Economy
Related: About this forumWeekend Economists ask the Question of the Year (so far) July 11-12 2015
Last edited Sat Jul 11, 2015, 03:24 PM - Edit history (1)
Well, what can you say about Greece? The ongoing Greek Drama has turned into a full-blown Greek Tragedy.
Introduction to Greek Tragedy
As was noted in the discussion of the Iliad, the word "tragedy" refers primarily to tragic drama: a literary composition written to be performed by actors in which a central character called a tragic protagonist or hero suffers some serious misfortune which is not accidental and therefore meaningless, but is significant in that the misfortune is logically connected with the hero's actions. Tragedy stresses the vulnerability of human beings whose suffering is brought on by a combination of human and divine actions, but is generally undeserved with regard to its harshness. This genre, however, is not totally pessimistic in its outlook. Although many tragedies end in misery for the characters, there are also tragedies in which a satisfactory solution of the tragic situation is attained.
from - http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/netshots/tragedy.htm
So, what's the Question of the Year (so far)?
Let's sing it out for you...
Clash - Should I Stay or Should I Go
Should I stay or should I go?
If you say that you are mine
I'll be here 'til the end of time
and...
You're happy when I'm on my knees
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/clash/shouldistayorshouldigo.html
or phrased slightly differently:
Clash - The Guns of Brixton
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/clash/thegunsofbrixton.html
Or even another way:
Depeche Mode - Shake the Disease
Permanently together
Lovers devoted
To each other forever
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/depechemode/shakethedisease.html
Once more, with no music...
So, which version will it be? Do you stay? Do you go? Do you surrender? Do you pretend nothing has happened? Do you kiss and make up? Or do you fight?
Stayed tuned...
So join in everybody! Post 'em if you've got 'em!
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
MattSh
(3,714 posts)but sometimes events take precedence over what I might want...
And some of this may have been posted already, so consider those a weekend wrapup!
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)I bow before a master! Seriously, couldn't have pulled that off.
I had a lovely night. The weather was perfect, and the music. I got to see the house pipes up close (extremely complicated device) and dance myself to exhaustion (well, I'm seriously out of practice...and generated a lot of humidity in the process. Made for good sleeping, though).
Today is the major event. Another day of fine weather, great music, more bagpipes and kilts. The dancers want me to come back, and go weekly to their sessions. It's so close to home, I probably will (if the rest of my so-called life permits).
Events in Greece are not looking promising. It's like a soap opera, only people are dying of it. One would hope that the desire for theater and tragedy had softened over 3000 years, but evidently not. Logic doesn't apply, there in the birthplace of logic.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)"... The history of logic is the study of the development of the science of valid inference (logic). Formal logic was developed in ancient times in China, India, and Greece. Greek logic, particularly Aristotelian logic, found wide application and acceptance in science[citation needed] and mathematics.
Aristotle's logic was further developed by Islamic and Christian philosophers in the Middle Ages, reaching a high point in the mid-fourteenth century. The period between the fourteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century was largely one of decline and neglect, and is regarded as barren by at least one historian of logic.[1]
Logic was revived in the mid-nineteenth century, at the beginning of a revolutionary period when the subject developed into a rigorous and formalistic discipline whose exemplar was the exact method of proof used in mathematics. The development of the modern "symbolic" or "mathematical" logic during this period is the most significant in the two-thousand-year history of logic, and is arguably one of the most important and remarkable events in human intellectual history.[2].." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logic
Like the Phoenicians before them, ancient Greeks were magpies.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)I've been absent again so don't know where you are but it sounds great!
MattSh
(3,714 posts)Like a tragedy from Euripides, the long struggle between Greece and Europe's creditor powers is reaching a cataclysmic end that nobody planned, nobody seems able to escape, and that threatens to shatter the greater European order in the process.
Greek premier Alexis Tsipras never expected to win Sunday's referendum on EMU bail-out terms, let alone to preside over a blazing national revolt against foreign control.
He called the snap vote with the expectation - and intention - of losing it. The plan was to put up a good fight, accept honourable defeat, and hand over the keys of the Maximos Mansion, leaving it to others to implement the June 25 "ultimatum" and suffer the opprobrium.
This ultimatum came as a shock to the Greek cabinet. They thought they were on the cusp of a deal, bad though it was. Mr Tsipras had already made the decision to acquiesce to austerity demands, recognizing that Syriza had failed to bring about a debtors' cartel of southern EMU states and had seriously misjudged the mood across the eurozone.
Instead they were confronted with a text from the creditors that upped the ante, demanding a rise in VAT on tourist hotels from 7pc (de facto) to 23pc at a single stroke.
Creditors insisted on further pension cuts of 1pc of GDP by next year and a phase out of welfare assistance (EKAS) for poorer pensioners, even though pensions have already been cut by 44pc.
They insisted on fiscal tightening equal to 2pc of GDP in an economy reeling from six years of depression and devastating hysteresis. They offered no debt relief. The Europeans intervened behind the scenes to suppress a report by the International Monetary Fund validating Greece's claim that its debt is "unsustainable". The IMF concluded that the country not only needs a 30pc haircut to restore viability, but also €52bn of fresh money to claw its way out of crisis.
Complete story at - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11724924/Europe-is-blowing-itself-apart-over-Greece-and-nobody-can-stop-it.html
MattSh
(3,714 posts)Something huge has happened in Greece, though you wouldn't know it if you rely on the US corporate media for your information.
That reporting has, with rare exceptions, followed the party line that a bunch of naive "leftists" led by Greece's relatively young and new prime minister Alexis Tsipras and his motorcycle-riding radical economist finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, have pushed Greece "to the brink of chaos" through their ineptitude. This same biased reporting has been pushing the argument that Greece has "no choice" but to swallow even more austerity, selling off all its public assets to circling capitalist vultures, in the vain hope that someday the country's economy will bottom out and begin "growing" again.
The reality of what has just happened is quite different. Actually, Greece has suffered seven years of austerity the likes of which countries like the US and northern Europe haven't seen since the Great Depression. Unemployment is over 20% (50% for young people!), and there is no end in sight if the so-called Troika -- the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank -- continues to hold the country by the throat, demanding regular payments on a debt that even the IMF admits can never be repaid.
Far from being naive or inept, Tsipras, Varoufakis and the ruling Syriza Party have done two remarkable things brilliantly -- one of which should not really be remarkable at all, except that the so-called "free world" has moved so far away from real democracy at this point that it's forgotten what democracy is, and the other of which would not have been necessary were the global media not so fawning towards ruling elites in their respective countries.
The first of these two things was the bold decision by Tsipras to hand the question of what to do next in Greece to the Greek people, by allowing them to vote on whether they wanted to surrender to global and European bankers and the governments of the world's wealthiest nations, or wanted to say "No!" to further demands for austerity. When Tsipras walked away from further bailout negotiations and made his surprise call for that referendum, and when the Greek parliament backed him by passing a bill setting the poll up, a cacophony of doomsaying pundits in Europe, the US and the Greek conservative media all warned the Greek people to "see reason" and to "vote for Europe," as though voting against more austerity would inevitably mean pariah status for Greece.
There was a kind of smug gloating over early polls showing that a majority of Greeks planned to vote "Yes" to accepting whatever the banks and the European Union demanded, or later, when it appeared that the vote would be close.
In the end, of course, the Greek people voted by a landslide (61% to 38%) against European austerity demands that Tsipras labeled "blackmail" and "national humiliation," and that Varoufakis called "fiscal waterboarding." Tsipras was fully vindicated in his trust in democracy and in the people of his country, which he pointedly reminded had "invented democracy."
Complete story at - http://www.opednews.com/articles/Is-this-taking-democracy-t-by-Dave-Lindorff-Austerity_Blackmail_Democracy-In-Action_Economic-Prejudice-150706-732.html
MattSh
(3,714 posts)--------------------
The idea that the euro has "failed" is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.
That progenitor is former University of Chicago economist Robert Mundell. The architect of "supply-side economics" is now a professor at Columbia University, but I knew him through his connection to my Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, back before Mundell's research on currencies and exchange rates had produced the blueprint for European monetary union and a common European currency.
Mundell, then, was more concerned with his bathroom arrangements. Professor Mundell, who has both a Nobel Prize and an ancient villa in Tuscany, told me, incensed:
"They won't even let me have a toilet. They've got rules that tell me I can't have a toilet in this room! Can you imagine?"
As it happens, I can't. But I don't have an Italian villa, so I can't imagine the frustrations of bylaws governing commode placement.
But Mundell, a can-do Canadian-American, intended to do something about it: come up with a weapon that would blow away government rules and labor regulations. (He really hated the union plumbers who charged a bundle to move his throne.)
"It's very hard to fire workers in Europe," he complained. His answer: the euro.
The euro would really do its work when crises hit, Mundell explained. Removing a government's control over currency would prevent nasty little elected officials from using Keynesian monetary and fiscal juice to pull a nation out of recession.
"It puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians," he said. "[And] without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business."
He cited labor laws, environmental regulations and, of course, taxes. All would be flushed away by the euro. Democracy would not be allowed to interfere with the marketplace – or the plumbing.
Complete story at - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/26/robert-mundell-evil-genius-euro
MattSh
(3,714 posts)With all eyes firmly focused on pensioners at the gate and ATM lines, there is another - just as cruel and unusual - crisis occurring in Greece. Europe's immigration 'problem' is front-and-center on the island of Lesvos, as KeepTalkingGreece reports, unbelievable scenes as refugees try to raid a food truck. No, this is not Somalia...
The incident took place when nearly 2,500 migrants hosted in the camp of Lesvos (Mytilene) municipality in Kara Tepe saw the catering truck approaching. They started to run for a plate with food.
Reason fro the panic to be left hungry without food was a rumor claiming that catering service for refugees had stopped on the island of Samos due to debts.
With hundreds of refugees and undocumented migrants arrive daily to Greece from Turkey, the situation has gone out of control.
On Tuesday, another boat carrying people to Greece sank, more than 10 people went missing.
Complete story at - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-08/caught-tape-other-crisis-happening-greece
MattSh
(3,714 posts)By Michael Nevradakis in Athens with Greg Palast in New York
We Greeks have voted 'No' to slavery -- but 'Yes' to our chains.
Not surprisingly, by nearly two-to-one, Greeks have overwhelmingly rejected the cruel, economically bonkers "austerity" program required by the European Central Bank in return for an ECB loan to pay Greece's creditors. In doing so, the Greek people overcame an unprecedented campaign of fear from the Greek and international media, the European Union (EU), and most of our political parties.
What's simply whack-o is that, while voting "No" to austerity, many Greeks wish to remain shackled to the euro, the very cause of our miseries.
Resistance, not Crisis
Before we explain how the euro is the cause of this horror show, let's clear up one thing right away. All week, worldwide media was filled with news of the Greek "crisis." Yes, the economy stinks, with one in four Greeks unemployed. But two other euro nations, Spain and Cyprus, also are suffering this depression level of unemployment. Indeed, more than 11% of workers in seven euro nations, including Portugal and Italy, are out of work.
But unlike Greece, these other suffering nations have quietly acquiesced to their "austerity" punishments. Spaniards now accept that they are fated forevermore to be low-paid servants to beer-barfing British tourists. Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, who has enacted a draconian protest ban at home to keep his own suffering masses at bay, has joined in the jackal-pack rejecting anything but the harshest of austerity terms for Greece.
The difference between these quiescent nations and Greece is that the Greeks won't take it anymore.
What the media call the Greek "crisis" is, in fact, resistance.
Resistance to nowhere
But it's a resistance whose leaders are leading them nowhere.
For decades, Greeks have suffered governments that are both corrupt and dishonest. The election of SYRIZA changed all that: the government is now merely dishonest.
Our new SYRIZA Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, correctly called the austerity plan "blackmail." However, before Sunday's vote, Tsipras told the nation a big fat fib. He said we could vote down the European Bank's plan but keep the European Bank's coin, the euro. How? Tsipras won't say; it's part of a policy ploy his outgoing finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls "creative ambiguity." To translate: Creative ambiguity is Greek for "bullshit."
Sorry, Alexis, if you want to use the Reich's coin you have to accept the Reichsdiktat.
Complete story at - http://www.opednews.com/articles/GREECE-D-We-Voted-No-to-by-Greg-Palast-Austerity_Euro_European-Union_European-Union-150706-62.html
MattSh
(3,714 posts)By Robert Berke, Oilprice.com:
In a previous article on Oilprice, I questioned whether western sanctions imposed on Russia were being regularly breached by E.U. and Asian companies, noting that sanctions only work if all countries unite behind them.
In June, the Financial Times reported that only one year after being imposed, the sanctions are eroding. It seems that government and business policies are pulling in opposite directions, despite the sanction regime being clear on the activities that are banned, as explained by Forbes:
“Last July (’14), the E.U. banned its companies from signing any new financing deals with Russia. In September, the E.U. placed even more restrictions on Russia’s access to E.U. capital markets. The sanctions state that individuals and corporations from the E.U. are banned from providing loans to five major Russian state-owned banks, including Sberbank and VTB Bank, and the three state owned energy companies, of which Gazprom tops the list.
<snip>
These potentially sanction busting deals were announced at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum:
• BP buys 20% of Rosneft-owned oil reserves in E.Siberia, in a $700 million deal, creating new Asian-bound oil partnership
• Rosneft and Indian state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp signed long-term deals.
• Gazprom and Royal Dutch Shell are building a global alliance
• Gazprom signed an agreement with the Greek government to pursue its Turkish Stream Pipeline
• Gazprom signed a 300 million euro loan with Unicredit Bank of Austria
• Gazprom held discussions with Engie (formerly GDF Suez) over gas pipelines to France
The capper came at the St Petersburg Economic Forum, where the Saudis arrived, offering to be a full-fledged finance partner in Russia’s energy development, in exchange for Russian nuclear expertise and military arms. Two weeks later, the Saudis raised the bet with a five-year, $10 billion investment in Russia’s agriculture, retail, and real estate sectors.
It is one thing to see Russia replace the West with China as client, partner, and financier of energy development; it’s quite another to see Russia swap western finance for Middle Eastern finance, sourced from one of the West’s strongest allies. That is likely to cause major concerns in western banking circles.
Complete story at - http://wolfstreet.com/2015/07/09/eu-asia-ignore-russia-sanctions-us-companies-left-behind/
MattSh
(3,714 posts)to the best of my recollection, only the EU and English speaking countries and Japan signed on to sanctions. India, Saudi Arabia, and China were never part of that insanity.
MattSh
(3,714 posts)but there's more to come. Much more!!!
MattSh
(3,714 posts)This much-needed re-set to an economy that serves the many rather than the few is what the Powers That Be are so fearful of.
On the surface, everything still looks remarkably stable in the core industrial economies. The stock markets in Japan, Germany and the U.S. are only a few percentage points off their highs, and we're constantly assured that inflation no longer exists and official unemployment is low.
In other words, other than the spot of bother in Greece, life is good. Anyone who signs on the dotted line for easy credit can go to college, buy a car or house or get another credit card.
With more credit, everything becomes possible. With unlimited credit, the sky's the limit, and it shows.
Europe is awash with tourists from the U.S., China and elsewhere, and restaurants are jammed in San Francisco and New York City, where small flats now routinely fetch well over $1 million.
In politics, the American public is being offered a choice of two calcified, dysfunctional aristocracies in 2016: brittleness is being passed off as stability, not just in politics but in the economy and the cultural zeitgeist.
But surface stability is all the status quo can manage at this point, because the machine is shaking itself to pieces just maintaining the brittle illusion of prosperity and order.
Consider what happened in Greece beneath the surface theatrics.
1. Goldman Sachs conspired with Greece's corrupt kleptocracy to conjure up an illusion of solvency and fiscal prudence so Greece could join the Eurozone.
2. Vested interests and insiders gorged on the credit being offered by German and French banks, enriching themselves to the tune of tens of billions of euros, which were transferred to private accounts in Switzerland at the first whiff of trouble. When informed of this, Greek authorities took no action; after all, why track down your cronies and force them to pay taxes when tax evasion is the status quo for financial elites?
3. If Greece had defaulted in 2010 when its debt was around 110 billion euros, the losses would have fallen on the banks that had foolishly lent the money without proper due diligence or risk management. This is what should have happened in a market economy: those who foolishly lent extraordinary sums to poor credit risks take the resulting (and entirely predictable) losses.
4. But since the big European banks that were on the hook for the 110 billion in bad debt were highly leveraged (estimates are 30 to 1), then a mere 5% loss in their capital would render them insolvent--a Lehman Moment of cascading defaults that the European leadership could not allow, as not only would their cronies lose fortunes but they would lose power when the fragile house of cards they'd constructed collapsed.
Complete story at - http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2015/07/maintaining-illusion-of-stability-now.html
MattSh
(3,714 posts)“We don’t know where all the money is going.”
The F-35 is the most expensive weapons program in history, with a total cost of $1.5 trillion, that has turned into a total fiasco.
So here is an 8-minute documentary (with some cool footage of the thing flying, landing vertically, etc.) to give you the willies about how the system works, and what’s wrong with it.
Note the term, “concurrent development.” It’s a key concept – and at the core of why this deal went haywire.
Complete story at - http://wolfstreet.com/2015/04/21/f35-jet-that-ate-the-pentagon-concurrent-development/
MattSh
(3,714 posts)From a couple of months ago, but these stories go together
Soviet Adm. Sergei Gorchakov reportedly held the view that the U.S. had made a strategic miscalculation by relying on large and increasingly vulnerable aircraft carriers. The influential U.S. Adm. Hyman Rickover shared this view. In a 1982 congressional hearing, legislators asked him how long American carriers would survive in an actual war.
Rickover’s response? “Forty-eight hours,” he said. (That's 33 years ago).
Now let’s take a look at the unofficial record derived from war games. In 2002, the U.S. Navy held a large simulated war game, the Millennium Challenge, to test scenarios of attacks on the fleet by a hypothetical Gulf state — Iraq or possibly Iran.
The leader of the red team employed brilliant asymmetric tactics resulting in 16 U.S. ships, including two supercarriers, going to the bottom in a very short span of time. The Navy stopped the war game, prohibited the red team from using these tactics and then reran the exercise declaring victory on the second day.
.....
This extends to diesel submarines. Although the number of simulated “sinkings” by ships of the Navy is officially unacknowledged, there are reports of around a dozen U.S. aircraft carriers being “sunk” in exercises with friendly countries including Canada, Denmark and Chile.
In 2005, the USS Ronald Reagan was “sunk” by the Gotland, an electric diesel sub that the U.S. Navy borrowed from Sweden between 2005 and 2007 and which was never detected in exercises by U.S. carrier groups during all that time.
Although it’s true that the Soviets and the Americans never faced off in an actual naval battle, there is every reason to believe that they would have had some success against the “invulnerable” carriers. As far back as 1968, a fast nuclear powered Russian submarine matched the Enterprise at top speed in the Pacific.
.....
One carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk, used up three of its nine lives having been run into by an undetected Soviet sub in 1984, overflown by two undetected Russian planes — an Su-24 and an Su-27 — in 2000, and surprised by a Chinese Song-class attack submarine that surfaced undetected inside its perimeter and within torpedo range in 2006.
In March of this year, the French Navy reported that it had sunk the USS Theodore Roosevelt and half of its escorts in a war game, but hurriedly removed that information from its website.
Complete story at - https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-navy-s-big-mistake-building-tons-of-supercarriers-79cb42029b8
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)I was stationed aboard the Enterprise when it was in drydock in Newport News, Va in '71. They were building the Eisenhower and Nimitz on either side of us.
My thought even back then, is that it wouldn't take much to send 6,000 men to the bottom of the ocean. Witness the hapless Argentinian military during the Falklands war. A couple of well placed Exocets.....
Warpy
(111,305 posts)For every day on the road, that thing spent a week in the shop. Every time he turned the key, it seemed something loosened up and started to fail, and it was always hard to get to.
While I'm sure Congressmen with military hardons really love this thing, just think about dropping a jet vertically onto a small carrier, but that's probably the Achilles heel. They tried to build this system onto a design they already had and have now found that design gets shaken apart by those non fixed engines. If they beef up the frame, the thing will be too damned heavy to fly. So they fly it and then wheel it into the shop to fix whatever got bent or shaken loose.
In addition, an AF guy I talk to infrequently has mentioned that visibility is piss poor in them, not a great feature in a fighter jet.
Then there are the delays and cost overruns. If the system weren't so unbelievably corrupt, Lockheed would have been told to eat the cost ten years ago, when it became clear the thing was never going to work well enough to be reliable.
This isn't the plane that ate the Pentagon, the fucking thing is eating the whole country. It represents our lost wages over many years, our remaining lack of a real health care system that covers us all, our improved schools, our mass transit, and all the other things other countries take for granted. Instead, we got this fancy plane that will spend more time in the shop than it does in the air.
MattSh
(3,714 posts)The Pentagon has released its “National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015,” June 2015.
The document announces a shift in focus from terrorists to “state actors” that “are challenging international norms.” It is important to understand what these words mean. Governments that challenge international norms are sovereign countries that pursue policies independently of Washington’s policies. These “revisionist states” are threats, not because they plan to attack the US, which the Pentagon admits neither Russia nor China intend, but because they are independent.
Be sure to grasp the point: The threat is the existence of sovereign states, whose independence of action makes them “revisionist states.” In other words, their independence is out of step with the neoconservative Uni-Power doctrine that declares independent action to be the right of Washington alone. Washington’s History-given hegemony precludes any other country being independent in its actions. By definition, a country with a foreign policy independent of Washington is a threat.
The Pentagon’s report defines the foremost “revisionist states” as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. The focus is primarily on Russia. Washington hopes to co-op China, despite the “tension to the Asia-Pacific region” that China’s defense of its sphere of influence causes, a defense “inconsistent with international law” (this from Washington, the great violator of international law), by turning over what remains of the American consumer market to China. It is not yet certain that Iran has escaped the fate that Washington imposed on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Ukraine, and by complicity Palestine.
Complete story at - http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/10/pentagon-concludes-america-not-safe-unless-it-conquers-the-world/
MattSh
(3,714 posts)NOT the Onion
Demeter
(85,373 posts)When the young man has had enough from the paranoid torturer who killed his brother, and announces at last: "it's NOT safe!" and finishes him off. A chilling masterpiece by William Goldman. And to think, I only read it because he wrote "The Princess Bride"!
MattSh
(3,714 posts)Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) are reintroducing legislation to revive the Glass-Steagall Act, which would force big banks to split their investment and commercial banking practices.
Glass-Steagall was first passed in 1933 but repealed during the Clinton administration, leading many progressives to argue that it contributed to the 2008 financial collapse.
Warren and McCain, along with their cosponsors, Sens. Angus King (I-Maine) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), said in a statement that the legislation would make big banks that are "too big to fail" smaller and safer and minimize the likelihood of a government bailout.
The bill, which they first introduced in the last Congress, would separate traditional banking with checking and savings accounts from financial institutions that offer services such as investment banking, which are riskier.
"Despite the progress we've made since 2008, the biggest banks continue to threaten our economy," said Warren, an ardent Wall Street critic, in a statement. "The biggest banks are collectively much larger than they were before the crisis, and they continue to engage in dangerous practices that could once again crash our economy."
McCain said the repeal of Glass-Steagall led to "a culture of dangerous greed and excessive risk-taking" in the banking industry.
Complete story at - http://thehill.com/policy/finance/247093-warren-mccain-introduce-bill-to-bring-back-glass-steagall
MattSh
(3,714 posts)The somewhat peculiar results of the Challenger Labor Shortage Survey showed that 77% of the approximately 100 human resources executives polled said their companies were having difficulty filling open positions due to a shortage of available talent. And 45% said they were having a hard time filling tech jobs, which run the gamut from software engineers to medical technicians. About half of the companies offered some sort of incentive, from referral and sign-on bonuses to relocation assistance, to get people to jump ship.
Peculiar because there are still many millions of Americans who are unemployed. But the report was the opinion of only a tiny group of select HR executives. So not exactly a universal statement.
But today, I ran into something that put that report in a different light, via Rebekah Campbell’s article in the New York Times, which describes her experiences in trying to rope in potential investors for her company, Posse. It was a story of how time and money – two commodities a startup CEO is desperately short of – went down the drain during her pursuit of VC, angel, and corporate investors.
A successful pitch led to lunches, dinners, and drinks, and to meetings, and some took weeks to set up, and more meetings with different people, and everything was exciting, and big money was being dangled out in front of her eyes, and then there would have to be a meeting with the senior guy, who was on vacation. Due diligence had started, and she and her team got peppered with questions, spreadsheets had to be redone, projections were challenged, but there was still no term sheet that would nail down the deal. And after months of seeing money and time spiraling down the drain, she ended up without a deal.
The article is a must-read for all those thinking about outside funding for their startup. Campbell is an excellent writer, and she’s probably a great CEO of her company. She is a compelling voice from the trenches of the startup world.
So I checked out some of her other articles and came across a crystal-clear explanation of one of the most dreadful aspects of the American jobs crisis that still exists despite Challenger’s peculiar Labor Shortage Survey. She spelled out what motivates employers like her, and big companies too, to keep the unemployed from being even considered for a job.
Complete story at - http://wolfstreet.com/2014/09/04/unemployment-crisis-irony-you-must-have-a-job-to-get-a-job/
Continued in the next post...
MattSh
(3,714 posts)Recruiting the right team member is always difficult. I start off knowing that I need someone to perform a task, and imagine what qualities that person might possess. How, in a sea of people, can I find my ideal candidate?
In the past, I would have posted job ads on all the appropriate websites and braced for a flood of applications. I’d spend a weekend afternoon sifting through them all, deleting three quarters and writing follow-up emails to the rest. I always mailed a list of questions for each candidate to complete, with a deadline for their return. This enabled me to filter out at least another half who either didn’t reply in time, wrote dud answers or couldn’t spell and didn’t pay attention to details. Finally, I’d have 10 or so interviews. Often, they would all be disappointing.
My problem was that the best candidates all had good positions and were not reading job advertisements. Somehow, I had to find these people and convince them to take a risk by joining our start-up. The only solution seemed to be to hire a recruiter and, as a cash-strapped small business, we just couldn’t afford to shell out a recruitment fee of 20 percent of the candidate’s annual salary.
Earlier this year I signed up to LinkedIn’s Recruiter service. For $2,200 per quarter, I can run detailed searches on exactly the type of candidates I’m looking for and then approach them en masse. I can search by location, previous and current job titles, previous employers, which universities they attended and how long they’ve been in their current jobs.
Complete story at - http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/why-i-do-all-of-my-recruiting-through-linkedin/
Hotler
(11,433 posts)they can't find talent is that there is no mention of what the job discription is and what they are willing to pay. I think the biggest reason managers can't find talent is that they are cheap and don't to pay a good wage. I remember when a certified pipe welder having to lay down welds to pass x-ray inspection in a fabrication shop would start at at least $18.00 and go as high as $22.00 an hour. Now if you look no one wants to pay more than $10.00 an hour
mother earth
(6,002 posts)Published on Jun 2, 2013
Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer.
That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we recognize austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.
mother earth
(6,002 posts)which remains to be seen, even with reforms and some concessions, that door could swing both ways. There's a call from their EU counterparts to leave, far left, far right, all saying the same.
‘Leave Euro, retake democracy!’ Far-left & eurosceptic MEPs bash eurozone over Greece
mother earth
(6,002 posts)Published on Jul 10, 2015
http://democracynow.org - Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has submitted a bailout proposal which includes harsh austerity measures just days after the Greek people overwhelmingly rejected such measures in a historic referendum. The proposal submitted to Greece’s creditors reportedly includes tax increases, pension cuts, a reduction in military spending, and the privatization of public assets. It comes after Tsipras himself had urged the Greek people to reject creditors’ demands for further austerity. In exchange for the reforms, Greece would receive a three-year, $59 billion bailout package. Germany meanwhile appears to be yielding to demands to provide at least some measure of debt relief to Greece. European officials have expressed approval for the Greek offer ahead of a key meeting of European finance ministers on Saturday. The Greek Parliament is expected to vote on the bailout proposal today, just five days after an overwhelming 61 percent of Greek voters rejected similar terms. We speak to Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He is the author of forthcoming book, "Failed: What the Experts Got Wrong About the Global Economy.
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)... Greece is playing a rough hand, and more than anything else, playing for time. What else does one think they would have gotten out of the Berlin blockheads, a fair deal, a workable solution? Hah!
Why should that happen now, when the crony capitalists have been pushing so hard for deprivation first, and then privatization and a general looting of productive assets next? This is a well-established pattern.
I think this was laid out in a pretty straightforward manner a couple of weeks ago. But the sturm und drang is certainly diverting, especially the German hubris and the Greek negotiation tactics. You cannot adequately follow the game unless you understand the objectives...
... The real solutions are fairly simple, but will not happen because there are such powerful interests allied against them. And they have managed to delude a vocal portion of the populace by feeding them a steady diet of slogans, sociological phantoms for children, and economic hoo-haw.
Financial reform and wage growth, with more certainty in the big variables of healthcare costs and retirement plans is key to a sustainable and organic recovery.
The way things are arranged now, hiring even a single person is a 'step function' because you are not only signing them up for a wage, but for benefits that can vary all over the place and represent a burden for a new or small business.
Gee, I wonder what a developed country would do. Oh yes, the US started on the path for a sane solution in this matter in the 1930s and the New Deal, but alas, were hijacked along the way.
Single payer healthcare and a robust social security system, taking the matter out of the hands of individual businesses who look for ways to cheat and cut corners would be more cost effective and much more workable.
And much easier then to get business to pay a living wage to a national workforce in which essential items like healthcare were not wild cards and the feeding grounds of healthcare and insurance monopolies that add roughly 50 percent overhead to the costs.
And finally there is the matter of tax loopholes and multinational tax cheating to consider.
And for the love of God: break up the Banks.
But the sine qua non is campaign finance reform. The current system of soft bribery for the political class makes a progressive democracy ineffective in the face of big money and crony capitalism.
Oh well, interesting times. It is a good phrase for the day.
/... http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com.es/
mother earth
(6,002 posts)
And the last part, could apply to the US...same poison, it is everywhere!
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I especially want to thank Matt, for stepping up and doing a spectacular thread.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)I'm an ignoramous here so don't really understand the details, just that the 1%ers are winning again... I'm just sick over it all.
And btw, great start to the thread!
MattSh
(3,714 posts)by Pepe Escobar
Greece invented democracy. Greek mythology forged the way the West looks at itself. Greece even invented the denomination of this Eurasian annex -- "Europa."
"For it is only criminals
who presume to damage other people nowadays
without the aid of philosophy."
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities.
Odysseus/Ulysses took 10 years to go back home after the Trojan War. His descendants are now making history in the original home of democracy. And they are not going anywhere. They have already placed their Trojan horse in the home of intolerance and austerity. There's no turning back from restoring dignity. And if the Muses rule it, it will be back to the drachma.
The so-called EU "institutions" -- along with cosmically mediocre politicians of wealthy EU nations -- behaved like barbarians all along, proving, graphically, how the whole Kafkaesque EU construction hates democracy with a vengeance.
Brussels and Berlin proved they are in the regime change business. Updating the exceptionalists on Iraq in 2003, they were advocating the destruction of a democratically elected government via economic Shock and Awe. Their subsequent wet dream was to impose renewed austerity on an interim, unelected technocratic government.
This past week, relentless scare tactics -- deployed by Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Eurogroup chairman, or European Commission (EC) president and certified opportunist Jean-Claude Juncker -- asserted that voting "No" would mean a Grexit. Now, the real possibility of a Grexit is threatening to destroy the euro.
The utmost fear of these cosmically mediocre politicians is that other European democracies -- starting with Spain in the fall -- would start forcefully saying "No" to the austerity obsession.
The mere fact that this is already happening is the ultimate indictment of the troika, whose one size fits all recipe always translates into recession, unemployment and widespread poverty. Their notion of Europe is dead and buried.
Complete story at - http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-Trojan-Horse-in-the-Home-by-Pepe-Escobar-Austerity_Debt_Euro_Trojan-Horse-150706-468.html
mother earth
(6,002 posts)
As always, my favorite place here...
MattSh
(3,714 posts)• Former foreign secretary breaks cover to warn Italy and Spain are next
• Mr Hague said the 'folly' of the Euro would be studied in years to come
• He urged Greece to abandon the single currency to give itself a chance
By TOM MCTAGUE, DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 09:05 GMT, 7 July 2015 | UPDATED: 10:49 GMT, 7 July 2015
Former foreign secretary William Hague has broken cover to urge Greece to abandon the Euro or be stuck in a 'permanent crisis'.
Mr Hague, who stood down from politics at the election, said Greece had no chance of turning its economy around within the single currency unless Germany agreed to hand over big subsidies 'forever'.
But the former Tory leader went even further, warning that the 'Greek debacle of 2015' will not be the end of the euro crisis 'but its real beginning' – eventually dragging in Italy, Spain, Portugal and other southern European countries.
Mr Hague's warning comes ahead of a crisis summit of Eurozone leaders in Brussels tonight amid warnings from Germany that the single currency could 'blow apart' if Greece is allowed to blackmail the rest of the Eurozone.
Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande were locked in a bitter stand-off ahead of yet another bid by eurozone leaders to prevent the debt-ridden state crashing out of the single currency.
Athens yesterday extended its 'bank holiday' until at least Thursday after the European Central Bank deferred a decision on whether to continue propping up the country's financial institutions.
But one American hedge fund, Balyasny, yesterday warned investors that Greek banks were on the verge of running dry, leaving the country 48 hours from civil unrest.
Complete story at - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3151947/This-BEGINNING-Euro-crisis-William-Hague-warns-Greece-debacle-minor-rehearsal-coming-crash.html
MattSh
(3,714 posts)A senior member of Greece’s negotiating team with its European creditors agreed to a meeting last week in Athens with Mediapart special correspondent Christian Salmon. Speaking on condition that his name is withheld, he detailed the history of the protracted and bitter negotiations between the radical-left Syriza government, elected in January, and international lenders for the provision of a new bailout for the debt-ridden country.
The almost two-hour interview in English took place just days before last Sunday’s referendum on the latest drastic austerity-driven bailout terms offered by the creditors, and opposed by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, and which were finally rejected by 61.3% of Greek voters.
While the ministerial advisor slams the stance of the international creditors, who he accuses of leading a strategy of deliberate suffocation of Greece’s finances and economy, he is also critical of some of the decisions taken by Athens. His account also throws light on the personal tensions surrounding the talks led by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who resigned from his post on Monday deploring “a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants, and assorted ‘partners’, for my ‘absence’ from its meetings”.
The advisor cites threats proffered to Varoufakis by Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem, warning he would sink Greece's banks unless the Tsipras government bowed to the harsh deal on offer, and by German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who he says demanded: "How much money do you want to leave the euro?"
The interview follows below and over the following three pages presented in a continuous series of extracts (editor’s notes appear in italics within hard brackets):
Complete story at - http://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/international/080715/we-underestimated-their-power-greek-government-insider-lifts-lid-five-months-humiliation-and-blackm?page_article=1
magical thyme
(14,881 posts)They should have taken him up on the offer. 
MattSh
(3,714 posts)Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister
Greece’s financial drama has dominated the headlines for five years for one reason: the stubborn refusal of our creditors to offer essential debt relief. Why, against common sense, against the IMF’s verdict and against the everyday practices of bankers facing stressed debtors, do they resist a debt restructure? The answer cannot be found in economics because it resides deep in Europe’s labyrinthine politics.
In 2010, the Greek state became insolvent. Two options consistent with continuing membership of the eurozone presented themselves: the sensible one, that any decent banker would recommend – restructuring the debt and reforming the economy; and the toxic option – extending new loans to a bankrupt entity while pretending that it remains solvent.
Official Europe chose the second option, putting the bailing out of French and German banks exposed to Greek public debt above Greece’s socioeconomic viability. A debt restructure would have implied losses for the bankers on their Greek debt holdings.Keen to avoid confessing to parliaments that taxpayers would have to pay again for the banks by means of unsustainable new loans, EU officials presented the Greek state’s insolvency as a problem of illiquidity, and justified the “bailout” as a case of “solidarity” with the Greeks.
To frame the cynical transfer of irretrievable private losses on to the shoulders of taxpayers as an exercise in “tough love”, record austerity was imposed on Greece, whose national income, in turn – from which new and old debts had to be repaid – diminished by more than a quarter. It takes the mathematical expertise of a smart eight-year-old to know that this process could not end well.
Once the sordid operation was complete, Europe had automatically acquired another reason for refusing to discuss debt restructuring: it would now hit the pockets of European citizens! And so increasing doses of austerity were administered while the debt grew larger, forcing creditors to extend more loans in exchange for even more austerity.
Complete story at - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/10/germany-greek-pain-debt-relief-grexit#img-1
MattSh
(3,714 posts)
Of course, I don't agree with this. What looks like help in the first five frames is actually an anvil in disguise. At least when he gets a real anvil, he understands exactly what he's getting.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)FOR THOSE WHO DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TO WORRY ABOUT--AND CAN STILL SLEEP AT NIGHT.
TERRA!TERRA!TERRA!
A cyber attack which shuts down parts of the United States' power grid could cost as much as $1 trillion to the U.S. economy, according to a report published on Wednesday. Company executives are worried about security breaches, but recent surveys suggest they are not convinced about the value or effectiveness of cyber insurance.
The report from the University of Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies and the Lloyd's of London insurance market outlines a scenario of an electricity blackout that leaves 93 million people in New York City and Washington DC without power. The scenario, developed by Cambridge, is technologically possible and is assessed to be within the once-in-200-year probability for which insurers should be prepared, the report said. The hypothetical attack causes a rise in mortality rates as health and safety systems fail, a drop in trade as ports shut down and disruption to transport and infrastructure.
"The total impact to the U.S. economy is estimated at $243 billion, rising to more than $1 trillion in the most extreme version of the scenario," the report said. The losses come from damage to infrastructure and business supply chains, and are estimated over a five-year time period. The extreme scenario is built on the greatest loss of power, with 100 generators taken offline, and would lead to insurance industry losses of more than $70 billion, the report added.
There have been 15 suspected cyber attacks on the U.S. electricity grid since 2000, the report said, citing U.S. energy department data. The U.S. Industrial Control System Cyber Emergency Response Team said that 32 percent of its responses last year to cyber security threats to critical infrastructure occurred in the energy sector. "The evidence of major attacks during 2014 suggests that attackers were often able to exploit vulnerabilities faster than defenders could remedy them," Tom Bolt, director of performance management at Lloyd's, said in the report.
Lloyd's syndicates offer cyber insurance but only 160 million pounds ($246.82 million) in cyber insurance premiums are written through London, which amounts to more than 10 percent of the global market.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The privacy of countless website owners is at risk, thanks to a proposal in front of the byzantine international organization at the heart of the Internet: ICANN. If adopted, the new proposal could limit access to proxy and privacy services, which protect domain registrants from having their home addresses exposed to everyone on the Internet.
When you register a domain, you must post information, including an address, phone number and email to a global database called WHOIS. The information is easily available online via a terminal command or an online lookup tool. If a domain registrant doesn’t want the Internet masses to know their address or phone number, they have two options: enter modified information, or use a privacy or proxy registration service that hides the information behind that of a company. Both the authors of this op-ed use privacy services. For example, if you run a WHOIS search on sarahjeong.net, it will return:
Registrant Name: WHOISGUARD PROTECTED
Registrant Organization: WHOISGUARD, INC.
Registrant Street: P.O. BOX 0823-03411
Registrant City: PANAMA
Registrant State/Province: PANAMA
Registrant Postal Code: 00000
Registrant Country: PA
Registrant Phone: +507.8365503
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax: +51.17057182
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: FDDD70C4319D4C4E8ED157FA6D26C118.PROTECT@WHOISGUARD.COM
The proposal in front of the ICANN working group would limit privacy and proxy domain protection to websites that are not commercial and transactional—which sounds reasonable. However, the working group’s current definition of commercial could include the website of any small business owner who sells goods via an online store, or the website of an activist who takes donations to cover her living expenses.
Why is this information available at all? WHOIS is an archaic remnant from the earliest days of the Internet whose “fathers” neglected to think about the consequences of requiring domain owners to make their physical addresses public. In the early days, the physical address was usually a university building, not someone’s home, and the population of people online was orders of magnitude smaller. The Internet is a very different place today, one where the consequences of having your address online can range from prank pizza delivery to the arrival of a SWAT team with guns drawn (called SWATing). For many, particularly those who become the targets of online harassment, WHOIS proxy or privacy protections are vital for their safety. The Geek Feminism wiki, for instance, advises people who are being attacked on the Internet, or are worried about being attacked on the Internet, to use a domain privacy service for their website. Just over the past year, many game developers, journalists, and activists have had their home addresses maliciously exposed (popularly known as “doxing”) as part of the widespread harassment campaign known as Gamergate. “I fucking *moved* to get away from this shit,” tweeted Zoe Quinn, a game developer who has been the target of coordinated harassment since 2014. “And now ICANN might just be like ‘lol that was pointless enjoy the swatting.’”
Of course, the creators of the proposal weren’t intentionally trying to endanger activists, journalists, and other targets of online harassment. This policy change has been pushed by the American entertainment industry since 2013, says Mitch Stoltz, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The policy was crafted to make it easier for the MPAA or RIAA to go after the owners of commercial websites. It’s not yet clear what definition of “commercial” ICANN will adopt, but in the past, the entertainment industry has claimed that sites that merely run Google ads are commercial in nature.
WHOIS privacy services are a de facto tax on targets of online harassment: personal safety should come as a default, not as a premium service. But this premium service is, for many, what keeps them safe from real, imminent danger. The time is ripe to update WHOIS, but this is a step backward, not a step forward. How can the ICANN proposal be stopped? It’s difficult, actually. According to Stoltz, ICANN listens to public comments “when they come from insiders who have actually invested in the policy-making process,” but it’s not so clear that they take “one-off public comments” seriously. Stoltz notes that such investment in the policy-making process is expensive, since meetings take place all over the world. But there is some hope. A handful of dissenters inside the ICANN working group have made good points inside the official report, documenting serious internal controversy about the policy proposal and the definition of “commercial.” They note that “fundraising and membership drives are often performed by the very groups and organizations seeking privacy/proxy registration for protection, including minority political groups, minority religious organizations, ethnic groups, organizations committed to change of racial policies, gender orientation groups, and publications engaged in freedom of expression.” We can only hope that ICANN will listen to these working group members. The ICANN working group and the entertainment lobby didn’t set out to aid and abet online harassment, but that is what this proposal would do. For many, including women who run their own businesses, being able to keep their WHOIS private is the difference between being harassed and being safe online. No lobbying group can ignore the weighty consequences of their policy proposals on members of marginalized groups. It’s time that we start taking online harassment seriously, and start thinking about how our governance structures and technical systems can be rewritten to protect people, not to make them more vulnerable.
Sarah Jeong is a journalist who graduated from Harvard Law School in 2014. She writes about technology, policy, and the law. Kendra Albert is a Harvard Law School JD candidate and affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She tweets about video games and tech law at @KendraSerra.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)IT'S TIME TO PUT SOME OTHER KIND OF EURO-SCHEME INTO EFFECT; ONE THAT DOESN'T KILL NATIONS OR PEOPLE. TAKE OUT THE BANKSTERS, MAYBE?
The referendum that just took place in Greece in which 61.3% of voters rejected the terms of an international ‘bailout’ package should not be read as a vote in favour of leaving the euro...
A crisis foretold
The Greek crisis was not only predictable, it was actually predicted. Wynne Godley, the Cambridge economist, said long ago, way before the euro, when the rules related to the common currency where being designed, that the project was bound to fail. In his view, expressed in 1992:
As I noted earlier, giving away that kind of power would be fine if there was an increase in fiscal transfers from a federal EU, and if there was the provision of liquidity and the guarantee of financial stability by the ECB. As Godley noted:
In other words, Godley was not anti-Europe, and not even anti-common currency, but he was anti-euro, at least in the way the European institutions where building the common currency, and predicted its failure...
No to Grexpulsion, Carthaginian deal
The question then, after the ‘No’ result in the referendum, is what will happen next. Can Tsipras and SYRIZA obtain better terms from the Troika than the greater austerity that has been offered before? Note that SYRIZA has asked for very little from Europe – a halt to the austerity program, and perhaps some development funds. It has stopped short of demanding a reversal of austerity, or the fiscal transfers needed for a recovery, or the liquidity that the ECB must provide for financial stability. The Greek government’s stand might be realistic, since the revamping of European institutions does not seem to be on the agenda. Note that if Europe choses to see the No vote as a vote against the euro, and not against the austerity policies the Troika has imposed, then it is very likely that the European institutions will find some way, since no official one exists, to expel Greece from the euro.
As noted by Varoufakis (and also by myself here), a default and the recreation of a national currency would not solve all the problems and lead to a fast recovery like in Argentina, after the devaluation of the peso more than a decade ago. The reason is that exports would not increase much in case of devaluation, in contrast to Argentina, which had significant and positive terms of trade. Also, if Greece tries to promote fiscal expansion, it is almost certain that imports will increase significantly, since consumption has been repressed over the last 5 years of adjustment. And higher imports with no increase in exports require access to foreign currency, that is, euros, the problem that leaving the euro is supposedly meant to solve. Besides, as the Argentine example shows, long after the default and devaluation, the powers that be – the IMF, the US judicial system, financial markets (including actors like Vulture Funds, but also rating agencies and the pink press) would have a stake in showing that going against them is not a good alternative. So Greece is indeed, like Ulysses, caught between Scylla and Charybdis. But at least, a No gives Europe the chance to rethink its Carthaginian peace policies towards Greece, and perhaps they can provide a more civilised solution to the crisis. Hope springs eternal.
MORE
MattSh
(3,714 posts)Got a link for this?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Honestly, one day of breaking free (well, two) and I forget the whole routine....it's not the lack of discipline so much as the lack of connectedness...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...in Germany, the attitude has not changed very much. Germans are still feeling like the kings of the universe, and they can dictate to other people, to other countries, what they think is reasonable policy, which is nonsense, as we all know...Syriza was all the time committed to stay in the Eurozone, to stay inside Europe, and it still is. What Alexis Tsipras wanted to achieve with this referendum is just to have a better negotiating position, and to give a strong signal that the people of Greece are backing him.
But as I said, if we continue, the negotiations continue as they did before, namely step by step going into every detail that the Greek government can do and cannot do and has to do, and if the whole package is going to remain restrictive and not expansionary, then it was all in vain. That's absolutely clear.
But the only way out is, the only way out is a change at the highest political level in a number of countries. If there would be a coalition, for example, only a coalition of say, cautionary change in Italy and France, and different language in these countries, then it would also impress Germany. Because in Germany there are many people who are very critical of the approach, only but now the government has no major political challenge because all the parties that are opposing, or the one party that is opposing this way into the negotiations with Greece is too small.
Heiner Flassbeck was the director of the Division on Globalization Development Strategies at the UN known as UNCTAD. He's also the co-author of the book Against the Troika: Crisis and Austerity in the Eurozone, which he co-wrote with Syriza MP Costas Lapavitsas.
FULL VIDEO INTERVIEW AND TRANSCRIPT AT LINK
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14182
mother earth
(6,002 posts)Flassbeck is must reading to understand how they're spot as number 1 in the EU has wreaked havoc within the EU. It is positively shameless, and continues to be so. As all of this plays on and on, lately, I too was thinking they should've just left, but I'm now realizing the beauty of this "pigs at the trough" becoming so transparent, and by making Greece its example, it is actually going to work against them rather harshly in the end I think. I suspect the reverberations of this as it plays out will only grow. It is only a matter of time. The Troika may think it has Greece by its throat, but they are looking more and more like terrorists with every day that passes. Either they too reform, as they demand of Greece, or the EU may have more of a mutiny on its hands as time goes on.
I wonder how they think it is possible to kill off their fellow nations economically and remain a union? They seem to be slitting their own throats, with blind greed, unwilling to see their own part in Greece's plight.
All of these men are playing historical roles, be they demonic or heroic, we are witnessing a pivotal time that has been stretched beyond what most of us thought was possible, and still we wait for some kind of working conclusion.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Germany is adamantly against the role as Blue State, paying the fare for all the Red States, which the northern part of our country has played since the federal govt. became an agent of wealth transfer.
Germany wants slave states at its feet. It will end up with dead states, or civil war.
mother earth
(6,002 posts)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)...Until recently, I called the LIBOR cartels the largest in history by at least three orders of magnitude. The rigging of foreign exchange (FX) “markets,” however, is so large that that I now have to say that they represent the two largest cartels in history by roughly three orders of magnitude. Both cartels consisted of most of the world’s largest and most elite banks. Indeed, UBS has admitted that after it signed its anti-prosecution agreement with DOJ for its massive LIBOR frauds it violated that deal by continuing to rig the FX “markets” as a member of a group that called itself “the Cartel.” Contrary to theoclassical ideology, both cartels persisted for many years and were ended only by (desultory) government action. Naturally, DOJ and the UK’s Serious Frauds Office (SFO) have refused to prosecute any of the elite bank officers that led the Libor and FX cartels.
The SFO is, however, prosecuting Tom Hayes, a low-level trader who confessed (then changed his mind) to being part of the conspiracy to rig LIBOR. Hayes worked at two of the recidivist criminal banking organizations – UBS and Citigroup. The two useful things about prosecuting low-level employees are that it often reveals that the senior managers knew of and supported the fraud – and that the prosecutors knew this to be true and nevertheless refused to prosecute the senior managers’ crimes. The BBC story is so embarrassing because it misses both points. But the title of the BBC article shows why the NYT and WSJ’s failure to report on the trial revealing details of the largest financial crime in world history is particularly bizarre because the trial is revealing facts that real journalists would be thrilled to report. The BBC title is: “Libor rates could be changed for a Mars bar, court hears.” Now, that is a title that could make a journalist famous, and it reveals graphically to the general reader just what “the corrupt culture of banking” in the City of London means. So, we have a news event of surpassing substantive importance plus testimony that sells newspapers. This explains why the NYT and the WSJ ignored the story (irony). The BBC story about the LIBOR trial starts strong.
Mr Hayes is the first person to face a jury trial for manipulating the key interest rate, used to set trillions of pounds of investments.
Better yet, Hayes’ statement was not one he made after his confession in hopes of getting a lighter sentence. The BBC story continues powerfully by showing the context of Hayes’ remark and why it is so incriminating about the City of London’s corrupt culture and the criminality that existed at all of the elite banks involved in fixing LIBOR.
The conversations – matey in tone – all related to moving Libor rates, said Mr Hayes, to assist the traders’ and banks’ commercial interests, something he said he found it hard to see as wrong.
In one chat, Mr Hayes suggests the market is rife with dealers attempting to influence rates: “Very, very hard to price stuff with the fixes so manipulated and inconsistent.”
His correspondent replies: “The fixes are manipulated?”
“Yes, of course they are,” says Mr Hayes. “Just give the cash desk a Mars bar and they’ll set wherever you want.”
Another chat session described Libor as “literally a joke”.
And note the moral-free zone that is the City of London (and Wall Street). The BBC thinks the “tone” is “matey.” The “tone” is “criminal” – the people involved sound exactly like what they are – blatant, privileged crooks. Hayes cannot see anything wrong in aiding the largest criminal cartel in history because what he was doing increased UBS’ profits.
The BBC’s key failures were missing the two giant points that emerged from Hayes’ statements and the documents the prosecutors and defense counsel introduced into evidence – the senior managers at UBS knew of the fraud and aided it – and the SFO knew that they did but has refused to prosecute them. Reuters’ article about the trial is even more embarrassing than the BBC’s on these two points because it tries to spin what is in substance an admission by senior UBS managers of criminal culpability into a “warning” to Hayes to stop rigging LIBOR. The problem begins with the article’s title: “Former trader Hayes ignored 2009 warning, Libor trial hears.” The lede is crafted to mislead.
The sentence is nonsensical for multiple reasons I will soon explain, but it is also carefully crafted by the prosecution to mislead. The article inadvertently begins the process of exposing why the claim is misleading. First, the article correctly describes the SFO’s preposterous theory that the largest financial conspiracy in his history was created by the crude machinations of a single trader at UBS without the knowledge of any senior bank officers at any of the roughly 17 banks that formed the real world conspiracy being aware that they were routinely rigging the LIBOR rates.
Hayes has pleaded not guilty to eight counts of conspiracy to defraud between 2006 and 2010, saying he was open about trying to influence rates, that his managers knew what he was doing and that the practice was widespread in the industry.
By “star trader” they mean that Hayes was a “slime trader.” He made money in financial trades the old-fashioned way that requires only minimal business skills – he cheated. When he made bad trades and UBS would have suffered a loss he worked with other UBS personnel and personnel from over a dozen elite banks to manipulate LIBOR so that his bad trade would become a profitable trade. No one who knows anything about how LIBOR was set and rigged (which required the coordinated, criminal actions of many of the world’s largest banks nearly every business day) believes that Hayes masterminded this real world conspiracy – and hid it successfully for five years. Under the prosecution’s theory, this one trader rigged the rates on over one-thousand trillion dollars in financial transactions – and successfully hid that fact from every high level officer at roughly 17 of the world’s most sophisticated financial institutions. Hayes’ testimony is that “his managers” knew about the criminal conspiracy and “that the practice was widespread in the industry.” The obvious question, which the BBC and Reuters fail to ask, much less analyze, is: why have none of these senior managers been prosecuted by the SFO and DOJ? Hayes’ lawyers promptly documented one of the reasons that the prosecutors’ claim that Hayes was the “idiot-savant” responsible for the world’s largest financial conspiracy was a myth. The rigging of LIBOR was widespread before Hayes even joined UBS.
Conversations between traders and submitters pre-dating Hayes’s arrival at UBS in 2006 were read by Hayes’s lawyers, which they said showed the bank was already setting Libor according to its trading positions.
“Do we have fixings?” the yen rate-setter asked a trader in a September 9, 2006, chat.
“Net -50bio 6m today let’s go lower 6m Libor,” the trader replied, referring to the six-month yen Libor submission.
Hayes’s lawyers produced another e-mail from March 2006, months before he joined Zurich-based UBS.
A trader asked submitters for a specific rate on a six-month position. “6m fra we’re long we want high Libor fixing,” referring to a position in forward rate agreements.
Hayes’ nickname at UBS was “Rain Man” – after the idiot-savant character in the movie of that name. Hayes’ lawyers presented a medical opinion that he has Asperger’s Syndrome. People with that syndrome are particularly unlikely to be able to recruit dozens of officials at over a dozen banks to join a vast conspiracy. Second, we know that senior managers at UBS knew of the LIBOR fraud schemes – and advised their traders to hide their rigging of LIBOR more carefully. We also know that the SFO has conclusive evidence of that fact. Bloomberg reports these two key points of documentation.
The trader responded “I agree we shouldn’t ve been talking about putting fixings for our positions on public chat.”
Koutsogiannis hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing by prosecutors.
With these facts in mind, we can return to the fake meme pushed by the prosecutors and accepted so naively by Reuters. The claim is that UBS’ senior managers were innocent babes deceived by the cunning and bullying Hayes. As soon as UBS’ senior managers learned of Hayes’ actions in creating and leading the largest financial conspiracy in the history of the world they were shocked and immediately acted to stop his crimes. The same senior managers were then distressed to learn years later that Hayes “ignored a 2009 warning to stop trying to influence rates” and continued to run that same conspiracy.
I promised to explain why that claim is nonsensical:
Hayes, 35, said he was surprised by the request, but interpreted it as meaning: “carry on doing it but don’t send any emails”
Demeter
(85,373 posts)
MattSh
(3,714 posts)
108. SOPHIE SCHOLL: The fire within
By Gav on March 19, 2013
Sophie Scholl (1921-1943) was a German activist who is famous for speaking out against the Nazi regime. Scholl was a member of a protest group called The White Rose, which was formed by her brother Hans, and some of his university friends. The group mainly consisted of students in their early twenties who were fed up with the totalitarian rule of the government. The Nazis controlled every aspect of society – the media, police, military, judiciary system, communication system, all levels of education and all cultural and religious institutions. The White Rose distributed leaflets urging their fellow Germans to oppose the regime through non-violent resistance.
On 22nd February 1943, after the release of the sixth White Rose leaflet, Sophie, Hans and fellow member Christoph Probst were arrested by the Gestapo and convicted of treason. They were executed that same day by guillotine. Sophie was 21 years old.
UPDATE: The source of this quote has been disputed. It’s been sourced on Wikiquote, but on further investigation by some readers, it can’t be 100% confirmed. It could have originated from a 1991 play about Scholl written by Lillian Garrett-Groag.
– Thanks to Elise for submitting this quote.
– Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a 2005 German movie that depicts Scholl’s last days and trial. It was nominated for best foreign film at the Oscars. I found the entire film on YouTube, although I’m not sure how long it will remain up.
– In case you missed it last week, someone made a short film based on one of my comics.
mother earth
(6,002 posts)The Latest: Finland's Stubb Hails 'Good Leap Forward'
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/07/12/world/europe/ap-eu-greece-bailout-the-latest.html?_r=0
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I WONDER IF THAT ISN'T THE WHOLE POINT?
http://www.theautomaticearth.com/2015/07/someone-pull-the-plug-or-this-will-end-in-war/
I was going to write up on the uselessness of Angela Merkel, given that she said on this week that “giving in to Greece could ‘blow apart’ the euro”, and it’s the 180º other way around; it’s the consistent refusal to allow any leniency towards the Greeks that is blowing the currency union to smithereens...Merkel’s been such an abject failure, the fullblown lack of leadership, the addiction to her right wing backbenchers, no opinion that seems to be remotely her own. But I don’t think the topic by itself makes much sense anymore for an article. It’s high time to take a step back and oversee the entire failing euro and EU system.
Greece is stuck in Germany’s own internal squabbles, and that more than anything illustrates how broken the system is. It was never supposed to be like that. No European leader in their right mind would ever have signed up for that. Reading up on daily events, and perhaps on the verge of an actual Greece deal, increasingly I’m thinking this has got to stop, guys, there is no basis for this. It makes no sense and it is no use. The mold is broken. The EU as a concept, as a model, has failed and is already a thing of the past. It’s over. And anything that’s done from here on in will only serve to make things worse. We should learn to recognize such transitions, and act on them. Instead of clinging on to what we think might have been long after it no longer is. Whatever anyone does now, it’ll all come back again. That’s guaranteed. So just don’t do it. Or rather, do the one thing that still makes any sense: Call a halt to the whole charade.
As for Greece: Just stop playing the game. It’s the only way for you not to lose it.
There’s no reason why European countries couldn’t live together, work together, but the EU structure makes it impossible for them to do just that, to do the very thing it was supposed to be designed for. Germany runs insane surpluses with the rest of the EU, and it sees that as a sign of how great a country it is. But in the present structure, if one country runs such surpluses, others will need to run equally insane deficits.
Cue Greece. And Italy, Spain et al. William Hague for once was right about something when he said this week that the euro could only possibly have ended up as a burning building with no exits. This is going to lead to war. Simple as that. It may take a while, and the present ‘leadership’ may be gone by then, but it will. Unless more people wake up than just the OXI voters here in Greece. And the only reason for it to happen is if the present flock of petty little minds in Berlin, Paris, London and Brussels try to make it last as long as they can, and call for even more integration and centralization and all that stuff. The leaders are useless, the structure is painfully faulty, and the outcome is fully predictable. Europe has no leadership, it has a varied but eerily similar bunch of people who crave the power they’ve been given, but lack the moral structures to deal with that power.
Sociopaths. That’s what Brussels selects for. And Brussels is by no means the only place in Europe that does that. What about people like Schäuble and Dijsselbloem, who see the misery in Greece and loudly bang the drum for more misery? What does that say about a man? And what does it say about the structure that allows them to do it? At times I feel like the Grapes of Wrath is being replayed here. It’s nice and all to claim you’re right about something, but if your being right produces utter misery for millions of others, you’re still wrong. Greece is not an abstract exercise in some textbook, and it’s not a computer game either. Greece is about real people getting hurt. And if you refuse to act to alleviate that hurt, that defines you as a sociopath...
...It’s time to acknowledge this is a road to nowhere. From where I’m sitting, Yanis Varoufakis has been the sole sane voice in this whole 5 month long B-movie. I think Yanis also conceded that it was no use trying to negotiate anything with the troika, and that that’s to a large extent why he left. Yanis will be badly, badly needed for Greece going forward. They need someone to figure out where to go from here.
A BIT MORE AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)AN INTERESTING, "SIDEWAYS" VIEW OF THE SITUATION
Demeter
(85,373 posts)For years, consumer advocates have warned of abuse, deception and unfairness in credit-card debt collections by banks and third-party debt collectors.
This week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the attorneys general of 47 states and Washington, D.C. brought an enforcement action against JPMorgan Chase for abuse, deception and unfairness in credit card collection cases.
Some highlights from the action:
• On some 500,000 credit card accounts it sent to collections litigation in recent years, Chase used illegally sworn documents to obtain false or inaccurate judgments for unverified debts.
• The bank sold “zombie debts” to third-party debt collectors, including accounts that were inaccurate, settled, discharged in bankruptcy, not owed or otherwise not collectible.
• Chase helped those third-party collectors obtain court judgments against borrowers by providing more than 150,000 sworn statements attesting to the accuracy and validity of the debt. But according to the consumer bureau, “Chase systematically failed to prepare, review, and execute truthful statements as required by law.”
• Chase failed to notify customers and the courts when it became aware of these problems.
The enforcement action requires Chase to stop collecting on the debts it sent to litigation between January 1, 2009 and June 30, 2014 and to notify customers that it will not try to collect. It must contact the major credit bureaus to request that the judgments not be reported against those consumers. It also must refund at least $50 million to customers who have already paid up. The refunds are for amounts that the customers were told to pay above what they owed when the debt was referred to litigation, plus 25 percent of the excess...
ALL I CAN SAY IS: "WOW!"
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)...Twice, U.S. exchanges have been halted by … squirrels.
In 1987, a squirrel—through methods that remain mysterious nearly 30 years later—damaged the electrical system at a complex in Trumbull, Connecticut, where many of NASDAQ’s computers were at the time. This led to an 82-minute shutdown that affected exchanges around the country and is estimated to have forced NASDAQ to trade at about 85-percent capacity.
That squirrel died, but its legacy lived on: In 1994, another mischievous Trumbull squirrel caused a similar disruption after gnawing on a power line. This development, along with other shutdowns around that time, left the chairman of the House subcommittee that manages securities trading “deeply concerned” about NASDAQ’s overall stability.
As far as financial markets are concerned, these are freak occurrences, but squirrels commonly wreak havoc on America’s wiring systems, as Alexis Madrigal explained in The Atlantic in 2011. By August of that year, the rodents were responsible for 17 percent of the damage done to the fiber-optic network of Level 3 Communications, a company with 84,000 miles of cable. That was down from 28 percent the previous year. “Honestly, I don’t understand what the big attraction is or why they feel compelled to gnaw through cables,” one of its vice presidents wrote at the time.
Squirrels are also responsible for many power outages across the country, and Jon Mooallem suggested in The New York Times in 2013 that they’re frequent power-line chewers because their incisors never stop growing, so they constantly need to wear them down by teething. Also, squirrels are naturally drawn to transformers, whose nooks can be similar to the hollow spaces in trees....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Matt, you can do the WEE any time you want.
Let's hope this coming week doesn't turn into a dog's breakfast, as last week did. Give peace a chance, you 1%er Elitists!
MattSh
(3,714 posts)I'm likely signing out for the weekend. After all, it is 9:30 PM here.
