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Roubini: EU To Break Up Once Contagion Hits Italy And Spain

Forbes - ‎15 hours ago‎

Roubini, or Dr. Doom as he's been dubbed by the media, is pessimistic on Europe - NYTimes.com Political uncertainty continues to rise in Europe as Greek politicians fail to build a government and more EU leaders, including German Finance Minister ...

ευτυχώς υπάρχει και ο Krugman

May 6, 2012

Those Revolting Europeans

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The French are revolting. The Greeks, too. And it’s about time.

Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity — and that’s a good thing.

Needless to say, that’s not what you heard from the usual suspects in the run-up to the elections. It was actually kind of funny to see the apostles of orthodoxy trying to portray the cautious, mild-mannered François Hollande as a figure of menace. He is “rather dangerous,” declared The Economist, which observed that he “genuinely believes in the need to create a fairer society.” Quelle horreur!

What is true is that Mr. Hollande’s victory means the end of “Merkozy,” the Franco-German axis that has enforced the austerity regime of the past two years. This would be a “dangerous” development if that strategy were working, or even had a reasonable chance of working. But it isn’t and doesn’t; it’s time to move on. Europe’s voters, it turns out, are wiser than the Continent’s best and brightest.

What’s wrong with the prescription of spending cuts as the remedy for Europe’s ills? One answer is that the confidence fairy doesn’t exist — that is, claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper.

Moreover, there seems to be little if any gain in return for the pain. Consider the case of Ireland, which has been a good soldier in this crisis, imposing ever-harsher austerity in an attempt to win back the favor of the bond markets. According to the prevailing orthodoxy, this should work. In fact, the will to believe is so strong that members of Europe’s policy elite keep proclaiming that Irish austerity has indeed worked, that the Irish economy has begun to recover.

But it hasn’t. And although you’d never know it from much of the press coverage, Irish borrowing costs remain much higher than those of Spain or Italy, let alone Germany. So what are the alternatives?

One answer — an answer that makes more sense than almost anyone in Europe is willing to admit — would be to break up the euro, Europe’s common currency. Europe wouldn’t be in this fix if Greece still had its drachma, Spain its peseta, Ireland its punt, and so on, because Greece and Spain would have what they now lack: a quick way to restore cost-competitiveness and boost exports, namely devaluation.

As a counterpoint to Ireland’s sad story, consider the case of Iceland, which was ground zero for the financial crisis but was able to respond by devaluing its currency, the krona (and also had the courage to let its banks fail and default on their debts). Sure enough, Iceland is experiencing the recovery Ireland was supposed to have, but hasn’t.

Yet breaking up the euro would be highly disruptive, and would also represent a huge defeat for the “European project,” the long-run effort to promote peace and democracy through closer integration. Is there another way? Yes, there is — and the Germans have shown how that way can work. Unfortunately, they don’t understand the lessons of their own experience.

Talk to German opinion leaders about the euro crisis, and they like to point out that their own economy was in the doldrums in the early years of the last decade but managed to recover. What they don’t like to acknowledge is that this recovery was driven by the emergence of a huge German trade surplus vis-à-vis other European countries — in particular, vis-à-vis the nations now in crisis — which were booming, and experiencing above-normal inflation, thanks to low interest rates. Europe’s crisis countries might be able to emulate Germany’s success if they faced a comparably favorable environment — that is, if this time it was the rest of Europe, especially Germany, that was experiencing a bit of an inflationary boom.

So Germany’s experience isn’t, as the Germans imagine, an argument for unilateral austerity in Southern Europe; it’s an argument for much more expansionary policies elsewhere, and in particular for the European Central Bank to drop its obsession with inflation and focus on growth.

The Germans, needless to say, don’t like this conclusion, nor does the leadership of the central bank. They will cling to their fantasies of prosperity through pain, and will insist that continuing with their failed strategy is the only responsible thing to do. But it seems that they will no longer have unquestioning support from the Élysée Palace. And that, believe it or not, means that both the euro and the European project now have a better chance of surviving than they did a few days ago.

food for thought

On OWS, Anarchism, Labor, Racism, Corporate Power and the Class War

Talking With Chomsky

by LAURA FLANDERS

A CounterPunch Exclusive

Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the US.  A new publication from the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series brings together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn.
From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement’s political impact.
We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic “suicide” Chomsky says. But there are glimmers of possibility – in worker co-operatives, and other spaces where people get a taste of a different way of living.
We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24.

LF: Let’s start with the big picture. How do you describe the situation we’re in, historically?

NC: There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it’s a period of close to global stagnation. In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it’s low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift — a striking shift — from production to financialization.
The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it’s austerity in the midst of recession and that’s guaranteed to be a disaster. There’s some resistance to that now. In the US, it’s essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration. It’s a subtext of what happened in Cartagena [Colombia] last week with the conflict over the drug war. Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course;) the US wants to maintain it.  An interesting story.  There seems to me no easy way out of this….

LF: And politically…?

NC: Again there are differences, In Europe there’s an dangerous growth of ultra xenophobia which is pretty threatening to any one who remembers the history of Europe…  and an attack on the remnants of the welfare state. It’s hard to interpret the austerity-in-the-midst-of-recession policy as anything other than attack on the social contract. In fact, some leaders come right out and say it. Mario Draghi the president of the European Central Bank had an interview with the Wall St Journal in which he said the social contract’s dead; we...

 

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fuck fucking austerity

Death of a Fairy Tale

By PAUL KRUGMAN

This was the month the confidence fairy died.

For the past two years most policy makers in Europe and many politicians and pundits in America have been in thrall to a destructive economic doctrine. According to this doctrine, governments should respond to a severely depressed economy not the way the textbooks say they should — by spending more to offset falling private demand — but with fiscal austerity, slashing spending in an effort to balance their budgets.

Critics warned from the beginning that austerity in the face of depression would only make that depression worse. But the “austerians” insisted that the reverse would happen. Why? Confidence! “Confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank — a claim echoed by Republicans in Congress here. Or as I put it way back when, the idea was that the confidence fairy would come in and reward policy makers for their fiscal virtue.

The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had de facto austerity in the form of huge spending and employment cuts at the state and local level.

So, about that doctrine: appeals to the wonders of confidence are something Herbert Hoover would have found completely familiar — and faith in the confidence fairy has worked out about as well for modern Europe as it did for Hoover’s America. All around Europe’s periphery, from Spain to Latvia, austerity policies have produced Depression-level slumps and Depression-level unemployment; the confidence fairy is nowhere to be seen, not even in Britain, whose turn to austerity two years ago was greeted with loud hosannas by policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Krugman: Austerity Myth

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Στα όρια, acrylic on canvas, Φεβ. 2012

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my own private rose

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τα δεδομένα παρακαλώ

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Just the Facts. Yes, All of Them.

By QUENTIN HARDY

Gilad Elbaz has a mission for Factual, his company: Identify every fact to build the world’s chief reference point. “The world is one big data problem,” he says.

μου λένε ότι αξίζει

τ απομεινάρια

David LaChapelle, Springtime, 2011.
Chromogenic Print.
Courtesy of the artist and Fred Torres Collaborations.

David LaChapelle at Fred Torres Collaborations

David LaChapelle

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καμμένα λάδια

A Tale of Greek Enterprise and Olive Oil

By SUZANNE DALEY

One man’s effort to sell olive products online shows how complicated it remains to start a business in Greece.

ψιλά γράμματα

Krugman: What Greece Means

And austerity in a slump doesn’t just inflict vast suffering. There is growing evidence that it is self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms, as the combination of falling revenues due to a depressed economy and worsened long-term prospects actually reduces market confidence and makes the future debt burden harder to handle. You have to wonder how countries that are systematically denying a future to their young people — youth unemployment in Ireland, which used to be lower than in the United States, is now almost 30 percent, while it’s near 50 percent in Greece — are supposed to achieve enough growth to service their debt.

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PHOTO BOOTH

POSTCARDS FROM TOHOKUBY ELISSA CURTIS

One year later, photographers respond to the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/#ixzz1ontlX2xW

wall art

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Greece Has Defaulted: Here Is Where We Stand

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/09/2012 - 19:33

After reading this, everyone should have a fairly good grasp of what happened not only today, but ever since the great (and quite endless) European financial crisis took center stage, and what to look forward to next...

In a nutshell---okay, a coconut shell---this seems to be where we are:

1) Greece was able to write off 100 billion euros worth of debt in exchange for a 130 billion rescue package of new debt, of which Greece itself will receive 19%, or about 25 billion, so that it can continue to operate as an ongoing concern. Somehow Greece is in a better position than before, with more debt and less sovereignty and still---by virtue of sharing a common currency---trying to compete toe-to-toe with the likes of Germany and the Netherlands, kind of like being the Yemeni National Basketball team in an Olympic bracket that includes the US, Spain and Germany. At least a "within the euro" default prevented bank runs in Portugal, Spain, Italy et al.

2) As a result of the bond haircuts, Greece has many pension plans that can no longer even pretend to be viable, at least according to the original contracted scheme, but pensionholders still working can take heart in the fact that their current wages will be cut, too.

3) CDS buyers will have to sweat bullets, jump through hoops, and be forced to endure every cliche known to man, but they might end up getting something for all their trouble, provided their counterparty is solvent and that counterparty itself is not heavily exposed to an insolvent party or a NTBTF institution, otherwise known as a Lehman Brothers. Expect the legal profession to be the prime beneficiary of this "event", as any new CDS contract will be at least a hundred pages of boilerplate longer in the future.

4) Good luck to any less than AAA rated sovereign who wants to issue debt from now on out. That contracts can now be unilaterally abrogated, as Greece' bonds were with the retro-CACs, bodes ill for attractive pricing from here on out. Peripherals in the EU will suffer most, as they face the added indignity of being subordinated to the ECB at any point the ECB chooses to exercise its divine right of seniority. The thing that used to be called the risk free rate no longer exists. Bill Sharpe take note.

5) One hundred billion euros worth of perceived wealth evaporated. That can not be a good thing for a Eurobanking system already capital short, as it raises leverage (quick back of the envelop calculation) by about 6% across the board. It also will not make the interbank market any more trusting, thus increasing the likelihood of perpetual LTRO. LTRO lll looks to arrive sooner than QE lll.

6) With the drawn-out Greek event and the LTRO, Europe might believe it has firewalled the system for at least three years and limited damage to Greece and Portugal (who will likely undergo a similar default by the 3rd quarter). LTRO-provided liquidity, it is hoped, will lower market rates enough in Spain and Italy so that those countries can meet sovereign bond obligations and both service existing debt and issue new debt. When the LTRO expires in 2015, "hopefully" something called organic growth will have taken over in countries imposing severe austerity measures on their public sectors, so that debt servicing becomes easier. Organic growth obviously is something that comes in a can, a can which has been kicked out to 2015.

7) As Europe now speaks increasingly of greater EU financial integration, Sarkozy's poll numbers will be the victim and a less EU friendly individual will likely win the upcoming election. Since France and Germany fortunately have a long and storied history of being the best of friends, and no one in either country would ever pander to nationalist sentiments, this shouldn't present a problem.

8) Given how much angst was caused by the drawn out Greek affair, the Spanish leader knows he has enormous leverage with EU leadership and he can continue to do what he has been doing with regard to ignoring the deficit targets demanded/suggested by the EU. The EU might well bark at him, but they cannot afford to bite at this time. Muchos gracias, Greece.

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Israel must fight to keep neo-Nazis out of Greece's government

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As a Jew and an Israeli, I feel it is my duty and obligation to share with you Voridis’ background and political career. A former leading figure in Greece's neo-Nazi youth group, Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn), Voridis has a long history of Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, including physical threats to Jewish families and leading groups of thugs against immigrants and leftists. Over the last couple of weeks he has smoothed over his thuggish past by describing it as "right-wing activism". As a student at the elite Athens College high school, alma mater of current Prime Minister Papadimos, former Prime Minister Papandreou, Samaras and myself, Voridis formed the fascist student group “Free Students” that painted the walls with swastikas and saluted each other with using the Nazi-era greeting "Heil Hitler."

During school elections, Voridis would violently threaten not only the Jewish students who opposed his fascist group, but also their families. After graduation, Voridis formed a fascist group in the Law School of Athens and became active in neo-Nazi youth groups. In the 1990s, following the footsteps of his mentor, Jean Marie LePen, he formed the National Front, an anti-immigrant party. His party's motto was "Red card for immigrants." A few years ago, he joined LAOS and was elected to parliament. He soon became the darling of the Greek media, due to his extensive family connections, his debating skills and his charisma in front of the cameras.

Although less charismatic, the second of the two LAOS MPS, Adonis Georgiadis, also has a long history of anti-Semitism. This includes attacking Jews through his television show and being named as a prosecution witness against the leaders of the Greek Jewish community who are on trial for the defamation of Kostas Plevris, a self-proclaimed Nazi and anti-Semite whose book was described by the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece as a "defamatory, anti-Semitic book in which Jews are called 'subhuman' and are directly threatened with annihilation." Plevris himself went on trial for incitement, but was acquitted, and then he sued the leaders of the Jewish community. Plevris is also the father of Thanassis Plevris, another LAOS member of the parliament.

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Greek Economy Suffers Record Collapse In February

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/01/2012 - 09:53

There are those who recall that not ten days ago, according to the IMF's Greek (un)sustainability analysis, worst case scenario no less, Greek GDP would somehow miraculously post just a 1% drop in 2013. Unfortunately this won't happen. According to the overnight PMI update out of Europe (where was saw the jobless rate at the highest since 1997), the Greek economy just imploded at a record pace. This follows the already horrendous budget revenue data from January which came in down 7% on expectations of a 9% rise. Sure enough, as expected the fact that the entire country has taken the rest of 2012 off with no incentive to actually work, will do miracles for Greece. From Reuters: "The Markit Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) for Greece fell to a survey low of 37.7 points in February from 41.0 in January, staying below the 50 mark that divides growth in activity from contraction for each of the past 30 months. Production and new order volumes fell at the sharpest pace in the near 13 year history of the survey as austerity sapped demand. New export orders fell for a sixth straight month and at the steepest rate since May 2010." Translated: the situation is hopeless and getting worse. Expect the German, pardon Troika, Kommissar to be shocked, shocked, to find out that not only do banks in Greece have no deposits left, but the entire economy picked up and left.