few hours late”
By 1:00pm, many Greek Civil Servants were figuring out the reality of the situation and were bailing out of their offices and running to their nearest bank branches after internet access to their accounts became “Temporarily Unavailable”.
By3:00pm Banks across Greece were locking their doors, ATMS were out of cash panic was starting to grip the nation with runs on Food stores and Petrol stations.
At 4:00pm the Greek government sent out email notices to all Greek Civil Servants telling that their annual salaries were being “changed to accommodate fiscal capability” by being reduced by 75%.
That night Athens burned and riots, mayhem and death filled the countryside.
And that’s how reality imposes itself on civilizations when the fun of spending other people’s money is terminated by those fed-up “other people”
It would be nice to be retired at 50 with a full pension to lay on the beach or take a cruise out to one of the Greek islands.
I wonder why so many Germans are pissed off that they need to work to 67 in cold winters to pay for the comfort of the Greeks early retirement? We are supposed all to be equal in the eyes of the European Liberal Socialists, but I suppose that white fiscal conservatives are a little less equal.
After all Greece is mostly a micro Middle Eastern country now, supporting huge Arab/ Islamic communities, who turn violent and riot at the drop of a hat. Are the Germans telling the world they are racist by complaining? The world of Liberalism believes so.
I wonder about the mechanics of booting the Greeks out of the Euro zone. My thought is that it would be easier for Germany and France to bail.
Greece is bankrupt and is entering the 3rd world as we speak. Just let it go. Unfortunate for the Greeks is the use of the Euro. They can’t just inflate out of debt like every other country. They actually have to default.
Tabernac… !!
Scar >
“Greece is bankrupt and is entering the 3rd world as we speak.”
Exactly! We are all on the same road to one degree or another.
I wonder now what the Greek Liberal Left is going to do after this collapse, now that they’ve so culturally enriched themselves with Arab Islamists mostly living on the Liberal entitlement systems. It’s a pretty simple future to predict from here on in, can you spell car-b-que?
The quicker the eu kicks Greece to the curb the better. It would have two important impacts:
1. It would scare the bejesus out of the other members of the pigs fraternity. Their “rescue” would probably go much smoother.
2. Some euro banks would fail thus destroying the “too big to fail” myth sooner than later and thus more banks would survive in the long run.
Greece’s problem has nothing to do with banking. It’s all to do with borrowing to pay people not to work. The system eventually collapses and no-one should be surprised.
If you read the additional Reuters article on German perspectives you will see that the Germans… who are supposedly the economic adults in the room … are completely clueless.
Knight 99
‘After all Greece is mostly a micro Middle Eastern country now,…”
Nah just same old same old….
After centuries of domination by the Ottomans and infiltration by the communists…..you have a weird cross between the ME and the old USSR.
An associate, a Korean War vet described the Greeks spooked the Goonies nearly as much as the Turks….neither one seemed to have mastered the notion of taking prisoners….
Below is a summary(sorry, don’t remember who and where) I cut and pasted from an article on what greedy gutless short-sighted politicians can accomplish.
Simply amazing, it’s a worse run country than I had previously imagined.
………………………………………….. In just the past 12 years the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms – and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials.
2. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year.
3. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians and on and on and on.
4. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average – and it is not uncommon, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.
5. The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: One of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest ranked, Finland’s.
6. It’s simply assumed, for instance, that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. People who go to public health clinics assume they will need to bribe doctors to actually take care of them. Government ministers who have spent their lives in public service emerge from office able to afford mansions and two or three country homes.
…………………………………..
Now the market is taking another dive because these bums want to hold a vote on whether or not the bail-out should be accepted.
Finally the chickens coming home to roost.
The Greek protesters rioted and destroyed property in their demand for “real democracy”. Papandreou gave it to them.
Will the protesters now be happy? Of course not. They wanted a savior to come to their rescue and magically put things right, making Greece the way it was. The last thing they wanted was to be forced out of their comfortable socialist fantasy to face reality and make hard choices.
“Fred”‘s description of the collapse of Greece is plausible. We may think that it will take weeks
but in today’s computer-linked world it really could come that fast, in a single day.
I do wonder why the financial markets are so ready to show optimism. They are something like the family
of a severely injured man who jump for joy when told that he may survive.
Scar, there are no mechanics for booting Greece out of the Euro-zone. In their arrogance, when the Brussels bureaucrats designed and the European politicians approved the creation of the Euro, no one ever considered it possible that such a situation would ever arise.
There is no exit mechanism, and whatever has to be devised will have to be developed by the EU nations and ratified by all of their parliaments and by the EU Parliament in Strasbourg.
This so-called bailout was bound to fail. First, it was only a 50% write-down on Greek debt. The real number that’s sustainable over the long term is north of 80%, and that’s with Greece eliminating its fiscal deficits.
What’s amusing in all this is the stupid poll results. 70% of Greeks say they want to remain in the Euro-zone. Well of course they do. A purely Greek currency would have an exchange rate similar to Zimbabwe’s right now. At least Zimbabwe mines chromium; Greece doesn’t do much of anything except goat cheese, bad wine, squid fishing and tourism.
There are two overall local consequences of Greek bankruptcy. The first is that any Greek with marketable skills is going to bail out of the country to other EU nations while they still can, thus furthering the cash drain on the Greek banks. The coming Greek emigration will resemble Ireland in the 19th C during the potato blight.
The second is that democracy itself is going to fail in Greece. Democracy only thrives on a viable, prosperous economy, which Greece will not have for another generation or two. The descent into fascism is inevitable.
Kicking Greece out if the EU does not solve the problem of banks being insolvent if they write even a small part of the Greek debt.
Backstopping the overleveraged banks shifts the risk to the taxpayer. Why would a hard working German accept this?
The banks need to fail, along with the politicians that allowed the banks to lobby for laws permitting such exuberant and highly risky rates of leverage.
This is a beer and popcorn moment, to be sure. With brief interruptions from that asshat Librano lawyer in The Beach. Here we have the biggest financial meltdown in history taking place, and he wants to flap his gums over erasing database records of duck guns.
This just makes my plans to retire and live on a Greek island some day even more remote. Mama mia!
How soon people forget. Greece used to be governed by the Military.It was mostly dictatorships till latley.
They have lives an illusion for 30 years or more now. Welcome back to reality.
The Greek dictatorship forty two years later
On April 21 1967 a military coup led by a group of right-wing army officers saw Greece endure seven years of military dictatorship. Professor Vrasidas Karalis looks at the Junta and the impact it has had on Greek politics.
http://neoskosmos.com/news/en/The-Greek-dictatorship-forty-two-years-later
Actually, I find Greeks are fairly cognizant of the bottom line.
Sure, they will take giveways from the EU, BUT, just as in Europe, most Greek businesses and their owners in Canada, run their establishments on a cash basis.
What the government doesn’t know, can’t hurt.
Whether here, or in Greece.
Beware of Greeks receiving gifts.
Did I get my facts straight? Your neighbour reaches to rescue you as you make your final bob before drowning and you give him the finger…right in the eye.
“I say bring it on. It’s going to come someday.”
Posted by: Doug at November 1, 2011 12:01 PM
Amen Brother. Far better to face a serious wound than death by a thousand cuts.
So on the same topic, maybe Dildo McDinky’s re-election isn’t such a bad thing.