The Runt’s clear concise explanations of the economic crisis have been the one constant in these turbulent times.
Interesting document here on plans to undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement - http://brown.3cdn.net/161818e784505272ab_eem6b9o7o.pdf
It’s a copy of a proposal from a lobbying firm in Washington to the American Banking Association on how they delegitimise the protesters. They’re worried that if the Democrats decide to engage with the protests around election time it could be bad for business.
“This would mean more than just short-term political comfort for Wall Street firms. If vilifying the leading companies in this sector is allowed to become an unchallenged centerpiece of a coordinated Democratic campaign, it has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy, and financial impacts on the companies at the center of the bullseye.”
They have no such worries on this side of the Atlantic anyway.
That’s an intriguing document WTB. Like they way they offer to go onto Facebook and look for extreme views from people in the OWS campaign so that they could highlight it and use it to discredit them. It’s too late though the cat’s out of the bag anyway, everyone knows Goldman Sachs are cunts and control the world.
So what appears to be emerging from Brussells is that to circumvent current EU rules, the ECB is going to lend vast amounts of money to the IMF who in turn will put together resuce packages for Italy, Spain etc. Strong rumours since the weekend that talks between the IMF and Italy for a [size=4]600bn[/size] aid package are at an advanced stage.
Where all the money is going to come from is a bit of a mystery and the lack of details hasn’t impressed the markets.
If the world was to do a full audit of itself would there be any money anywhere?
What is money?
Only a piece of paper secured against nothing.
Fucking imaginary money is all thats being bandied around the place now.
I myself have 7 gazillion sestertii sitting in Greenland.
I await the Runts take on the latest developments.
Unimpressed
I wonder will anyone ask what has happned to all our Gold here in Ireland. Apparently any requests about its whereabouts under the freedom of information act are rebuffed?
ECB have it by all grapevine accounts but we’re not allowed to know this.
Julio may have gotten it wrong with his cola bottle hoarding. Guns seems to be where its going to be at folks. Guns. And lots of them. Bit of ammo wouldnt go astray either.
Hardly matters, would assume the value of out gold is a drop in the ocean compared to what we owe. You’ve been reading politics.ie too much.
[size=3]Let’s end charade before EU chiefs get more powers[/size]
[size=3]Fintan O’Toole[/size]
[size=3]LET’S BE mercenary. How much have we got from the European Union since we joined in 1973? The Common Agricultural Policy gave Irish farmers €44 billion between 1973 and 2008, and €1.8 billion a year since then, making a total of €50 billion so far.[/size]
[size=3]Up to 2013, Ireland will have received a further €18 billion from the structural, regional and cohesion funds. From this we have to subtract Irish payments into the EU budget which, so far as I can make out, total about €25 billion since 1973. So we’re looking roughly at a net gain of €43 billion.[/size]
[size=3]And now a second mercenary question. How much are we paying back to the EU to support the euro and rescue euro zone banks? At the time of the so-called “bailout” by the troika this time last year, euro zone banks held €214 billion in Irish debt.[/size]
[size=3]German banks alone were on the hook for €103 billion of that total. The purpose of the “bailout”, and of the entire policy of saturating failed Irish banks in public money, is to ensure that these debts are repaid. Otherwise the euro zone’s banking system will be plunged into crisis.[/size]
[size=3]It is impossible to say precisely how much this Irish bailout of the euro zone is costing us taxpayers. We don’t know how much Nama will cost in the end or what the State’s stake in the banks might ultimately be worth.[/size]
[size=3]So let’s just take one slice of the cost – the money that’s gone on Anglo Irish Bank. This is definitively dead money, a massive blood transfusion into a putrefying corpse. It amounts to €30 billion up front and at least €17 billion in punitive interest payments to the European Central Bank. That’s €47 billion – €4 billion more than all the money we’ve received from the EU, through Cap and the aid funds, since 1973.[/size]
[size=3]These figures are directly comparable. One was a transfer from relatively wealthy European (and in particular German) taxpayers to the citizens of an economically hard-pressed Ireland. The other is a transfer from the citizens of an economically hard-pressed Ireland to the relatively wealthy European (and in particular German) taxpayers.[/size]
[size=3]Let’s be clear about this: the only beneficiaries of the State’s assumption of Anglo’s liabilities are taxpayers in the countries whose banks were the reckless lenders to Anglo. Anglo, for all the guff at the time of the bank guarantee, had no systemic importance to the Irish economy. Irish taxpayers had no moral or other liability for its debts.[/size]
[size=3]The sole reason for saving it was the ECB’s insistence that no euro zone bank should fail. Had Anglo failed, the costs would have been borne primarily by European banks and consequently by European taxpayers.[/size]
[size=3]So the undertaking by the Irish State to stump up €47 billion to pay those private debts is an act of extreme (if extremely demented) euro-altruism. We are Europe’s ragged-trousered philanthropists, bailing out the euro with money we don’t have and that our European partners are kindly lending us at penal interest rates.[/size]
[size=3]And this single act of insane generosity wipes out every red cent we’ve got from Europe since 1973. All the blissful bungalows, all the high-tech milking parlours, all the four-by-fours, all the combine harvesters, all the sewage pipes, all the sleek black motorways, all the streamlined new trains and unsoiled new buses, all the tourist information centres and community development schemes, all the fixed-up piers and buzzy broadband connections, all those sweet little blue flags with their twinkling eurostars – all of them wiped off the balance sheet. Everything we’ve got over nearly 40 years, paid back with interest.[/size]
[size=3]And for what? For less than nothing. For a moment of panic, a daft notion, a stupid indulgence in bluster and bravado. Some bleary-eyed fools decided, in the middle of the night, that they could bluff the markets by throwing all the chips we might ever have on to the table. It didn’t take long for the markets to realise that their hand contained nothing better than a pair of deuces.[/size]
[size=3]But the gamble failed for Europe too. There might be some kind of (very expensive) pride in being able to say that little Ireland took the hit to save the euro zone, like the starry-eyed gal who takes a bullet for the outlaw in a corny western. But we saved nothing. All we managed to do was to buy the euro zone leaders more time in which to delude themselves that there was no real crisis, just a few brush fires out on the perimeter. And to hide from the German taxpayers the reality that their banks had been as reckless in their lending as ours were in their borrowing. The sole achievement was a deepening of paralysis.[/size]
[size=3]This charade has gone on long enough. It is killing Ireland, but it is also killing the EU. Do its leaders really expect us all to vote to give them more powers when they’re only interested in using them to take back what they’ve given us? We may be the stupidest mercenaries of all time, but even our folly has its limits.[/size]
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/1129/1224308280035.html
Interesting that he assigns zero value to our access to the common market or our cost savings from the common currency since the start of the 00’s etc etc. there are swings and roundabouts but they gave us X, it cost us Y is Tara and Ben economics.
Not saying that the bailout isn’t immoral or whatever just that the analysis there is pathetic.
What about the costs to leave the Eurozone?
You can’t eat Guns but you could use them to kill other people to get their Cola Bottles so I wouldn’t be opposed to investing 20% of your portfolio in them.
What bothers me is we cant yet see the eventual military outcome to all of this. We have had over 4 years of financial crisis and the end game is probably years away. The forest may be burnt down or blown up.
Far too much history is about dates, biographies and battles. Finance is the key underlying driver for national action, whether it be for resources, markets, standard of living or plain jealousy/insecurtiy.
Could you see a situtation where a country just tells Germany “Fuck off we’re not paying you” and then a military dispute stems from that?
I’d say it’s more likely a danger of a breakdown in international cooperation in Europe, which of course leads to international competition and international tension as a result. There’s nothing like a depression to bring out hyper-nationalism.
After all, we live in a historically unique period of European history. Europe has traditionally been at war.
True about Europe & war. However there are wider problems than Europe; US budgets, Arab Spring, chinese (eventual) soft landing, Australian bubble … which will bring their own conflicts.
Merkel and Sarkozy have firmly laid their cards on the table in the past 12 hours.
A new EU, with have stricter central (Franco/Germany) control over member states finances, budgets and taxation.
They also want more use of Qualified Majority Voting as opposed to the current system which requires unanimity for any major changes.
So the choice is pretty much France & Germany controlling us for all economic matters (which you could say is already happening) or countries opposed to this decide to go it alone.