Greece Facing “Titanic” Problem

Larry,

I read about this early this morning in our local paper.  My first thought was that I hope O and members of Congress are all paying attention.

I read about the GS connection, again, when this news brief first hit [think it was over at zerohedge]. Possibility of hiding debt so Greece could gain entrance into the EU?  With the help of “concerned” friends. 

There’s some talk [from what I've read] that GS may be banned from dealing with eurozone governments after this reveal. 

But what about the US Government?  How muych does it take to say: okay this is the end of the road.  Don’t wish to be honest brokers? Well, here’s the new Rule Book. 

When Lloyd Blankfein declared he was–”Doing God’s work”–what god is that exactly?

Start with a “M?”

I feel empathy for the citizens of Greece.  And no, they shouldn’t be running around with massive debt on their books and pretending everything is hunky-dory. 

But then, who are we to criticize?

But what is GS doing in the middle of this?  Somehow, I doubt their outreach came for free.

Everytime I think it can’t get any worse.  It does.

Docelder:  Amen.  We also need to reassess the entire budget and just cut out all unnecessary spending.  We send billions to other countries, to corporations, to the prez’s Executive Order social programs, etc.  We just can’t afford it anymore.  We have to shake up the welfare system and get millions of people off the roles who either don’t deserve it or shouldn’t be in this country.

Perfect up to the minute relevant information to unmask my fairy tale beleifs. Thank you.

And Toyota closed today two auto plants in the South to make sure all the babies in Nursery Quarter USA get their cribs adjusted as soon as possible. They know that fewer cribs will be selling these days.

China, Japan and Great Britain are applying for Nursery Care licenses.

Like Larry says, There is a serious lesson in this Greek drama for all of us.

Greece was my favorite place to ever visit.  Best Food!

The WORLD is going to wake-up soon and realize that the US Bankers, Congress and Acorn did this to everyone, and we will be banned from the Planet!

Is the same story for Mitt Romney. Here is a man that is a millionaire, a celebrity and a Governor. He sits behind a regular American and walla – you can’t make a little minuscule mistake or do something as benign as having your seat back in the rest position. They have to make it where you loose your flight, you are arrested, you have to defend yourself, hire a lawyer, and get this to follow you for the rest of your life. And they go home to live it up.

I believe the seat back was not up for take off.

As an ex-FA, get the freaking seat back up!  The man also became violent. I would have settled it myself with the beverage cart.

CAROL HAKA

Yeah I know. And you being an ex-FA you know too. The guy got violent. End of life for him. And for Romney another one under the belt.

I don’t know who you are, but seek help!

“There is a serious lesson in this Greek drama for all of us.”

So true.  One that I’m taking to heart.  

The value of the dollar has just soared against the Euro.  The Japanese took over the top spot for holding the most of our debt.

Something tells me we don’t want the Euro to survive.

Or better yet, report it to your probation officer next time you check in.

Congrats!

What ever happened to BO’s girlfriend who was exiled to Martinique?

Too bad it didn’t soar last June when we went to Italy…

No, “we” meaning the corporatists want a single world currency. They get what they want, as they have the best politicians that money can buy… meaning all of them.

sows—–If that’s who you mean, Obama appointed her to Nat’l Security Council

Pat Buchanan wrote a good column on this subject.
The PIGS of Europe…Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain.
One segment:
Where Greece is at today, we shall arrive tomorrow. In every Western nation, government is growing beyond the capacity of taxpayers to bear. Deficits and debt are surging. Not enough children are being born to replace parents. The immigrant poor who consume more than they contribute are coming to take the empty places. Seniors and the elderly are growing as a share of the population. Companies are saying goodbye to the West and moving offshore to low-wage lands.

This modern Greek tragedy was avoidable.  If Greece had not joined the EU and did not agree to dump its “drachma” currency in favour of the Euro, it would have been able to not only survive but thrive!

If she had her own currency, Greece could have devalued it, allowed for deflation for a while and then it would have emerged healthier.  Unlike the U.S. European countries cannot print their own money, thus cannot devalue it at will. 

Europe is ruled by arrogant extreme right-wing minority that has attached itself to Angela Merkel’s middle of the road right leaning party. She needs these kukoos to stay in power, unfortunately. 

What many don’t realize is that Britain is in a very similar situation in terms of of debt to its GDP portion!

The heavey Euro-bureacracy has robbed the smaller countries like Greece, Portugal and Ireland of their sovereignty.  So not only economically, but politically, they’re slaves to Brussels.

Greece is in same position as Long Term Capital Management was in l998 when the arrogant SEXISTS SUMMERS,GREENSPAN, RUBIN AND GEITNER fired Brooksley Born and ignored her “WARNING” (see PBS doc) that the markets needed urgent regulation!

Those damn Credit Default Swaps are the Greek pensions going down the dumps….it’s only the beginning of a new CATASTROPHE CAUSED BY THESE JERKS WHO ARE NOW ADVISING OBUMMER!!!!!!
Greece should sue their pants off…..

Now that sounds a lot like Reaganomics. I think the lesson of Reagan is that the supply side part was dead on right. But, the removal of the controls over financial interests was a mistake. Bring back supply side economics and bring back some form of Glass-Steagall and I think we all will have learned a painful but valuable lesson. Nobody is perfect and everything they do won’t be always right, all the time. But we need desperately to be able to learn from mistakes which we have already paid for.

Well, I agree with you to a degree. But bear in mind that supply side economics predicted that cutting income taxes would wind up increasing government revenue due to increased economic activity. Bush’s tax cuts didn’t work out that way. And it was Bill Clinton’s combination of targeted tax cuts AND targeted tax hikes in the early 90s that managed to both kickstart the entrepreneurial economy and lower the budget deficit, which led to the boom. So I am in favor of letting the disastrous Bush tax cuts expire next year on schedule (even though I’ll be one of the fortunate households that sees its taxes go up); we need that additional revenue desperately, and showing the markets that we are able to control and reduce the deficit will lead to more economic activity in its own right.

But at the same time, the most urgent need right now is for more jobs. And that, unfortunately, will require more federal spending. Much more. As usual, the Republicans are dead wrong about this, and yet again, the Democrats are right, and yet again, it is unclear whether Obama has the balls and/or skill to do the right thing.  

Once again, I agree with most of what you’ve written. I agree that Obama’s proposed policies have been poorly sold, and weakly argued for. I don’t agree that he tried to do too much too soon: we absolutely needed the bailouts, absolutely needed the stimulus, absolutely needed an aggressive war policy in Afghanistan, and absolutely, urgently need major, comprehensive health care reform. Obama inherited a house on fire. On balance, he has done a decent job; America hasn’t collapsed. But in a number of very important respects he has been a FAR weaker president than I would have expected (there, PUMAs, I said it). But it isn’t too late — the Democrats can still prove themselves worthy of leadership by rolling over the Republicans and passing health care this year by themselves. It’s clearly the only way anything decent will come out of Congress.

I also agree with you that Clinton was actually helped by having the Gingrich Congress pushing him toward the center (on the budget, on welfare reform, on free trade). In retrospect, though, that was a much more “bipartisan” time. I have zero faith in the Republican Party today to pursue anything other than Obama’s complete and utter destruction. They are nothing but a negative force in American politics today, and I despise them with every fiber of my being. 

LD,

You like to write about all this negative stuff, but why not write about this article (see link below)? Why not a real objective post on the stimulus? How it is working and has already done a significant amount for the economy in terms of jobs and GDP growth, with still the majority of it yet to be spent. And then you can put your spin on it and tell use whether you think it was worth it or not?

Judging Stimulus by Job Data Reveals Success
By DAVID LEONHARDT

Published: February 16, 2010

“Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.”

” Around the world over the last century, the typical financial crisis caused the jobless rate to rise for almost five years, according to work by the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. On that timeline, our rate would still be rising in early 2012. Even that may be optimistic, given that the recent crisis was so bad. As Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson (Republicans both) and many others warned in 2008, this recession had the potential to become a depression.

Yet the jobless rate is now expected to begin falling consistently by the end of this year.

For that, the stimulus package, flaws and all, deserves a big heaping of credit. “It prevented things from getting much worse than they otherwise would have been,” Nariman Behravesh, Global Insight’s chief economist, says. “I think everyone would have to acknowledge that’s a good thing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/economy/17leonhardt.html

I’m sorry, this is just wrong. First of all, at least 2/3rds of the stimulus has already been spent, probably more. Second of all, it is without question the consensus of virtually all mainstream economic research that the stimulus did work, and saved probably a couple million jobs from vanishing, much of them in the public sector. This is just a matter of simple math: several hundred billion dollars were pushed into budgets that were then spent on projects and kept people employed. Another few hundred billion went into tax cuts (not that the Tea Party morons acknowledge or even understand that Obama passed one of the largest middle class tax cuts in U.S. history). It is difficult to argue about unseen effects — we can never know for sure what would have happened to the U.S. and global economy if two successive presidents (one Republican, one Democrat) hadn’t done these enormous bailouts and stimulus packages. But to assert baldly that they failed is sheer idiocy. 

He hasn’t tried bipartisanship. He talked about it a lot. But he never did it. He let Nancy and Harry drive and they used the brute force of numbers. Now that that force id disappearing, he will either use soft power or he will fail. This could be his greatest opportunity. “Could be” being the key term. It really is up to him.

LD,

But, what is the definition of “stimulus”. It is to stimulate the economy. The bill did exactly what it was suppose to do. To keep the economy from tail spinning and to stop the bleeding. It was not suppose to deal with long term unemployment or as you say the outter innings. How can you argue the fact that we went from 700,000 job losses a month and about -6% GDP growth a quarter to no job losses and nearly 6% GDP growth in the recent 4th quarter. A remarkable turnaround for an economy that was tail-spinning out of control. The stimulus helped to turn this around.

And in the end the stimulus may have cost nothing, as who knows what the costs would have been if we let the economy continue to spin downward and we lost another 2 to 3 million jobs? What would have been the cost the the economy and to dig us out of the deeper hole? The stimulus has also has likely brought the tax receipts back to the government that were depressed because of the economic downturn back quicker, so in the end the stimulus may have cost far less than the actual dollar cost.

Basic economics you borrow and spend in a recession and you save and pay down debt during good times.

Obama has admitted that this stimulus and other rescues will ultimately add $1 trillion to the deficit. Do you think it was worth it? At lease we are spending to save the economy, as opposed to Bush who added $5 trillion to the deficit and had absolutely nothing to show for it. Not one job created over 8 years. In addition, 40% of this stimulus will help long-term growth, as it is going into infrastructure, education, energy, etc. Things that will help the economy over the long-term.

To me the stimulus was an investment at a crucial moment that was well worth it. How can you say otherwise, no matter what inning you think we are in? what was the alternative Larry?

By the way the stimulus did not explode the deficit as you say. First of all the CBO said in a January 2009 report, before Obama took over, and which does not include any of Obama’s programs including the stimulus, that the 2009 deficit was going to be $1.2 trillion. It came in at $1.4 trillion. At most you can say that of the 2009 deficit Obama was responsible for maybe $200 billion. The rest was going to be there whether Obama was elected President or not. And in fact much of the deficit over the next three years would have still been there even if McCain was elected, unless he drastically cut spending, which would have been a disaster in an economic downturn. The stimulus its was only $787 billion over 2 to 3 years. So at most that adds say $200 – 300 billion a year, which is maybe 15-20% of the deficit in anyone year. So it hardly blew out the deficit. The biggest cause of the deficit, about 40% by most estimates, was the decline in tax receipts to the government from the Bush recession.

I would argue that the game has been going on since mid-2007, when the credit crunch began. We have been in this recession for 2 1/2 years. Most recession, especially one of this magnitude last longer, as long as 5 years. So it is all the more remarkable that the economy is now growing again. We could have a double dip, but there are absolutely no indicators pointing toward that.

Just today:

“U.S. housing starts and industrial production increased more than economists projected in January, government data showed, adding to evidence growth is accelerating in the world’s largest economy.

    “The fundamentals are trending in the right direction,”
said Hank Smith, who helps oversee $6 billion as chief
investment officer of Haverford Trust Co. in Radnor,
Pennsylvania. “The economic data continues to trend to the
positive, corporate profits by and large exceeded expectations
and some of the global uncertainty about sovereign debt has been
taken away. We have an unprecedented worldwide recovery going
on.””
And by the way for all most the entire last year the Obama adminstration has continually said that they will focus on deficit reduction in the second half of his first term, as we get out of this recession. That seems perfectly logical to me.

I ask LD, what would you have have done differently?

Oh, and don’t let me forget the original stimulus bill, which was negotiated over a period of weeks at the very beginning of the Obama presidency, and watered down way more than it should have been, until Congress progressives were extremely irritated by Obama’s “fetish for bipartisanship” — only to get precisely zero votes from the Republicans. This at a time when the global economy was on the verge of outright collapse.

The Democrats and Obama have plenty of problems. But the GOP is a joke.   

ms,

What exactly are you talking about?

Obama has taken a ton of steps to turn this economy around and every credible economist says the stimulus did what it was suppose to do and there is increasing evidence every day that this economic turnaround is real. The economy is coming back faster than most thought.

Not sure what you are talking about when you say failed to act for 5 months. What are you talking about? The economy? Right out of the gate Obama passed the largest single stimulus in global history and biggest middle class tax cut. They also rescued Detroit, which saved a lot of jobs, maybe a million, and a big part of the industrial base of this country. It looks like the govt may get its money back with a profit from detroit by mid-summer. etc. etc. All they have been doing is acting on the economy and trying to bail the country out from the Republican recession and mess. It probably hurt their healthcare push, as they had to focus on the economy instead of the Obama agenda on energy, healthcare, education, environment, etc. 

Healthcare? Too soon to write off. Reconciliation looks increasingly probable. The public option may even come back. So far we have 11 senators who yesterday pushing for a public option and reconciliation. It is 100% admirable that Obama has even tried to fix healthcare. You would have gotten zero focus on healthcare, if McCain and the Republicans were in there.

I hardly think the independents turned into the Tea partiers. The Tea partiers are so far away from being independents it is not even funny. They represent a far right-wing agenda. I suggest you read this NYT article from yesterday. Tea partiers are largely; birthers, John Birchers, the patriot movement, militias, etc. etc. The extremes of your society, hardly independents.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/us/politics/16teaparty.html

It is funny, why is it that the Tea Partiers are only now concerned about big government and the debt, when we did not hear a peep out of these people during the Bush years? Few other presidents increased government, the debt, and treaded on the constitution more than Bush and the Republicans. Why are they concerned now when Obama is trying to fix the Republicans mes?.

Complete  BS. A movement funded by corporations (insurance companies, etc.) to oppose healthcare. a complete faux grass roots movement. all their money and media comes from corporations and lobbyists. Where do you think Freedom Works gets their money?