Krugman is hammering on the basics about Greece. We don't blame him. This is ridiculous, it's like the neocons want to rewrite 100 years of economic statistics and theory. Don't like something? Why pretend it doesn't exist! Seriously, this economic fiction is beyond frightening, the implications into other areas of more hard science are becoming extreme. When one just replaces science with "belief", or glorified religious philosophy, we go back to the stone age. Or maybe the gilded age.
Some nations are suffering Great Depression-level pain: Greece and Ireland have had double-digit declines in output, Spain has 23 percent unemployment, Britain’s slump has now gone on longer than its slump in the 1930s.
Worse yet, European leaders — and quite a few influential players here — are still wedded to the economic doctrine responsible for this disaster.
Reuters' Felix Simon cranked a few numbers, plus graphed up Greece's supposed GDP under this deal:
under this pretty upbeat downside scenario, Greece gets nowhere near the required 120% debt-to-GDP level by 2020: instead, it only gets to 159%. And to make things worse for the Eurozone, the report explicitly says that under the terms of this deal, “any new debt will be junior to all existing debt” — in other words, there’s no way at all that Greece is going to be able to borrow on the private markets for the foreseeable future, so long as this plan is in place.
We didn't crank the numbers but Simon too concludes Greece is being bombed and buried into a debt hole, never to get out of it.
Pointing out what this post amplifies, literally austerity is digging Greece into a hole so deep they just won't recover and the vicious cycle will continue, Greece will need another bail out.
Wall Street and even letting some DOW level dictate policy is beyond pathetic.
The mortgage settlement is like a rape victim being made to post bail for her attacker:
http://financeaddict.com/2012/02/more-easy-living-for-misbehaving-banks/
There is a bunch of events happening right now. The IMF is denying funds, the Greece prime minster is rushing to Brussels to "secure a bail out", more cuts, more delays. I think we've been say from day one to have an organized default, orderly.
I like the way Iceland had been dealing with there issues via referendum. They are already turning it around but maybe their problem wasn't so bad to begin with.
It seems the Greek people have been sold out.
The austerity will lead them into long term recession or even depression. Bankruptcy may do the same thing but for different reasons and at least that way the internal economy will work such as tourism etc.
Liars? Then their are 1000's of us all over this country in collusion with each other. BoA is a toxic and totally morally bankrupt company who will do anything, break any law to make a buck. I and my wife are victims as well. Got our home in 2007 and had trouble with BoA from day one. Our payments were somehow always magically "late" and we would have to pay some fee to make the problem go away. We both had to change jobs and did get a couple of payments behind but they said "no problem, we will do a loan remodification!" Sent us a couple of letters saying we got it and a new payment schedule with the lowered payments. Went along as if there was no problem for 2 years. Then, in January of 2011, they send us a letter telling us we were 9 payments behind when we were current. We tried to solve the problem, to no avail. Over and over, for months. Then, in September, we get a letter from an attorney in St. Louis that the home had been sold at a foreclosure auction in August! In Missouri, you have to notify the homeowner that their home has gone into foreclosure. You have to notify them of an impending foreclosure sale. You have to place an ad in the local paper of a foreclosure sale. BoA skipped every one of these steps and foreclosed on the home without notifying us at all, except when they served us in September of 2011 that we would have to be out of the house by October 12th. We lost our home through no fault of our own. it was BoA doing, mistakes and incompetence every step of the way. They are not a good company, and I know through experience that they DO NOT obey the law.
While we support the OWS movement, generally, after all, look at our site name, this is economics for the rest of us, we're not out there camping out or directly involved. I found all of these new efforts dynamite myself, but from one comment, maybe there is some hoodwink we don't know about.
If so, or more details, let us know and keep us informed. Supposedly the Huffington Post declared OWS "dead" a couple of weeks ago and it sure seems the police state shut down the movement from the press/news, beyond more cracking heads in Oakland.
I read through the Occupy the SEC movement, as well as the 99% petition website and from just the SEC letter, work, content, I thought all of this was laser directed and on issues I felt certain the majority agree with.
From the site I did not see anything about "1 person" and the history was a formulation from the Occupy movement. Note we say "offshoots" of various activities to separate these efforts from the main, which is also make clear by the site. Bottom line, it's a great idea and effective, and the work of Occupy the SEC is beyond great, effective, it's downright professional.
This is almost funny - considering this is now out of the hands of the people and in the hands of a defense attorney in NY that lost his bid for a congressional seat.... Just goes to show that the press will print all sorts of miss information without doing diligence - and people will believe whatever they read...
The attorney that hijacked this effort is taking all the credit for all the work that hundreds of volunteers did before he went off the deep end and resigned - only to hold on to the money all the people donated... He keeps lying about the venue being paid for when it is not (check with the Philly Convention Center) - In general beware of wolves in sheep's clothing.
This is nothing more then a 1% trying to circumvent the whole Occupy effort.... SHAMEFUL! Do your homework!
Iran just moved some warship into the gulf. My comments are not meant to deny the impact of oil on the U.S. economy or inflation. More we saw buzz headlines trying to claim that January's CPI numbers were all about gas and not so.
Well, welcome back! We seem to go through comment spurts on EP, although actual reads, references and links are still about the same.
If there is something I can set up here to help people discuss, let me know for it's you guys who really add to the site.
Nobody rational wants a refinery nearby. But as we now learn corporations are people and those people are going to build more gulf refineries if the XL pipeline goes to the Gulf. Big Oil's spin is that Alberta Tar sands will give the U.S. driver more gasoline. So why ship the oil from Alberta to the Gulf? Only one reason, the refined product goes the same place the Alaska Pipeline goes: Asia through the expanded Panama Canal.
If they build the XL Pipeline, there has to be more local Louisiana refinery capacity used, a whole lot more. That extra refining either crowds out crude from the Gulf, or you build more refining capacity. So now we have a perfect segue into adding more refining capacity. More refineries,we know, is something those 'people' want to build. The U.S. driver will not see any more gasoline from the XL Pipeline. It is the same fraud as the Alaska Pipeline.In 1970, we were told that all the Alaska crude from the Pipeline would go to the West Coast.
In the 1830s a famous French author Stendahl wrote an historical novel called the 'Red and the Black' about the return of the French Monarchy.
The punch line of the novel was that the Retrogrades who returned to power:
"They acted as if they had forgotten nothing and they acted as if they had learned nothing".
If Obama had the right financial people in his cabinet (other than Volker who is a real US Hero) they probably would have rescinded all those trader exceptions and got the speculators out of the oil market.
You are right about the refineries. No one wants to build them. The big money now wants to build LNG plants turning cheap NG into expensive LNG that can be shipped overseas. The US has a 3000 year supply maybe a 100 years less if we went to CNG cars or CNG hybrids even better.
The 2013 Ford Fusion 47mpg highway, 43mpg city. Think about those numbers and that's sort of a mid size.
I haven't been here for some time. I just wanted to see how the forum was doing and say hello.
I switched on FAUX and they are spinning gas price statistics to somehow blame Obama for price increases. This is ridiculous. First, during the Bush administration, there was a speculative bubble on oil that collapsed. We also had a global recession which dramatically collapsed demand.
What we have here is increased global demand, a lack of refineries, some commodities inflation overall, and a huge threat traders are banking on, Iran.
Anyway, political spin and the desire to blame Obama for rising gas prices as the new strategy for election 2012 seems to be driving this month's media CPI headline buzz.
So glad reporters are objective and people just look at the statistics and try to get an understanding behind the real reasons for rising gas prices.
After just reviewing MSM via the Internets, the blazing headlines that gas prices drove this month's inflation increase are clearly, very obviously wrong. This is why we do these overviews, because the MSM seems to echo chamber some original buzz headline and if that buzz headline is incorrect, the entire media reporting sphere is incorrect.
Anyway, we can see, from the above, food by itself, increased 0.2%, core, which doesn't include gas increased 0.2% and we see other parts of core inflation drop. They also ignore housing, the largest part of people's budget and it, across the board, homeowner, renter or hotel guest stayer, increased 0.2%.
Sure gas increased the overall energy index, but inflation was across the board, it wasn't gas driving the all items CPI-U increase. See the index breakdown at the bottom, proof positive gang.
Gez, someone pay me for this or at least go to the top link and read the CPI report yourself. They speak English at the BLS ya know (abet cryptic English).
This is just unreal, the headlines are Greece is "struggling" to get bail out funds due to Europe's demand for more budget cuts, plus the declaration, default is not an option.
Huh, the level of details on this I just don't know, except who exactly is Reuters referring to, the brokerage houses who gave the margin calls or the actual MF Global investors? It seems opposite of Ch. 7 definitions in terms of "launching their own probe".
As far as Calculated Risk goes, he has his own beliefs but I like him because he is extremely data centric, although lately he's putting out some beliefs that if one looks at the data, are not there.
I think all of this is extremely relevant, but then to find the issue, one needs to drill down into that data...or in this case, it looks like bankruptcy law and the judge's actual ruling on the actual motion and by whom was this motion presented, i.e. brokerage houses or actual final MF Global investors?
Reuters and Chicago Tribune 2/1/12
“MF Global Inc. (MFGLQ)’s brokerage customers can’t have the bankruptcy of the company’s parent converted to a Chapter 7 liquidation or conduct their own probe into its collapse, a judge ruled...three former customers, who claimed to have had $241 million in their commodity accounts, had sought to liquidate the parent under a bankruptcy law concerning commodities brokers. THIS COULD HAVE ALLOWED COMMODITY CUSTOMERS SUCH AS THEMSELVES TO BE REPAID FIRST...Glenn, however, said the parent could not be classified as a "commodity broker" deserving of liquidation...”
How could it not be a commodity broker with, as I recall reading, it has something in the range of 30,000 commodities accounts? What business was it in, if not community brokerage?
But, apart from the legal question and to revisiting my point above...
What are the economic implications for the futures market and the economy as a whole? We read volumes on fractional percentage changes in labor and consumer variables and virtually nothing on issues that could lead to trillions of dollars TARP type actions and economic collapse.
I’m don’t mean to be critical of the many hardworking and excellent econ blogers. I just think that the economy has experience a paradigm change from national to global and too many economists are still extrapolating 20th century models in the 21st century. Just glance at the link blogs over at Calculated Risk. They represent some of the best minds publishing on eco issues...but just how relevant are they? The endless debate about more or less government spending. That’s so 20th century!
For example, go back to the 2000-2008 period and demonstrate how government spending up or down would have affected the events leading to TARP and the economic collapse.
Krugman is hammering on the basics about Greece. We don't blame him. This is ridiculous, it's like the neocons want to rewrite 100 years of economic statistics and theory. Don't like something? Why pretend it doesn't exist! Seriously, this economic fiction is beyond frightening, the implications into other areas of more hard science are becoming extreme. When one just replaces science with "belief", or glorified religious philosophy, we go back to the stone age. Or maybe the gilded age.
Reuters' Felix Simon cranked a few numbers, plus graphed up Greece's supposed GDP under this deal:
We didn't crank the numbers but Simon too concludes Greece is being bombed and buried into a debt hole, never to get out of it.
Post WWI Germany, here we come.
Pointing out what this post amplifies, literally austerity is digging Greece into a hole so deep they just won't recover and the vicious cycle will continue, Greece will need another bail out.
Wall Street and even letting some DOW level dictate policy is beyond pathetic.
You're right, this is all about the banks and Wall Street. Greece has another broken down main street.
The mortgage settlement is like a rape victim being made to post bail for her attacker:
http://financeaddict.com/2012/02/more-easy-living-for-misbehaving-banks/
There is a bunch of events happening right now. The IMF is denying funds, the Greece prime minster is rushing to Brussels to "secure a bail out", more cuts, more delays. I think we've been say from day one to have an organized default, orderly.
I like the way Iceland had been dealing with there issues via referendum. They are already turning it around but maybe their problem wasn't so bad to begin with.
It seems the Greek people have been sold out.
The austerity will lead them into long term recession or even depression. Bankruptcy may do the same thing but for different reasons and at least that way the internal economy will work such as tourism etc.
Liars? Then their are 1000's of us all over this country in collusion with each other. BoA is a toxic and totally morally bankrupt company who will do anything, break any law to make a buck. I and my wife are victims as well. Got our home in 2007 and had trouble with BoA from day one. Our payments were somehow always magically "late" and we would have to pay some fee to make the problem go away. We both had to change jobs and did get a couple of payments behind but they said "no problem, we will do a loan remodification!" Sent us a couple of letters saying we got it and a new payment schedule with the lowered payments. Went along as if there was no problem for 2 years. Then, in January of 2011, they send us a letter telling us we were 9 payments behind when we were current. We tried to solve the problem, to no avail. Over and over, for months. Then, in September, we get a letter from an attorney in St. Louis that the home had been sold at a foreclosure auction in August! In Missouri, you have to notify the homeowner that their home has gone into foreclosure. You have to notify them of an impending foreclosure sale. You have to place an ad in the local paper of a foreclosure sale. BoA skipped every one of these steps and foreclosed on the home without notifying us at all, except when they served us in September of 2011 that we would have to be out of the house by October 12th. We lost our home through no fault of our own. it was BoA doing, mistakes and incompetence every step of the way. They are not a good company, and I know through experience that they DO NOT obey the law.
While we support the OWS movement, generally, after all, look at our site name, this is economics for the rest of us, we're not out there camping out or directly involved. I found all of these new efforts dynamite myself, but from one comment, maybe there is some hoodwink we don't know about.
If so, or more details, let us know and keep us informed. Supposedly the Huffington Post declared OWS "dead" a couple of weeks ago and it sure seems the police state shut down the movement from the press/news, beyond more cracking heads in Oakland.
I read through the Occupy the SEC movement, as well as the 99% petition website and from just the SEC letter, work, content, I thought all of this was laser directed and on issues I felt certain the majority agree with.
But I'm not part of OWS, so, please let us know.
From the site I did not see anything about "1 person" and the history was a formulation from the Occupy movement. Note we say "offshoots" of various activities to separate these efforts from the main, which is also make clear by the site. Bottom line, it's a great idea and effective, and the work of Occupy the SEC is beyond great, effective, it's downright professional.
This is almost funny - considering this is now out of the hands of the people and in the hands of a defense attorney in NY that lost his bid for a congressional seat.... Just goes to show that the press will print all sorts of miss information without doing diligence - and people will believe whatever they read...
The attorney that hijacked this effort is taking all the credit for all the work that hundreds of volunteers did before he went off the deep end and resigned - only to hold on to the money all the people donated... He keeps lying about the venue being paid for when it is not (check with the Philly Convention Center) - In general beware of wolves in sheep's clothing.
This is nothing more then a 1% trying to circumvent the whole Occupy effort.... SHAMEFUL! Do your homework!
Iran just moved some warship into the gulf. My comments are not meant to deny the impact of oil on the U.S. economy or inflation. More we saw buzz headlines trying to claim that January's CPI numbers were all about gas and not so.
Well, welcome back! We seem to go through comment spurts on EP, although actual reads, references and links are still about the same.
If there is something I can set up here to help people discuss, let me know for it's you guys who really add to the site.
Nobody rational wants a refinery nearby. But as we now learn corporations are people and those people are going to build more gulf refineries if the XL pipeline goes to the Gulf. Big Oil's spin is that Alberta Tar sands will give the U.S. driver more gasoline. So why ship the oil from Alberta to the Gulf? Only one reason, the refined product goes the same place the Alaska Pipeline goes: Asia through the expanded Panama Canal.
If they build the XL Pipeline, there has to be more local Louisiana refinery capacity used, a whole lot more. That extra refining either crowds out crude from the Gulf, or you build more refining capacity. So now we have a perfect segue into adding more refining capacity. More refineries,we know, is something those 'people' want to build. The U.S. driver will not see any more gasoline from the XL Pipeline. It is the same fraud as the Alaska Pipeline.In 1970, we were told that all the Alaska crude from the Pipeline would go to the West Coast.
In the 1830s a famous French author Stendahl wrote an historical novel called the 'Red and the Black' about the return of the French Monarchy.
The punch line of the novel was that the Retrogrades who returned to power:
"They acted as if they had forgotten nothing and they acted as if they had learned nothing".
I believe the Iran situation is keeping prices where they are.
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/17/business/la-fi-mo-gas-prices-201...
If Obama had the right financial people in his cabinet (other than Volker who is a real US Hero) they probably would have rescinded all those trader exceptions and got the speculators out of the oil market.
You are right about the refineries. No one wants to build them. The big money now wants to build LNG plants turning cheap NG into expensive LNG that can be shipped overseas. The US has a 3000 year supply maybe a 100 years less if we went to CNG cars or CNG hybrids even better.
The 2013 Ford Fusion 47mpg highway, 43mpg city. Think about those numbers and that's sort of a mid size.
I haven't been here for some time. I just wanted to see how the forum was doing and say hello.
Reading this brings joy to my heart.
I switched on FAUX and they are spinning gas price statistics to somehow blame Obama for price increases. This is ridiculous. First, during the Bush administration, there was a speculative bubble on oil that collapsed. We also had a global recession which dramatically collapsed demand.
What we have here is increased global demand, a lack of refineries, some commodities inflation overall, and a huge threat traders are banking on, Iran.
Anyway, political spin and the desire to blame Obama for rising gas prices as the new strategy for election 2012 seems to be driving this month's media CPI headline buzz.
So glad reporters are objective and people just look at the statistics and try to get an understanding behind the real reasons for rising gas prices.
After just reviewing MSM via the Internets, the blazing headlines that gas prices drove this month's inflation increase are clearly, very obviously wrong. This is why we do these overviews, because the MSM seems to echo chamber some original buzz headline and if that buzz headline is incorrect, the entire media reporting sphere is incorrect.
Anyway, we can see, from the above, food by itself, increased 0.2%, core, which doesn't include gas increased 0.2% and we see other parts of core inflation drop. They also ignore housing, the largest part of people's budget and it, across the board, homeowner, renter or hotel guest stayer, increased 0.2%.
Sure gas increased the overall energy index, but inflation was across the board, it wasn't gas driving the all items CPI-U increase. See the index breakdown at the bottom, proof positive gang.
Gez, someone pay me for this or at least go to the top link and read the CPI report yourself. They speak English at the BLS ya know (abet cryptic English).
This is just unreal, the headlines are Greece is "struggling" to get bail out funds due to Europe's demand for more budget cuts, plus the declaration, default is not an option.
Bloomberg story gives the latest.
Huh, the level of details on this I just don't know, except who exactly is Reuters referring to, the brokerage houses who gave the margin calls or the actual MF Global investors? It seems opposite of Ch. 7 definitions in terms of "launching their own probe".
As far as Calculated Risk goes, he has his own beliefs but I like him because he is extremely data centric, although lately he's putting out some beliefs that if one looks at the data, are not there.
I think all of this is extremely relevant, but then to find the issue, one needs to drill down into that data...or in this case, it looks like bankruptcy law and the judge's actual ruling on the actual motion and by whom was this motion presented, i.e. brokerage houses or actual final MF Global investors?
Reuters and Chicago Tribune 2/1/12
“MF Global Inc. (MFGLQ)’s brokerage customers can’t have the bankruptcy of the company’s parent converted to a Chapter 7 liquidation or conduct their own probe into its collapse, a judge ruled...three former customers, who claimed to have had $241 million in their commodity accounts, had sought to liquidate the parent under a bankruptcy law concerning commodities brokers. THIS COULD HAVE ALLOWED COMMODITY CUSTOMERS SUCH AS THEMSELVES TO BE REPAID FIRST...Glenn, however, said the parent could not be classified as a "commodity broker" deserving of liquidation...”
How could it not be a commodity broker with, as I recall reading, it has something in the range of 30,000 commodities accounts? What business was it in, if not community brokerage?
But, apart from the legal question and to revisiting my point above...
What are the economic implications for the futures market and the economy as a whole? We read volumes on fractional percentage changes in labor and consumer variables and virtually nothing on issues that could lead to trillions of dollars TARP type actions and economic collapse.
I’m don’t mean to be critical of the many hardworking and excellent econ blogers. I just think that the economy has experience a paradigm change from national to global and too many economists are still extrapolating 20th century models in the 21st century. Just glance at the link blogs over at Calculated Risk. They represent some of the best minds publishing on eco issues...but just how relevant are they? The endless debate about more or less government spending. That’s so 20th century!
For example, go back to the 2000-2008 period and demonstrate how government spending up or down would have affected the events leading to TARP and the economic collapse.
Best
Tom
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