Posted on 03/16/2010 12:25:38 AM PDT by ErnstStavroBlofeld
Earlier this week, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou traveled to the United States to promote a message: We're in this together. The debt crisis that has threatened the Greek economy and the stability of the European Union's monetary policies "very much involves America's interests," Papandreou stated in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The prime minister--who was born in St. Paul, Minn.--even connected the current crisis to the Great Depression as well as the Great Recession. "If the European crisis metastasizes, it could create a new global financial crisis with implications as grave as the U.S.-originated crisis two years ago," he said. But the path from a Greek crisis to a U.S. crisis is not a direct one. The European Union is hoping it can contain Greece's debt crisis before the problems spread across the continent--threatening the stability of all countries that use the euro, or the euro zone--and then over the Atlantic.
The crisis began shortly after the election last fall of the new socialist government led by Papandreou. State officials revealed that Greece's budget deficit was at 14 percent of GDP--almost twice what the official Greek government statistics had reported. Two months later, Moody's downgraded Greece's debt to A2, raising the possibility of Greece defaulting on its debt.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
All you can eat Baklava until the debt is paid off? Probably not, eh?
i like Sambuca better than Ouzo anyhow
but I would miss taziki
Dont forget souvlaki..yummy.
play zorba the greek faster and faster till everybody falls down
Notice the socialists always claim to the US “we are in it together” when their economies are collapsing from all their out of control government spending, but when they can hide their debts or find some temporary sugar daddy like the EU to suck billions out of, they cannot line up fast enough to bash the US.
Greece has been one of the most anti-american countries of the EU for decades.
Screw Greece. Let those lazy socialists go down in flames.
Yeh, that certainly is wishful thinking that I am tempted to have also. But, a credit crunch in Greece wouldn’t be good for anyone. It isn’t just Greece that would go down, Spain could be next and then who knows who else.
At the beginning of the year the World Economic Forum estimated that there is was a 1 in 5 chance of another asset price bubble implosion costing the World over 1.5 trillion dollars. A full scale sovereign debt crisis is given similar odds.
Your analysis is true enough, but alas, the Prime Minister is right too. We ARE all in this together, if only because the world’s economies are now so tightly bound that if one collapses it might very well lead to the collapse of a whole chain of others, domino fashion. Then there is the geopolitical aspect. If Greece collapses, Turkey and/or Albania might move into the resultant power vacumn. The whole of south east Europe could fall to Islam.
Not a happy thought.
Greece is the time, is the place, is the motion.
Yeah, Greece is the way we are feeling.
Certainly, the health of the Euro *is* everyone’s worry. I guess that’s what happens when you put all your socialist eggs in one currency basket. Unfortunately, debtor nations like the U.S. get sucked into any failing economy where their debts are tied into.
California appears to be our Greece. 2010 or 2011 will be the year of financial reckoning for California. Will the US government bail it out or will it go bankrupt? If California is bailed out, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Illinois are standing in line as are thousands of local governments.
The birthplace of Democracy becoming the death of it. A test run for the rest of us.
If the Germans bail them (Greece) out, the precedent for bailing out the rest (PIIGS) will be established, something Germany really does not want to own. The game right now seems to try to drag the US and, indirectly, its sacrificial taxpayers in to “buy and own” the obligations of failing European states, conceivably in a deal with Germany et al. US taxpayers are not knowingly in the loop at this point. European economies falling like dominoes likely eventually involves large position liquidations in US assets (articles in the past couple of years have noted that some portion of $6 trillion of equities in US markets are at risk of liquidation by Europeans). More credit default swaps might have to be “created” in solving the problem, amounting to kicking the can down the road. It seems that the financial unraveling is going to continue as a surety, and only the rate of unraveling can conceivably be changed temporarily by “bailout” maneuvers. The bond rating agencies note that the AAA rating of UK and the US are closer to being at risk of downgrade confirms the continuance of the world-wide derivative unraveling process and the recognized inability of taxpayers to cover the increasing obligations of nation-state borrowing. Attempts to buy time will continue. The next several years look really rough.
So we are supposed to bail out Greece as well? What the hell, why not?
And if Greece is somehow bailed out by other nations, same thing.
You know, one really funny thing about it all is that the real taxpayers (producers) are now mostly in places like China. Here, revenues are mostly recirculated back and forth between government and government-employed/paid consumers.
You know, one really funny thing about it all is that the real taxpayers (producers) are now mostly in places like China. Here, revenues from debt are mostly recirculated back and forth between government and government-employed/paid consumers.
I thank God above that the UK was wise enough to keep its own currency and not embrace the Euro. OTOH, just like the US, it only keeps us one step removed from the problem...
You can give a crack addict all the money in the world,he is still going to die.
While Prime Minister George Pap-something(forgive me I am not used to Greek names)is doing his best to safe his country.It doesn’t help that his constituents are so woefully ignorant.
At best,they will walk away from this but more then likely they are going to need to have their “hands out”(for another bailout) for awhile.
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