9
   

Is the Euro well and truly buggered?

 
 
OmSigDAVID
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Nov, 2011 02:18 pm
@High Seas,
High Seas wrote:
Walter could give you a more reliable answer, but my understanding is that the 1919 Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany was so catastrophic for its people that it directly led to Weimar hyperinflation - * * *
Its less painful to pay debts in hyperinflated currency.


0 Replies
 
Cycloptichorn
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Nov, 2011 06:38 pm
The Greek PM survived a no-confidence vote today.

Cycloptichorn
0 Replies
 
hawkeye10
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Nov, 2011 11:31 pm
@High Seas,
High Seas wrote:

Chancellor Merkel said that Greece would receive support in its efforts not to leave the eurozone. Not the EU.


Quote:
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - If Greece decided to leave the euro, it would also have to quit the European Union, according to the terms of the EU's treaties, the European Commission said on Thursday.
"The treaties indeed confirm what we have been saying here: the treaty doesn't foresee an exit from the euro zone without exiting the EU, so indeed that is the current situation," European Commission spokeswoman Karolina Kottova said.
The comment was in response to a question about the provisions the EU treaties make for a country to leave the euro, but the spokeswoman did not refer to a particular member state


http://news.yahoo.com/greece-could-not-exit-euro-without-leaving-eu-130411670.html
High Seas
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Nov, 2011 10:00 am
@hawkeye10,
You truly are a fool - Chancellor Merkel and the European Commission are not identical: http://able2know.org/topic/177476-6#post-4781545

I don't plan to waste any more time with your posts but I'm posting a link to Fantasia's clip called "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" - works for "a little bit of inflation" as well. Nobody knows how to stop accelerating inflation without a crash. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-7Qar1lFjo&noredirect=1
hawkeye10
 
  -1  
Reply Sat 5 Nov, 2011 11:05 am
@High Seas,
Quote:
Chancellor Merkel and the European Commission are not identical
The Germans are the deciders, as they are the last one standing with any money.

Quote:
I don't plan to waste any more time with your posts
I am sure that it is not comfortable for you to get called out as wrong by me, as you were here trying to claim that there is a big difference between leaving the Eurozone and leaving the EU.....when in fact leaving one necessitates leaving the other.
High Seas
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Nov, 2011 11:09 am
@hawkeye10,
hawkeye10 wrote:

Quote:
Chancellor Merkel and the European Commission are not identical
The Germans are the deciders, as they are the last one standing with any money.

Quote:
I don't plan to waste any more time with your posts
I am sure that it is not comfortable for you to get called out as wrong by me, as you were here trying to claim that there is a big difference between leaving the Eurozone and leaving the EU.....when in fact leaving one necessitates leaving the other.

Laughing Laughing Laughing

0 Replies
 
hawkeye10
 
  0  
Reply Sat 5 Nov, 2011 11:56 am
Quote:
Almost all of the endeavors to defuse this crisis have denied the overarching conclusion of that I.M.F. draft: that Greece could no longer pay its bills and needed to drastically cut its debt.

Until October, when European leaders conceded that point, the champion of the resistance was Jean-Claude Trichet, who stepped down this month as president of the European Central Bank. It was he who insisted that no European country could ever be allowed to go bankrupt.

“There is simply no excuse for Trichet and Europe getting this so wrong,” said Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup. “It is fine to make default a moral issue, but you also have to accept that outside of Western Europe, defaults have been a dime a dozen, even in the past few decades.”

If leaders had agreed earlier to ease Greece’s debt burden and moved faster to protect the likes of Italy and Spain — as United States officials had been urging since early 2010 — the worst might be behind Europe today, experts say.

The turning point came at a late-night meeting last month when Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, pushed private creditors to accept a 50 percent loss on their Greek bonds. Mr. Trichet had long opposed such a move, fearing that it could undermine European banks. Instead, at his urging, European leaders initially promoted painful austerity for Greece, prompting a public backlash that pushed Mr. Papendreou’s government to the brink of collapse and could force Athens to abandon the euro.

Many view the latest rescue plan as too little, too late.

“Because of all this denial and delay, Greece will need to write down as much as 85 percent of its debt — 50 percent is not enough,” Mr. Buiter said.
.
.
.
Paradoxically, it was a representative of the banking industry, perhaps more in tune with the realities of the marketplace, who finally insisted that Greece could not borrow and cut its way out of the crisis without having to restructure its debt.

“There was shock and surprise on their faces,” Mr. Dallara recalled. “They could not believe it.”

Again, Germany put its foot down — another delay. While a new deal reached in late October will force bondholders to accept deep losses, Europe, Greece and Mr. Dallara continue to insist that the transaction will be voluntary. As a result, there will be no need to trigger Greek credit defaults swaps, which would add to the complexity and cost. But in the eyes of many debt experts, this is simply another form of denial.

“You have to have a coercive element to make it work,” said Mitu Gulati, a sovereign debt expert at Duke University Law School. “To not accept that means you are living in Alice in Wonderland.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/business/global/europes-two-years-of-denials-trapped-greece.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

Great read above, the conclusion is the the Central Bank and Merkel are the most responsible for this mess not getting dealt with, and that they still are not ready to deal with this.
0 Replies
 
georgeob1
 
  1  
Reply Sat 5 Nov, 2011 01:39 pm
@Cycloptichorn,
Cycloptichorn wrote:

God, the CDS market is fucked and needs to be gotten under control as soon as possible.
Gotten under whose control? Perhaps we could have Barney Frank and Maxine Waters appoint some of their Fannie & Freddy managers to oversee it.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Maybe you can answer this question as well - why does the ECB not simply print however many Euros are needed to cover the losses? Surely the downsides to this would be far preferable to watching Greece exit the system, and Italy and Portugal probably collapsing not long after that.
Cycloptichorn

I think this is a very good and interesting question. Though its powers and governance are different, the ECB plays (or has the potential to play) the same role in Europe as does the Fed here. The ECB has so far been extremely reluctant to do any of the liquidity enhancing or money supply increasing activities that our Fed has so liberally undertaken. There are understandable historical reasons for this, particularly in Germany, which appears to be the dominant influence on the ECB. In addition there may be some governance issues in the EU itself that further limit the potential of the ECB. I would be very interested to learn the insights that others here may have on this question.
0 Replies
 
CalamityJane
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Nov, 2011 03:46 pm
You just can't simply print more money - inflation would take place and especially Germany - having gone through a historic and painful inflation process, is vehemently against printing more Euro. Luckily there is no Bernanke in Europe, so this isn't an issue there. Merkel's influence on the ECB makes sure of it. Besides, it won't solve any problems, and the U.S. will have to come to realize this shortly as well.

The entire EU misery is a catch 22 really. If the EU lets Greece default,
then the domino effect is inevitable and the ECB might be able to bail out Greece but not Spain, Italy and Portugal at the same time. A default on
Greece would translate to a default of the entire EU - it won't happen - therefore as long as Greece has an ounce of life left, resuscitation efforts
will continue.
georgeob1
 
  1  
Reply Sat 5 Nov, 2011 04:26 pm
@CalamityJane,
Well our Fed has already printed lots of it with QE2, and it is currently doing more to hold down interest rates (to reduce the government's burden in servicing the bonds it continues to issue to finance current operations and service old debt). Much has been made about the harmful effects of illicit collusion among financial institutions (issuers of mortgages and those who bought, securitized and sold them for example), but too little has been said about the collusion of imprudent governments and the central banks that ultimately serve them.

However, in the case of Europe, I can't understand the argument for the fictions being used to avoid "technical default" while the fact of inevitable default is obvious to all. Why specifically is the "voluntary haircut" for private Greek bondholders being used as a means of avoiding massive writedowns of these assets by national banks being tried, when a much more credible policy might be default and capital loans to national banks by the ECB (more or less as was done by the Fed here)?

I'll confess to limited understanding here of the powers of the ECB and as well of the multiple hazards that confront highly indebted economies generally. Printing money and deficit spending in a recession are effective tools in softening economic cycles .... up to the moment at which they aren't, and then disaster ensues. Retrospective analysis of past catastrophies is relatively easy, but history also confirms that the best of us aren't very good at predicting what's ahead in a still unfolding crisis.
CalamityJane
 
  1  
Reply Sat 5 Nov, 2011 05:43 pm
@georgeob1,
George, like most highly acclaimed analysts, the financial sector in particular sits in an ivory tower, far away from reality. Aside from that, Europe is still much more conservative than the U.S. in regards to printing money and issuing bonds. The 50 % voluntary haircuts pans out to be more like 70 %, yet there aren't any takers, no matter how presentable the package is made. Would you buy a 10 year note? Probably not!

For the United States it may in all probability work out fine economically
to print more Dollars and issue more bonds, in Europe the fear of a greater debt crisis and a push into mass inflation seems much more prominent, especially in the wake of fiscal irresponsibility on part of various governments like we have seen in Greece, Italy, Spain etc. The risk would
exceed the benefits thereof.
High Seas
 
  1  
Reply Sat 5 Nov, 2011 05:56 pm
@CalamityJane,
These are actual quotes by EU politicians; all of them made publicly, except for PM Berlusconi's about Chancellor Merkel, which was obtained from wiretapped evidence submitted by prosecutors on a matter unrelated to the euro. What can you expect the financial sector to conclude from all this Smile
http://images.businessweek.com/cms/2011-11-02/etc_euroinsults46__01__960.jpg
CalamityJane
 
  2  
Reply Sat 5 Nov, 2011 06:10 pm
@High Seas,
Haha, this just about sums it up how each leader sees the other - and the same goes for its citizen. This might be also a reason why the EU on an emotional level won't succeed.
hawkeye10
 
  1  
Reply Sat 5 Nov, 2011 06:26 pm
@CalamityJane,
CalamityJane wrote:

Haha, this just about sums it up how each leader sees the other - and the same goes for its citizen. This might be also a reason why the EU on an emotional level won't succeed.
If it does not succeed it will not be because the citizens were not invested, it will be because of shoddy leadership, which the citizens can no longer believe in.
0 Replies
 
georgeob1
 
  1  
Reply Sun 6 Nov, 2011 12:02 pm
@CalamityJane,
I agree with your assessment of the differences in European and American attitudes. Both are based on the past experiences of the respective actors. Unfortunately for us all, past experiences aren't always a reliable guide in an evolving and fast-changing world economy.

We live in a world in which money has no objective value, and its supply & availability are both variable and, in a liquidity crisis, unreliable. Governments here and in Europe, burdened with high levels of debt (often disguised in the form of guarantees or future benefits) and chronic current deficits sustained by political paralysis - a description that fits us all, find themselves with no options to speed the correction of economic cycles that don't have worse side effects than the problems they are attempting to correct. Worse, the closer we get to the cliff, the less effective are the various "controls" with which we imagine we "manage" the situation.
hawkeye10
 
  1  
Reply Sun 6 Nov, 2011 12:16 pm
@georgeob1,
An economic system dies much as a body dies...as the body weakens it can no longer fight off the ailments, and so the end often comes from some predestrian cause....

What you boys need to get your mind around is that we are not looking at a bad spell here, we are looking at a global financial system that is by all appearances near the end. It is difficult to know what will replace it but we do know that the Chinese will have a big say....he with the gold makes the rules. You are sure not to like it very much.
georgeob1
 
  1  
Reply Sun 6 Nov, 2011 12:28 pm
@hawkeye10,
I don't think that history supports your metaphorical analysis. Think some more.
hawkeye10
 
  1  
Reply Sun 6 Nov, 2011 01:12 pm
@georgeob1,
georgeob1 wrote:

I don't think that history supports your metaphorical analysis. Think some more.
Bullshit...human economic systems have regularly been required to adjust to changes in human behavior, often brought on by new technology. We have over the last 30 years massively changed how we produce goods and services, it has gone global with the predictable result that inter country trading has exploded. It is not just understandable but it was almost inevitable that the financial system we created after ww2 was not going to be able to handle it...that it would need to be replaced. Now with much of the globe nearly bankrupt and the masses revolting the axe falls.

Wake up and smell the coffee.
georgeob1
 
  1  
Reply Sun 6 Nov, 2011 01:17 pm
@hawkeye10,
I'm not suggesting that nothing will change or evolve - quite the opposite. However the catastrophic collapse you forecast above is not consistent with history.
hawkeye10
 
  1  
Reply Sun 6 Nov, 2011 01:49 pm
@georgeob1,
georgeob1 wrote:

I'm not suggesting that nothing will change or evolve - quite the opposite. However the catastrophic collapse you forecast above is not consistent with history.
They old system will be dead, replaced with something else...and it will have died because it no longer functions, not because our leaders figured out a better way. That is a collapse.

As for what happens to economic activity levels we have yet to see...we need to massively shrink production and consumption because we have over populated the planet and it can not handle all of the toxins that our activity generates, but we are likely still some time away from that level of rethinking and reform. Right now everybody who is anybody is still thinking that the solution to what ails us to to bump up economic activity...the mantra of "growth" which was hugely responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place as Reagan and all who came after actively worked to juice the economy. Obama as you know has the fever bad, and we also see now that his solutions have not worked to deal with the actual problems.
0 Replies
 
 

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