By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posed from New Economic Perspectives
Some lies will not die.
Read more...Paul Krugman, in a post earlier today, Cyprus: The Sum of All FUBAR, acts as if he has figured out what is the real problem with Cyprus. The only problem is his math is all wrong, and a better analysis undermines his major assertions.
Read more...Mr. Market decided yesterday that the fact that the Cypriot finance minister, Michalis Sarris, was meeting as previously scheduled with Russian officials meant all would be well. And even better…Bernanke said the Cyprus banking mess would be contained. So why worry?
The ECB just announced that it will extend the ELA to Cyprus only through Monday. After that, it will cut off Cyprus if it has not knuckled under to an EU/IMF deal.
Read more...Yves here. You will notice that this list of options for Cyprus is very depressing and does not envision Russia riding in to the rescue in a big way. It also treats a 20% fall in GDP as a possibly optimistic base case.
Read more...Yves here. The viewpoint expressed in this article will not go over well in some circles, since the BRICs have insisted that they have the same right to pollute as much as first world countries did in getting to their living standard. But the problem is the planet cannot remotely support everyone in emerging economies living at first world living standards, at least the way we produce them now. And that isn’t operative only the energy and greenhouse gasses fronts. We’ll all need to eat lower down on the food chain as well.
Read more...By the transcriber.
Dreamworks’ upcoming movie The Fifth Estate about WikiLeaks is “a lie upon a lie,” says Julian Assange. “It fans the flames to start a war with Iran… So that’s the reality of where we’re at. Not merely a war of intelligence agencies, but a war of corrupt media, corrupt culture.”
The Oxford Union in January hosted the Sam Adams Awards for Integrity in Intelligence, where this year American Tom Fingar won the award for overseeing the 2007 NIE Estimate on Iran. “A consummate intelligence professional, Fingar would not allow the NIE to be ‘fixed around the policy,’ the damning phrase used in the famous ‘Downing St. Memo’ of July 23, 2002 to describe the unconscionable process that served up fraudulent intelligence to ‘justify’ war with Iraq,” said the press release. Past award winners and associates also spoke, including 2010 winner Julian Assange by video link, the YouTube of which Oxford Union posted right away. Controversy ensued when the Guardian’s Amelia Hill wrote a column saying Assange found “no allies and tough queries” at the Union. Craig Murray, who also spoke that evening, was furious at Hill’s portrayal and posted a rebuttal with video embedded, Amelia Hill is a Dirty Liar. Who you gonna believe, the Guardian or your lying eyes? (Disclosure: I ♥ Murray.)
Also too Benedict Cumberbatch pix!
Read more...Cyprus, as its President Nicos Anastasiades predicted but no one outside Cyprus quite believed would happen, has resoundingly defied the will of the Eurozone in failing to surrender a single Parliamentary vote to a diktat to haircut depositors to save its number two bank, whose failure would in all likelihood bring down Cyprus’s entire banking system. The members of the President’s own party abstained despite his resigned support for the deal. And mind you, this was after the terms revised to allow for deposits under €20,000 to be spared.
The EU was utterly unprepared for this rebellion.
Read more...A quick run-down on the impressively stupid handling of the “Cyprus bailout” by the EU.
Read more...Yves here. Even the China bulls are coming to see the financial system as a risk factor.
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil
Dreaming, I was only dreaming
I wake and I find you asleep– Billie Holiday “Gloomy Sunday”
The criticisms of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) on the internet and in academia can be placed into three categories: the cranks; the nit-pickers; and the Kaldorians.
Read more...The state of play in Cyprus is that negotiations in Parliament are underway, with the hope of a yes vote on a “Plan B” today. The Cypriot officialdom has allowed for slippage in this timetable, with the bank holiday in effect till Thursday. The latest events were largely a nothingburger, aside from the big news of the failure to approve the president’s plan yesterday: European ministers confirmed that they’ll approve an agreement so long as Cyrpus obtains €5.8 billion from depositors. Monday night, President Nicos Anastasiades gave his version of the Hank Paulson armageddon speech on national TV, laying out the fact that no deal means an immediate collapse of “one bank” (presumably Liaki), and a possible exit from the Eurozone.
The widespread assumption is that the Cypriots will fall into line, since the alternative really does look even uglier. But the runway is pretty short.
Read more...One of the big lessons of the fraught negotiations over bailing out (or more accurately, in) Cyprus’s banks is that deregulating institutions with an implicit or explicit state guarantee is a bad idea. You’ve just given them a license to gamble with the public’s money, and you can rest assured that they will eventually avail themselves of it. A bit more than a week ago, Jim Himes (an ex Goldman officer) and Randy Hultgren introduced bills that not only aim perpetuate this situation but will make it worse.
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