Greece needs debt restructuring. On this, a growing chorus of voices is agreed (Manasse 2015, Taylor 2015). Even the IMF (2015) now acknowledges that Greece’s debt is unsustainable. Restructuring is required, it now insists, for the workability of the third programme between the country and ‘the institutions’ that is currently being finalised.
Read more...Updating the bizarre story of Questus Global Capital Market, a New Brunswick-incorporated, GXG-listed, New-Zealand-FSP-brokered company of monstrously fraudulent aspect that had apparently ensnared a Malaysian billionaire, various US-based small businesses and retail investors, and a couple of princes from the royal families of Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.
Read more...Perhaps Angela Merkel thought we didn’t yet know how full of it she is. Perhaps that’s why she said yesterday with regards to Europe’s refugee crisis that “Everything must move quickly,” only to call an EU meeting a full two weeks later. That announcement show one thing: Merkel doesn’t see this as a crisis. If she did, she would have called for such a meeting a long time ago, and not some point far into the future.
Read more...How Germany’s wage repression, a war against its own workers, has been exported to the rest of the Eurozone.
Read more...This post mines an issue we’ve discussed repeatedly, that the heavy dose of “reforms” imposed on Greece succeeded in lowering wage costs without providing the expected boost in exports.
Read more...By Lambert Strether of Corrente. The YouTube below, titled “The Battle Against Austerity: Lessons From Greece,” was recorded at a two-person panel discussion sponsored by Canada’s Socialist Project. The speakers are Leo Panitch, Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy at York University and editor of the Socialist Register, and Richard Fidler, a life long […]
Read more...Greece’s crisis has invited comparisons to the 1953 London Debt Agreement, which ended a long period of German default on external debt. Unfortunately for Greece, the motivations driving the 1953 agreement are nearly entirely absent today.
Read more...The debate over Greek debt sustainability is muddied by the fact that different analysts use different definitions. But once you use realistic assumptions, as in “tails risks” are actually pretty likely, Greek debt is obviously not “sustainable”.
Read more...Human dynamics, which over time played right into the Germans’ and other hardliners’ hands in the earlier chapters of the Greek bailout talks, may now be working against them.
Read more...Power 8, Sponsor of Everton FC, Fulham FC and RCD Espanyol, is a $250Mn Pyramid Fraud.
Read more...Greece and its creditors have reached agreement on key terms for a so-called “third bailout”
Read more...If Greece decides to exit the euro and abrogate contracts, it is not likely to fare well in the tidal wave of lawsuits and arbitration cases that would ensue.
Read more...The first direct evidence of IMF hostility towards Russians as a matter of policy, including multiple violations of the IMF staff code, and an attempt by Lagarde herself and her spokesman Rice to cover up the misconduct of their IMF representative in Kiev.
Read more...A proposal for breaking Greece’s vicious debt cycle.
Read more...The issue of Catalan independence is no longer one based on pragmatic realities; as tensions have festered, it has become an almost purely emotionally driven issue, not just in Catalonia but throughout Spain.
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