“… what is happening to Greece has nothing to do with economics – it’s about power and the politics behind the power.” – Bryan
You guys been reading Naomi Klein or somethin’? I’ve been reading her books, but I’m about to dig for some of her articles (The Nation and many other places) to find out her take on the Greek/Euro situation.
I get some info from my buddy L’Enfant de la Haute Mer, but Google Translate doesn’t deal with modern Greek as well as it might, and unsurprisingly most of her Greece-related posts are in that language.
]]>China has bigger problems than its stock market. If you look a world commodity prices, especially oil, copper, and steel it is obvious that the Chinese economy is really slowing down. There are multiple bubbles that could burst at any point.
]]>The Chinese, on the other hand. Their stock market is tiny, so their stock marking crashing is not a big deal. But their leaders appear to be forcing their banks to prop up insane valuations in their stock market with bad loans. That’s the same recipe that killed our banks back in 1929.
Nobody learns from history. Nobody.
SIGH.
– Badtux the Bummed Penguin
]]>Of course, this may all become a footnote if the Chinese continue to go downhill. Together with the bursting of the oil price bubble and the general incompetence of the banksters,hedge fund hustlers, and market gamblers another global depression is a real possibility.
]]>As long as the entire purpose of the ECB is to protect the large German and French banks that made the bad investments, no reasonable plan is possible.
]]>So why don’t they give Greece the opportunity to do the same thing — have their debts bought off by the ECB and written off? Well, they are whining about how it’s the immorality of Greeks that is the problem, so the Greeks need to be punished, good and hard, until they are properly moral. It is the same moral tale that Southern slave holders said about black people, i.e., slavery was a moral evil but it was good for the black people because it taught them how to work hard and be Christian. (No, I am not joking). The Eurobankers have the same attitude towards Greeks that the white Southern slavers had towards their slaves — i.e., that it was only right that they, the superior people, crack the whip hard on those inferior people, because it is the only thing that will teach those inferior people how to behave properly like good Germans.
The problem is that banks are supposed to be businesses, not morality police, and this is bad for business all around. There’s no — zero — way that these loans can ever be repaid by Greece. Ever. It’s a mathematical impossibility. Offering a deal that included a significant haircut is the only way that they’ll ever get *any* of their money back. I cannot imagine an American bank doing something so lame-brained, because American banks are run by people whose morality is measured in dollars and cents. American banks did sell a lot of liar loans to people who had no business buying a house, but they never expected those liar loans to actually get repaid. That’s why they bundled them up as “good as Treasuries AAA rated” mortgage backed securities and sold them off to pension funds and 401(k) funds (SIGH).
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