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Amazing article in the latest copy of Le Monde by Michel Rocard (previously the French Prime Minister) and Pierre Larrouturou (an economist). It's called " Why is it that states have to pay 600 times more than the banks ". They are spot on, but they don't even seem to have realized that the ECB just handed a further 489 billion euros to the banks at 1% (see my recent posts). They also seem to think that governments are also only having to pay 6-8% interest to the bond markets, when in fact, Greece is currently being charged 18% and Portugal 12%. These numbers are incredible. We already knew that the end of 2008, George Bush and Henry Paulson had put $700 billion (540 billion euros) on the table to rescue U.S. banks.
Michel Rocard and Pierre Larrouturou - Spot on!!
Fresh credit crunch fears as banks park record €453bn cash with ECB | Business | The Guardian
• Move suggests banks afraid to lend to each other • Italy's UniCredit spooks markets with cash call Fresh fears about the eurozone banking system were raised when record amounts of cash were deposited with the European Central Bank and Italy's UniCredit spooked markets with a cash call on investors. Some €453bn (£378bn) was lodged in the ECB's "deposit facility" on Tuesday night in a move that some analysts feared showed banks were so concerned about lending it out to rivals that they would rather earn just 0.25% in interest from the central bank.
It is a forensic look into the deeper causes of Europe’s crisis and why the reactionary policies being imposed on two thirds of the eurozone by Germany’s Wolfgang Schauble and the northern neo-Calvinists – with input from 1930s liquidationists at the ECB – will lead to certain disaster. It has been out for a week, but I have only got round to reading it. Better late than never. The CER is a pro-EU group with a broadly free-market leaning.
Self-serving myths of Europe’s neo-Calvinists – Telegraph Blogs
Eurozone debt crisis: the key charts you need to understand what's happening | News | guardian.co.uk
Europe is in crisis - but what's going on? Which are the right key numbers to compare each country? • Get the data How bad are things in Europe - and how does each country compare? Well, besides the data below, Polly Curtis' Reality Check series is a good place to start, answering key questions such as What would the collapse of the euro mean for the UK? and What happens if Greece leaves the euro?
Arrows show imbalances of debt exposure between borrowers in one country and banks in another; arrows point from debtors to their bank creditors. Arrow widths are proportional to the balance of money owed. For example, French borrowers owe Italian banks $50.6 billion; Italian borrowers owe French banks $416.4 billion. The difference — their imbalance — shows France's banking system more exposed to Italian debtors by about $365.8 billion. Greece amassed a huge debt that it has scant hope of repaying.
An Overview of the Euro Crisis - Interactive - NYTimes.com
I’ll get to the tragedy in a minute. First, let’s talk about the pratfalls, which have lately had me humming the old children’s song “There’s a Hole in My Bucket.” For those not familiar with the song, it concerns a lazy farmer who complains about said hole and is told by his wife to fix it.
