With Italy's deficit problems, where to next?

I have no idea about the next place.

I do know that Italy has a long time tax avoidant economic culture and have read that this is also a big part of Greece's problem. Nothing will help until this cultural behavior is addressed.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/07/11/110711ta_talk_surowiecki

And here we are.....three years later.


Only a monetary 'nuclear bomb' can save Italy now, says Mediobanca



"The OECD has drastically cut its growth forecast for Italy. The depression will drag on though most of 2015.

The economy will contract by 0.4pc this year. It will remain stuck in the doldrums next year with growth of just 0.1pc.
If so, Italy’s public debt will spiral to dangerous levels next year, ever further beyond the point of no return for a country without its own sovereign currency and central bank.

“This is catastrophic for the finances of the country. We’re heading for a debt ratio of 145pc next year,” said Antonio Guglielmi, global strategist for Mediobanca.
“Who knows the maximum number that the market will tolerate? The number is already scary, but for the time being Draghi’s poker game is proving successful, and there is now the smell of QE keep the game going for a bit longer.”
“It is going to take a nuclear bomb to turn this around. If Draghi ends up doing almost nothing – and there is a lot of scepticism about the ECB's plans – Italy is dead,” he said.

It has been an abominable few days for the Italian economy. ISTAT said today that industrial output fell by 1pc in July (m/m), and 1.8pc from a year ago. It is down a fifth since 2008.
Exports from the regions fell 2.5pc in the second quarter (q/q). The figures for the South were nothing less than catastrophic: Sicilia (-11.1), Sardegna (-11.2), Basilicata (-24.6). It seems that the Mezzogiorno is falling off the bottom of the Italian economy.

The OECD also slashed France’s growth by half a percentage point to 0.4pc this year. It cut Brazil by 1.5pc to 0.3pc. The Brazilian miracle is by now a structural wreck.

Yet it is the eurozone that remains the epicentre of hopelessness.

“The recovery in the euro area has remained disappointing, notably in the largest countries: Germany, France and Italy. Confidence is again weakening, and the anaemic state of demand is reflected in the decline in inflation, which is near zero in the zone as a whole and negative in several countries.”
It called for QE, yet again, but such pleas are meaningless without a concrete number.

Italy’s debt reached 135.6pc of GDP in the first quarter, galloping upwards at a rate of 5pc of GDP each year. This is happening despite – or because of – a series of austerity packages, and even though the country is running a large primary budget surplus of 2pc-3pc of GDP. Plans to stabilise the debt have been blown to pieces.

Note that the Monti government said three years ago that the ratio would end 2014 at 115pc. That Panglossian estimate is likely to be wrong by 25 percentage points of GDP. That is a staggering error in such a short space of time. Was it bad luck, or were those crafting policy in denial about the fundamental nature of Italy’s EMU-rooted crisis?

Zolt Darvas from the Bruegel think tank in Brussels said Italy’s nominal GDP is flat or contracting, meaning that it must sustain a rising debt load on a static base. This is a classic debt-compound trap.
“The OECD forecast for Italy is a negative shock. Everything now depends on growth dynamics, and that depends on the ECB. I don’t think the ECB is yet doing enough,” said Mr Darvas.
He said markets are mistaken if they think that the forthcoming blast of ECB lending (TLTROs) will act as super-stimulus merely because it boosts the ECB’s balance sheet (perhaps by €1 trillion over time). “The balance sheet is not a meaningful indicator. It has very few implications for monetary policy. Only purchases of assets will really make a difference,” he said.

Exactly so, and we don’t yet know whether that will be a token gesture – like its earlier purchases of €60bn of covered bonds – or on a relevant scale. The ECB’s Yves Mersch said in a speech last week that this would be nothing like Anglo-Saxon QE, and nor is it intended to be. It is worth reading for a salutary cold douche.

Italy’s rock star leader Matteo Renzi must by now have realised that his first gamble has failed. He thought he could ride a wave of recovery after snatching power in February in a remarkably audacious move in February, only to discover that Europe is not in fact recovering, and that his country is trapped, with no way out under the current deflationary/contractionary policies of the EMU regime.

If Italy slashes wages and deflates the economy further to regain lost competitiveness within EMU, the “denominator effect” will automatically cause the debt ratios to rise. There is no plausible remedy to this unless EMU switches tack to massive reflation, which the ECB is not in fact about to do.

Mr Renzi will soon have to make a second gamble, whether to go along meekly with further austerity and fiscal cuts – chasing his tail in a perpetual vicious circle – and suffer the disastrous fate of French leader Francois Hollande. Or think of a better idea.

I hand it over to Italian readers to suggest which of the two he might choose given his tempestuous character."


http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100028145/only-a-monetary-nuclear-bomb-can-save-italy-now-says-mediobanca/

Ugh..

Mario Draghi's efforts to save EMU have hit the Berlin Wall

(EMU = European Monetary Union)
(ECB = European Central Bank)
(QE = Quantitative Easing)

Article written by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, for The Telegraph.

If the ECB tries to press ahead with QE, Germany's central bank chief will resign. If it does not do so, the eurozone will remain stuck in a lowflation trap and Mario Draghi will resign.

"Mario Draghi has finally overplayed his hand. He tried to bounce the European Central Bank into €1 trillion of stimulus without the acquiescence of Europe's creditor bloc or the political assent of Germany.
The counter-attack is in full swing. The Frankfurter Allgemeine talks of a "palace coup", the German boulevard press of a "Putsch". I write before knowing the outcome of the ECB's pre-meeting dinner on Wednesday night, but a blizzard of leaks points to an ugly showdown between Mr Draghi and Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann.
They are at daggers drawn. Mr Draghi is accused of withholding key documents from the ECB's two German members, lest they use them in their guerrilla campaign to head off quantitative easing. This includes Sabine Lautenschlager, Germany's enforcer on the six-man executive board, and an open foe of QE.
The chemistry is unrecognisable from July 2012, when Mr Draghi was working hand-in-glove with Ms Lautenschlager's predecessor, Jorg Asmussen, an Italian speaker and Left-leaning Social Democrat. Together they cooked up the "do-whatever-it-takes" rescue plan for Italy and Spain (OMT). That is why it worked.
We now learn from a Reuters report that Mr Draghi defied an explicit order from the governing council when he seemingly promised to boost the ECB's balance sheet by €1 trillion. He also jumped the gun with a speech in Jackson Hole, giving the very strong impression that the ECB was alarmed by the collapse of the so-called five-year/five-year swap rate and would therefore respond with overpowering force. He had no clearance for this.

The governors of all northern and central EMU states - except Finland and Belgium - lean towards the Bundesbank view, foolishly in my view but that is irrelevant. The North-South split is out in the open, and it reflects the raw conflict of interest between the two halves.
The North is competitive. The South is 20pc overvalued, caught in a debt-deflation vice. Data from the IMF show that Germany’s net foreign credit position (NIIP) has risen from 34pc to 48pc of GDP since 2009, Holland's from 17pc to 46pc. The net debtors are sinking into deeper trouble, France from -9pc to -17pc, Italy from -27pc to -30pc and Spain from -94pc to -98pc. Claims that Spain is safely out of the woods ignore this festering problem.
David Marsh, author of a book on the Bundesbank and now chairman of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, says the Bundesbank has been quietly seeking legal advice on whether it can block full-scale QE. It is looking at Articles 10.3 and 32 of the ECB statutes, arguably relevant given the scale of liabilities.




The let-out clauses would make QE the sole decision of the 18 national governors - shutting out Mr Draghi - based on the shareholder weightings. Germany would have 26pc of the votes, easily enough to mount a one-third blocking minority. Mr Draghi would not even have a say.
Mr Marsh said this has echoes of the "Emminger Letter" invoked in September 1992 to justify the Bundesbank's refusal to uphold its obligation to defend the Italian lira in the Exchange Rate Mechanism. The lira crashed. The Italians were stunned. One of them was the director of the Italian Treasury, a young Mario Draghi.
Lena Komileva, from G+ Economics, says the ECB is heading for a crisis of legitimacy whatever happens. If the bank tries to press ahead with a QE-blitz, Mr Weidmann will resign. If it does not do so, the eurozone will remain stuck in a lowflation trap and the ECB will go the way of the Bank of Japan in the late 1990s, in which case Mr Draghi will resign.
Mr Draghi's balance sheet pledge was muddled and oversold from the start. Much of it was predicated on banks taking out super-cheap loans (TLTROs) from the ECB, but they have so far spurned it. You cannot make a horse drink. These loans are not the same as QE money creation in any case. They are an exchange for collateral.
The asset purchases are what matter and the package announced so far is modest, bordering on trivial. It is unlikely to exceed €10bn a month as currently designed. The "buyable" market for covered bonds and asset-backed securities is too small to move the macro-economic dial. If the ECB wanted to match the Bank of Japan in its latest effort to drive down the yen and export deflation, it would have to launch €130bn of asset purchases every month (1.4pc of GDP).
Hawks claim that QE would make no difference because interest rates are already near zero, and the German 10-year Bund is already the lowest in history. This is eyewash. Central banks can print money to buy gold, land, oil for strategic reserves (why not?) or Charollais cattle. Or they can print to build roads or windmills. They can hand the money out as cash envelopes. If they did this, even the dimmest wits would see that QE is a monetary device and can always defeat deflation as a mathematical principle. It does not have to work through interest rates, nor should it.
The ECB's North-South clash mirrors the political breakdown of monetary union after six years of depression and mass unemployment. France's Front National now has twice as many Euro-MPs as the ruling Socialists. Euro defenders invariably insist that the triumph of Marine Le Pen - currently leading presidential polls at 30pc - has nothing to do with her pledge to restore the franc and take back French economic sovereignty.
Whether or not this is true - and that smacks of presumption - she is snatching enough votes from the Socialists to threaten their survival as a political movement. If they let perma-slump drift on until 2017, they will meet the fate of Greece's PASOK, and deserve it.
Italy is also edging closer to an inflexion point. The Five Star movement of Beppe Grillo - which won a quarter of the vote in 2013 - has grasped the elemental point that zero inflation and falling nominal GDP is pushing Italy into a debt-compound trap. For a long time Mr Grillo wrestled with the EMU issue. There is no longer any doubt. "We must leave the euro as soon as possible,” he says.



"Spain's insurgent Podemos party has come from nowhere to top the polls at 28pc. It is not anti-euro. Its wrath is directed against a corrupt "Casta". Yet the party's reflation drive and furious critique of Spain's "internal devaluation" is entirely at odds with EMU imperatives, as is its €145bn plan for a universal basic income, which would lift Spain's fiscal deficit to 20pc of GDP. Podemos reminds one of France's Front Populaire in 1936. Leon Blum did not perhaps intend to leave the Gold Standard, but he knew his policies would bring it about in short order.
Mr Draghi is of course right to force the issue. The ECB is missing its 2pc inflation target by a mile, with crippling effects on the crisis states. This itself is a violation of the ECB's legal mandate. The refusal of the German-led hawks to do anything serious about this is indefensible, and remarkably stupid unless their intention is to break up EMU, a possibility one can no longer exclude.
The European Commission's Autumn forecast this week is a cri de coeur. It warns of a "snowball effect" as deflationary forces causes debt trajectories to accelerate upwards by mechanical effect.
Brussels admits that something has gone horribly wrong, obliquely blaming stagnation on the "policy response to the crisis". It halved the growth estimate for France to 0.7pc next year, and for Italy to 0.6pc, a ritual with each report.
It says the eurozone faces a "home-grown" malaise, left behind as the US and Britain pull away. "It is becoming harder to see the dent in recovery as the result of temporary factors only. Trend growth has fallen even lower due to low investment and higher structural unemployment," it said. Now they tell us.
The collapse of investment is not some form of witchcraft. It is entirely due to the folly of deep cuts in public investment - pushed by the Commission itself - at a time of private sector deleveraging, all made much worse by monetary paralysis. Italy's rate of investment fell by 7.4pc in 2012 and 5.4pc in 2013. Even Germany's fell 0.7pc in each year.
Tucked away in the report is a nugget that Britain alone accounted for almost all the EU's growth in 2013, half in 2014, and will still be the biggest contributor by far in 2015. This implies that the UK's net payments to the EU budget - already up fourfold since 2008 - will become ever more skewed. Or put another way, the more EMU makes a mess of its affairs, the more Britain must pay to prop it up.
Europe's leaders and officials have run monetary union into the ground. Mr Draghi has bravely tried to bring them to their senses and contain the damage. He seems to have hit the limits of European power politics.
There is another job waiting for him in Rome as Italian president, should he wish to take it. The offer must be tempting, if only for sweet revenge.
His departure would shatter market confidence in the euro overnight. He could then lead his country to recovery, with a correctly-valued lira, and inflict a massive trade shock on his tormentors in the North for good measure."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/11211973/Mario-Draghis-efforts-to-save-EMU-have-hit-the-Berlin-Wall.html

Just a snippet from the end of the article, for those who got too bored to read it all......

"Tucked away in the report is a nugget that Britain alone accounted for almost all the EU's growth in 2013, half in 2014, and will still be the biggest contributor by far in 2015. This implies that the UK's net payments to the EU budget - already up fourfold since 2008 - will become ever more skewed. Or put another way, the more EMU makes a mess of its affairs, the more Britain must pay to prop it up.
Europe's leaders and officials have run monetary union into the ground. Mr Draghi has bravely tried to bring them to their senses and contain the damage. He seems to have hit the limits of European power politics.
There is another job waiting for him in Rome as Italian president, should he wish to take it. The offer must be tempting, if only for sweet revenge.
His departure would shatter market confidence in the euro overnight. He could then lead his country to recovery, with a correctly-valued lira, and inflict a massive trade shock on his tormentors in the North for good measure."


This reporter is usually very good at forecasting events. Personally, I think we are in for some very interesting developments over the coming year or two, with regards to the awful Euro currency shambles.

That might be we around the world. Depression. THe wheels came off the EU bus awhile ago, but now the people are catching on. All that sing song chirping from EU officials about the grand ideals of Europe and the triumph of the EU sound a might bit hollow when you realize that they have no plan to stop the invading Africans hoards, nor to stop the returning ISIS terrorists from lighting a lot of matches once they return home. The fact that the basically third world Russia can dictate terms in Ukraine is salt in the wound.

Thanks for your contributions. It provides us with a 'bigger picture' of what's happening in the EU's economy.

Don't bail them out. Let the evil scumbags implode.

And be sure to force the Italian vermin to pay every last cent when the European Court of Human Rights orders them to compensate Amanda Knox.

If we're lucky we can force them to close all their children's hospitals.

Eurozone breakup threat reaches all-time high

As Greek leaders enter negotiations with the troika, analysts have described the coming confrontation as an “unstoppable force meeting an immovable object”


The formation of a new left wing Greek government has elevated the risks of a eurozone breakup to levels “significantly higher than at any point in 2012”, according to Barclays.
2012 is widely viewed as the height of the eurozone crisis. A cocktail of political populism across the continent and the prospect of a deflationary spiral has now elevated the risks of a breakup even higher in 2015.
“The risks have also risen as the periphery, especially Spain, is aligning itself with the views of several countries in the core of granting few concessions to Greece on a new programme,” Francois Cabau of Barclays said.
Syriza leaders view the burden of debt imposed on Greek shoulders as far too heavy to pay, and have sought some form of relief.
They will clash with the so-called “troika” - the EU, IMF, and ECB - on the matter. Jan von Gerich, a strategist at Nordea, has described the coming confrontation as an “unstoppable force meeting an immovable object”.


The new government has implemented new policies in a matter of days that run contrary to the structural reforms they have been required to implement. Measures have included an increase of the minimum wage and the cancellation of privatisation plans for a power company and ports.
“Greece has very tough negotiations ahead,” Mr Von Gerich said. “If Syriza is seen to be able to change the terms of Greece’s adjustment programmes, the spill-over effects could be sizeable in many other countries, which would add to euro area political risks.”
If neither party is willing to blink, then a 'Grexit' may result, which economists fear could add momentum to populist parties in other eurozone states. Bookmaker Paddy Power offers 6/4 odds on a Greek exit by the end of 2016.
“The fear is that [left wing] Podemos, polling first in Spain, would get a boost if Syriza is able to negotiate easier policy conditionality for Greece,” Mr Cabau continued. He said that a hypothetical exit is “likely to imply increased volatility in peripheral risk assets”.

Greek stocks have suffered a torrid week in the aftermath of Syriza's stunning victory on Sunday. Banking sector shares were some of the most exposed, as political uncertainty knocked €8bn (£6bn) off their value in three days.
There was some respite for the sector on Thursday, as bank stocks rebounded by 12.9pc after comments from Daniele Nouy, a European Central Bank official.
She attempted to downplay concerns that banks would be unable to survive the current turbulence in financial markets. “They will go through this crisis like they went through the previous ones,” she said.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11379365/Eurozone-breakup-threat-reaches-all-time-high.html

Germany's worst nightmare has come true


It’s Germany’s worst nightmare. Increasingly isolated, ganged up on, and even hated by much of southern Europe, it is fast losing the argument over the future of the euro.
Even the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has been at it. This week he joined in the German bashing with a full-frontal attack on Berlin’s austerity agenda. And it’s causing confusion, dismay and resentment in equal measure in this most stable, disciplined and civilised of nations.
To understand the decisive shift in narrative that has taken place in Europe over the last couple of weeks – from the defeat Germany has suffered at the hands of the European Central Bank, to the Syriza victory in Greece and its demands for debt forgiveness – you have to go back to the euro’s origins and Germany’s place in it.
Germans never wanted the single currency in the first place, for like Britain, they instinctively understood where it would lead – to a fiscal, or transfer, union which Germany, as Europe’s dominant economy, would be forced to bankroll. If given a referendum, they’d have said no.
But European monetary union was the price Germany had to pay for reunification; it was a way, other European nations naively believed, of containing the newly enlarged country and ensuring that it was properly integrated into the rest of Europe. To them, it seemed the answer to Europe's historic problem - Germany was too large and economically powerful ever to be properly defeated, but the potential threat it poses to the rest of Europe could perhaps be defused through economic integration. Most Germans, now a peace loving people, broadly go along with this "solution" to the problem. The point of dispute is rather about the degree of integration.

To buttress itself against economic pollution from the south, Germany surrounded the new currency and its institutions with safeguards. Fiscal and monetary transfers between nations were specifically banned, and rules were put in place that would supposedly ensure fiscal discipline. None of them has proved equal to the task, and none of them is ultimately compatible with a single currency that actually works.
Since the onset of the financial crisis, Germany has suffered one defeat after another. Every line in the sand has been breached, culminating last week in the Bundesbank’s failure to block ECB money printing, a remedy which may or may not have some merit for the beleaguered economies of the south but is culturally anathema to Germans as well as largely inappropriate for their economy. It's also a money transfer by the backdoor.
The bottom line is that the single currency hasn’t worked for anyone. It’s proved as unsatisfactory for Germany as it has for Greece, Spain and Italy. Happy families are all alike, begins Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The observation could have been written for Europe’s experiment in monetary union.
If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. So said Herb Stein, one time economic adviser to President Richard Nixon. So far, the euro has defied this truism. Unsustainable it may be, but the single currency has also proved remarkably resilient. Despite the damage, nobody wants to give it up, including the Germans, who grudgingly admit to a huge export dividend from participation. What’s more, the last thing Berlin wants is to be seen as blowing up Europe for the third time in a century.
War guilt ensures that Germany will not be the first to pull the plug. Somehow, it has to try to make it work. Berlin is therefore doomed to persist with a project which fundamentally Germans don’t want and has caused economic ruin throughout much of the rest of Europe.
By the by, Germans again find themselves depicted as the Continent’s bad guys, with the new Greek government demanding reparations for wartime afflictions and repeatedly reminding Germany of the hypocrisy of its position by pointing to its history as a serial defaulter. A currency meant to unite Europe has only further divided it.
From the start of the crisis it has been obvious to all dispassionate observers that it can only really end in two ways. Either the eurozone must move rapidly towards the sort of transfer union which Germany has spent the last 15 years resisting, or it must be reconstituted in more sustainable form – that is the monetary separation of Germany and its satellites from the less competitive south, arguably including France.
European elites have been in a state of denial about this choice, with their response to the crisis characterised by grudging incrementalism. There are too many egos, too many careers and too much vested interest bound up in it all to admit the reality.
Now up pops little Syriza to speak truth to power. Whatever you might think about Syriza’s substantially unrealistic economic agenda, and its apparent love affair with the brutish Vladimir Putin, on monetary union at least, its leaders have told it as it is.
“The eurozone is going to be toast within a couple of years”, says Greece’s new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, unless it can create “shock absorbers and what I call surplus recycling mechanisms”. No monetary union that demands its debtor nations constantly shrink their economies in order to keep up with the repayments can last for long. The current situation is indeed a form of debtors prison, and a completely counter-productive one, for if you deny the debtor the ability to work off his debts, he'll never repay them anyway.
Germany as much as Greece - virtually the whole of Europe, managed to deceive itself when the euro was formed. Everyone feels bruised and wronged by the experience. To blame disciplinarian Germans is as pointless as profligate Greeks. It is half-formed monetary union which is the problem, not the wicked Germans, and it has proved a catastrophe for all involved. The more important question now is whether unwinding it would be an even greater one, or whether something more durable might be salvaged from the wreckage. The geo-political stakes are as important as the economic ones. If Greece is thrown to the wolves, what does that mean for a country with a history of military coups? What does it mean for democracy, and for Europe's already ineffectual role as a buttress against Putin's imperial ambitions? Germany has some big decisions to make.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11377010/Germanys-worst-nightmare-has-come-true.html

And the latest.......


We will not co-operate with the troika, says Greek finance minister


Greece’s new finance minister said his country’s new left-wing government would not co-operate with international creditors, dismissing the troika of the EU, ECB and IMF as “a rottenly constructed committee”.
Yanis Varoufakis, who met with Eurogroup chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem on Friday, also rejected the extension of Greece’s €240bn (£180bn) bailout programme, which came with tough austerity measures.
“This platform enabled us to win the confidence of the Greek people,” Mr Varoufakis said after the meeting.
Mr Dijsselbloem, who represents the European Union’s 19 finance ministers, hit back by rebuffing Greece’s calls for an international conference to look at writing off part of its €320bn debt.
“As for a conference on debt restructuring, you must realise that this conference already exists and it’s called the Eurogroup,” he said.

Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras became Prime Minister last Sunday, after his policy of never bowing to European creditors won over Greece’s recession-hit public.
Mr Varoufakis echoed that stance on Friday. “We have no intention of co-operating with a three-member committee whose goal is to implement a programme whose logic we consider anti-European,” he said. “We are not going to co-operate with a rottenly constructed committee.”
Mr Dijsselbloem said he had told the new government to respect the terms of the existing agreement between Greece and the eurozone.
The impasse came as Barclays warned that the chances of a eurozone break-up were “significantly higher than at any point in 2012” - the height of the eurozone crisis.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11381168/We-will-not-co-operate-with-the-troika-says-Greek-finance-minister.html

Most of the analysts that I hear are saying that Germany will kick Greece out of the Eurozone.

I'm not sure what impact that will have on places like Spain and Italy. If being kicked out of the Euro is a disaster for the Greek people, perhaps it will provide a disincentive for others to follow the same path.

Really, what Europe needs are stronger institutional controls so that they have the governmental power required to exercise proper control over their currency.

If I were Germany, I'd deliver an ultimatum that either stronger EU controls over the Euro are created, or Germany will pull out of the Euro altogether.

Greece's chutzpah is beyond the pail.
Please help us; but screw you! We're going to do whatever we want.

I do have some sympathy for the ordinary Greek. They should never have been allowed to join the Eurozone in the first place because they did not fulfil the criteria. Then you've got massive tax evasion/avoidance by a tiny wealthy elite. Finally, you've got all the Greek gold stolen by the Nazis in WW2 that a US/Soviet alliance decreed never had to be paid back.

I'd be pissed off if I were Greek.

Who wouldn't be?

There's plenty of Greek millionaires. Christina Onassis inherited a tidy sum from her dad. Get the guest list from one of her parties and divvy up the debt amongst all the Greeks who attended. Call it back taxes.

That's the funny thing about greed; some want all others to wallow in poverty to show how wealthy they are vs those who are humanists and contribute for the good of all humans.

We've just got to the point where the wealthiest 1% own more than everyone else combined. Who is this money owed to? Them of course, and it's not like they even need it.

"Who is this money owed to? Them of course, and it's not like they even need it."


This is a very good point, and the sheer scale of the imbalance will come back and bite "them" on the bum sooner rather than later, I feel.

I'll dig out an article I was skimming through earlier on, about how the mega rich are starting to buy farms with land big enough for a runway in NZ lately, so they will have a bolthole to go to when the poor rise up against them.

Personally, I give the Euro another 18 months until the Germans will have had enough and bugger off back to the DMark.