global financial crash yay!

[DJ PIMP]

Yerp there is a lot more paper gold/silver than actual bullion.

Rickards on Chavez http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldn...Gold_Leased_to_JP_Morgan,_Barclays,_HSBC.html

Libya has/had 100+ tons of gold but it is yet to be located.

 

[baboon2004]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/19/greece-must-default-and-quit-euro

this guy is an excellent politicised academic (seemingly one of the few) - well worth reading

 

[IdleRich]

What will happen if they default? Beyond the immediate economic consequences I mean. For example, how pissed off will everyone else be and what will they do about it? Will non-Greek institutions recognise a new drachma as a worthwhile currency?

 

[Sectionfive]

God knows what they are going to do with Italy.

We're only six months or so behind Greece and the real fun of our 18bn deficit hasn't even started.
Cuts cuts cuts, Privatisation, sacking half the public sector who will then face a dismantled the welfare system yet to come.

Do you ever get the feeling our leaders don’t know what the hell they’re doing?

The Finns want collateral. Mr Barroso at the Commission wants to sell Euro Bonds. The Germans don’t. The Greek people want to default. The French banks are desperate that they don’t. Tim Geithner wants Europe to follow America’s lead and create a super expanded bail out fund like America’s TARP. The Austrian parliament declined to fast track the idea through their parliament. No one is sure if this is Austrian pedantry or a refusal. In the UK the long awaited Vickers report on Bank ‘reform’ is welcomed and given a timetable of …2019…because obviously when you’re in a crisis you don’t want to hurry.

In Italy austerity plan 1 was passed and then eaten by ‘special interests’ till there was nothing left. The ‘perfectly well capitalized’ Italian banks who had disdained raising cash earlier suddenly began an accelerated kind of rot so that they seemed to crumble in on themselves life a leper with a failed face lift.

As fast as our leaders plan to put money in to the banks, depositors, especially large financial institutions and other European banks are taking their money out (100 billion euros have left Italian banks this year so far) and putting it in American banks. At the same time American Money Market Funds have also stopped lending to European banks.

But, the American banks are now lending billion of that money back to the European banks via long duration repo agreements (an agreement in which you ‘sell’ an asset but with the agreement to repurchase the assets at a fixed time and at a fixed price). Thus it is less like selling and more like pawning. And so, to solve their short term funding the European banks are pledging assets that are still worth something at American banks who funnily enough find themselves flush with cash.

But then help is at hand in th eform of a conference call no less betwen Merkel, Sarkozy and Papandreou in which it is revealed to a waiting world that, “Greece will meet its obligations and stay in the Euro block.” There that was easy wan’t it. Makes you wonder why they didn’t just say so before!

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/09/they-havent-a-clue/#comments

 

[IdleRich]

"What will happen if they default? Beyond the immediate economic consequences I mean. For example, how pissed off will everyone else be and what will they do about it? Will non-Greek institutions recognise a new drachma as a worthwhile currency?"

Also, what about the practicalities of a switch-over? Re-calibrating everything to a new currency, printing the new money etc etc Jumping out of the Euro is surely gonna cause absolute chaos in the short term.

 

[Sectionfive]

This is the thing. No one really knows or at least it suits people to peddle the worst kind of end of days scenarios.
It's disaster either way for Greece butdisaster for everyone should they pull the plug.

 

[baboon2004]

Slowly getting some perspective on the whole Greek situation. From what I can gather (reading comments sections of Guardian articles, in which quite a number of Greeks (and Argentinians, helpfully) have commented), leaving the Eurozone would be a total disaster for Greece, as it relies on imports so heavily (whereas Argentina, though in chaos, at least had natural resources to rely upon, and some possibility of self-sustainiability).

Interesting points about the reactions of the educcated./professional classes too. Some say they are already leaving, othere counter that there are no places where they can go and be asssured of jobs outside greece, and so the east-european style 'taxi driver with phd' scenario looks more likely.

really interested to know more - sectionfive, great graphic btw. Portugal must be fucked too if Greece goes, no, as their exposure is so much greater in relative terms than that of the European 'giants'?

 

[baboon2004]

Also, what about the practicalities of a switch-over? Re-calibrating everything to a new currency, printing the new money etc etc Jumping out of the Euro is surely gonna cause absolute chaos in the short term.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis...eurozone-disaster-ordinary-greeks?INTCMP=SRCH this is interesting - i rated lapavitsas, but now i'm not so sure his view makes sense, as there seemingly IS no way they can exit the Euro and stay with their head above water.

"With a weak currency, the price of energy would skyrocket, wiping out much of the artificial boost in competitiveness." - this seems critical - i dont' know whether it's true or not though.... ah, the perils of having half-rememebred economic knowledge
Also, where would the infrastructure arise from to increase domestic production so suddenly (without some months of horrific hardship, that is)?

 

[Sectionfive]

You can see the rest of those graphs and the full merry go round of bullshit here

Good summary here broken down

So who owns Greek debt?

French and German banks are the biggest foreign holders, according to last week’s “stress tests,” in which banks had to report, among other numbers, their sovereign debt holdings. French banks have more than $50 billion exposure, German banks about $34 billion.

BNP Paribas (France) — $7.4 billion

Dexia (Belgium) — $5 billion

Commerzbank (Germany) — $4.2 billion

Societe Generale (France) — $4 billion

ING Groep (The Netherlands) — $3.4 billion

Deutsche Bank (Germany) — $2.5 billion

Groupe BPCE (France) — $1.8 billion

That obviously leaves a lot unaccounted for. Greek banks own about $85 billion of the country’s debt, according to a research note from Goldman Sachs. The European Central Bank owns about $71 billion worth of Greek debt, which it began buying up more than a year ago — much of it from banks — through its Securities Market Program, to shore up investor confidence. U.S. banks don’t have much direct exposure to Greek debt, just $7.3 billion, according to CNN.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/.../110719/euro-zone-sovereign-debt-crisis-banks

Greek students are occupying one of the TV stations at the moment.



Interesting Paul Mason post here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15051882

 

[Sectionfive]

 

[baboon2004]

if only the bbc was this real the rest of the time.

"the government don't rule the world. goldman sachs rules the world".

this is almost the best interview i have ever seen.

 

[Sectionfive]

Who's going to tear-gas this lot then?

 

[crackerjack]

It's time we stop talking to these cunts and just start shooting them

 

[Sectionfive]

yes, we should all buy treasury bills in the morning

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said we should hang a random banker annually just to keep the rest on the straight and narrow... or something like that.

 

[IdleRich]

When I started working for a trading company I was amazed to hear one of the guys who was supposed to be teaching me saying "What we need is a nice natural disaster". I like the way that towards the end of the interview he tries to put a moral spin on what he's saying and pretends he's trying to warn people.
I guess the problem (from his point of view) is that if the collapse is really as bad as some are suggesting then having made money from the crisis won't help anyone cos money will be worthless. Interesting to see how even iconoclasts can't think outside the paradigm while they're telling the less knowledgeable it how it is.

 

[baboon2004]

I dunno, I don't hate that guy that much. He's just a wanker with no moral compass, making hay while the sun shines. He's not the real problem - the real problem are the governments who've been kow-towing to the banks and created this disaster (for example, who thought it was a good idea to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, for example. Pure madness), and the populations who let them do it. At least that guy is telling the truth - when was the last time a politician came even close to doing that?

There are always going to be wankers around. The trick is to make sure they don't end up ruling the world, which they only do because they are given the opportunity to do so. As with far-right politics, pretty analagous in some ways.

 

[Sectionfive]

So apparently the beeb was had

 

[crackerjack]

That's definitely the same guy, right? Peston seems reluctant to accept evidence before our eyes.

 

[Sectionfive]

Either way tbh

 

[baboon2004]

it was a good set-up if so, but hardly one of those cases where the fictionality of the character has any bearing on the truth of what was said. It's what everyone knows (or seemingly some people don't) - the best way to accumulate the most is to give the least of a fuck about anything else but said accumulation.