ss,
this is not their responsibility, ecb’s main focus is to control inflation across eurozone. irish banks borrowed recklessly on wholesale markets. it was the responsibility of the board of governance of these banks to rain this in but they did not out of fear of losing market share, hence a herd mentality developed. i agree with your other points.
Surely a massive, once in a lifetime increase in the credit supply would be one of the main contributing factors to eurozone inflation? You can’t claim to be monitoring inflation and ignoring the credit boom. nobody in the ecb comes out of the past ten years with any credit, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Leo Varadkar reckons we are going to need to second bailout :unsure:
Looks like the “trioka” are going to be taking almost direct control of Greek affairs in the coming months. They are waiting on report in the next week or two which will reveal the current government is nowhere near meeting it’s obligations under their current bailout deal.
Leo knows jack shit about anythiing except self promotion but he’s having one of those stopped clock being right moments here. Once it happens the fun really begins. One postive aspect of it all is that Fine Gael will be permanently destroyed. I hope.
How the fuck could we have gone from this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2ZVKhL92bc
to where we are now?
For fuck sake.
Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan. Heroes the both of them.
Ask your bosses
a coked up Gerry Ryan too, different times… 
article on reuters today showing us fed bank bailed out ecb to the tune of 640 bn. And at an interest rate of 0.1% and those cunts are charging us 5%
David Murphy, RTE Business Editor, strikes me as being quite a poindexter.
Michael Noonan is going to burn the Anglo bondholders
(or more likely bluster on about doing it for the next few weeks, then say we couldn’t do it, Europe wouldn’t let us)
So, Iceland returned to the markets last week and their bond issue was twice over subscribed and their economy is now growing 2% year on year.
We’re some mugs.
They’re also in negotiations to join the EU, the fools.
It’s time for another:
Good Idea: Joining the EU.
Bad Idea: Joining the Eurozone
Bad idea: allowing EU fishing fleets to overfish Irish waters
The Greeks are gas all the same. They are up in arms at the “austerity” measures but the country is a complete basket case. Worse than us even.
Here are some points from an IMF report:
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For a population of 11 million, the government has US$400bn of outstanding government debt and $800bn of impending pension payments. This equates to US$250,000 for every working Greek, or US$110,000 per person. In comparison, Australia’s public debt averages around US$5,000 per person.
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Over the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled in real terms. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job.
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The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year, or A$91,000.
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The Greek public-school system is incredibly inefficient: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland.
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The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, and musicians.
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Somewhere between 30% and 40% of the activity in the Greek economy that might be subject to income tax goes officially unrecorded.
Tax evasion is rampant. According to tax returns only 5,000 people in the whole of Greece officially have a salary over €100,000. They estimate they are losing up to €15bn a year in tax evasion.
And they are up in arms on the streets over austerity. Jokers.
Turns out the lazy Greeks work on average 690 hours more a year than the Germans, they work the most in Europe in fact
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2831KUAl_5QJ:roarmag.org/2011/06/roar-on-bbc-world-dont-blame-the-greeks/+greek+work+hours+more&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie&source=www.google.ieMYTH #1: The Greeks are profligate
The unquestioned assumption in the international media is that the Greek debt crisis was caused by excessive state expenditure, an overburdened welfare state and an inflated public sector.
TRUTH #1: The Greek welfare state is actually anemic
Here are the facts:
■Public spending: according to the Center for American Progress, public spending in Greece is only 44.6% of GDP. This is lower than the EU average, lower than Germany’s 46.6% and considerably lower than Sweden’s 55%.
■Tax collection: the real problem is not social expenditure on the poor but the lack of tax collection from the rich. From 2001 to 2007, Greece collected only an average of 39.4% of GDP in taxes, compared to the EU 44.4% average.
MYTH #2: The Greeks are lazy
Another unquestioned assumption is that the Greeks don’t work enough — they retire at 50, take crazy amounts of paid holidays and lie around in the sun drinking ouzo most of the day. Angela Merkel, for example, recently called on the people of southern Europe to “work more, play less“, i.e. work more hours, retire earlier and take less holidays.
TRUTH #2: The Greeks actually work most of all Europeans
Here are the facts:
[b]■Hours worked per week: According to Eurostat data of 2005, the Greeks worked 43.1 hours per week (compared to 35.7 hours in so-called ‘thrifty’ Germany, with its much-touted ‘Protestant work ethic’).
■Hours worked per year: More recent OECD data shows the Greeks to work an average of 2,119 hours per year — 690 hours more than the average German, 467 more than the average Brit and 356 more than the OECD average. In fact, out of all OECD countries, only the Koreans work more.
■Amount of paid holidays: The paid leave entitlement in Greece is 23 days per year. This is actually below the EU average, and significantly lower than the minimum of 28 days in the UK and 30 (!) days in Germany.
■Retirement age: Again, Eurostat data from 2005, shows the average age of exit from the labour force in Greece to be 61.7. This was higher than in Germany, France or Italy and higher than the EU27 average. It is being raised even further now as a part of the EU-IMF bailout conditions.
MYTH #3: The Greeks are spoilt
In a truly terrible piece of journalism earlier this week, Sean O’Grady (economics editor of The Independent) wrote that “for many in northern Europe, the rioting in Athens must remind them of a tantrum by a spoilt child.” He refers specifically to popular opposition to the cutting of the so-called “13th and 14th salary” as a key indicator of this ‘spoiltness’.[/b]
TRUTH #3: The Greeks suffer more than anyone else
Here are the facts:
■According to Eurostat, even before crisis, in 2008, one in five Greeks (among them almost half a million children) lived under the formal poverty line of 500 euros per month.
■An independent survey by Kapa Research and the London School of Economics found even worse data: a third of the Greek population now live in formal poverty (and mind you: this was in 2007 – it’s actually gotten a lot worse since as a result of these draconian austerity measures).
■Every child in Greece is born with a 40,000 euro debt on their name.
■Greece’s youth are now referred to in the country as Generation 700: because that’s the maximum monthly wage that young Greeks will typically make – that is, if they are lucky enough to find a job: according to the Financial Times, over 35 percent of young Greeks is out of work right now.
■The so-called 13th and 14th salaries (Christmas, Easter and summer bonuses) are not additional salaries. As a Greek reader on this blog, Amalia, pointed out: “Greeks do not get two extra salaries a year; their annual salary is simply divided by 14 and they get two installments at Christmas, one and half at Easter and one and a half sometime in the summer.”
■The Dutch get a 13th month worth of salary and Austria has a 14th month. Since these countries are not experiencing a similar budget crisis, this simply can’t be the cause of Greece’s debt.
■The bottomline is: it doesn’t matter in how many installments you receive your salary (whether it’s in 12, 13, 14 or 2,000 parts); what matters is your annual salary. As long as you make less than 6,000 euros a year (as is the case for 20 percent of Greeks) you live in poverty — period.
■Living costs in Greece are the highest of all of Europe.
■As a result of this lethal combination of low wages and high living costs, millions of Greeks are forced to work two or three jobs just to survive.
■Since last year’s bailout, the Greek economy contracted almost 5%, 50,000 to 65,000 business have been closed, unemployment increased by 400,000, industrial activity declined by 11%, the construction sector contracted by 73%. Partly as a result, suicide rates are reported to have nearly tripled.
■All in all, this is a humanitarian tragedy of unprecedented proportions. How could Mr. O’Brady possibly keep a straight face arguing that the people experiencing all of the above, are somehow spoilt children?
MYTH #4 — the bailout is helping the Greek people
Part of O’Grady’s logic assumes that the Greeks should actually be grateful for receiving EU money in return for austerity measures. After all, EU taxpayers are footing the bill for the failures of the Greek people, no?
TRUTH #4: — it’s an indirect subsidy for Europe’s insolvent banks
Here are the facts:
■First of all, the bailout is not a handout: the Greek people don’t actually benefit from the EU-IMF bailout. Even if the bailout money really did go to the Greeks, this wouldn’t necessarily be beneficial for the Greek people at all. After all, the bailout is a loan for which the EU and IMF charge an exorbitant 8 percent interest rate, meaning northern European tax payers and the IMF should make a handsome profit from their so-called ‘rescue aid’, while the Greeks will only be further indebted by it.
■The bailout serves not Greece but Europe’s insolvent banks: as former IMF Chief Economist Kenneth Rogoff pointed out last year already, “a lot of European banks are insolvent.” The real problem of the European crisis isn’t the fiscal crisis in the periphery, it’s the financial crisis in the banking sector of the core.
■Private bank exposure to Greek sovereign debt: BNP Paribas: 5bn – 7 percent of equity; Société Générale: 2,5bn – 6 percent of equity; Postbank: 1,2bn – 21 percent of equity; Kommerzbank: 2,9bn – 27 percent of total equity. That’s just a handful. More data here.
■Central Bank exposure to Greek debt: the European Central Bank has 190bn of exposure to Greek debt.
■ECB close to insolvency: according to a recent report by Open Europe, asset losses as small as 4.25% could tip the ECB into insolvency. Greek default alone would chip 2.35% to 3.47% off of the ECB’s capital base. Add in a Portuguese or Irish default and you have the European Central Bank – the flagship of European capitalism – literally going bankrupt.
But no one really seems to care about Europe’s ailing banks and the ECB. Indeed, hardly anyone is talking about it. Instead, we prefer to talk about the handful of Greek workers who retire at 50, the ‘spoilt children’ who refuse to accept the EU’s generous aid packages.
By narrowly channeling our ire onto the suffering people of Greece, we have completely lost sight of the infinitely larger structural problems we face in the European Union. Our private banks are insolvent. Our central bank is on the verge of bankruptcy. This is the real crisis.
Yet apparently, in all this misery and chaos, bashing the Greeks seems like an infinitely more enjoyable pastime for Europe’s populist politicians and the factually illiterate international media. It’s time we put these lies to an end and start speaking truth.
There you go, there it is. Gut the fucking lot of them.
Greece has a higher tax take as a percentage of GDP than Ireland.
Greece is not Ireland.