Yields on two-year Greek government bonds reached 46.84% recently. This is roughly comparable to yields on Argentine bonds in early December 2001 - only a month before the country defaulted on its debt.
Similar interest rates occurred this spring in Greece before the second bailout package was put together. The bailout saved Greece from defaulting back then, but the bailout is now falling apart while the fiscal situation in Greece continues to deteriorate. The risk of default in the near future has returned, but the will to stop it this time around is much weaker than in the past.
Finland and a number of other countries have already demanded collateral from the Greek government for their contribution to the bailout and this reduces the money available that can be used by the Greek government to pay off its debts. Then talks between the Greek government and the ECB, EU and IMF broke down last Friday (September 2nd) because Greece admitted it will not meet its deficit reduction and privatization targets for the year. This potentially puts the next $8 billion tranche in bailout payments in jeopardy. The talks are supposed to resume in 10 days. Even more challenges will have to be faced this coming week.
Citizens of the fiscally solvent EU countries are getting tired of paying to support what they see as the profligate spending habits of the EU's weaker economies. The bailout efforts have been lead by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but support within her country has never been strong for them. Her ruling party has lost six regional elections this year, including one in her own home state this weekend. Any more pro-bailout efforts will only further weaken her politically.
At the same time that efforts are taking place to undermine the second bailout, more and more money is needed by Greece. Like many other heavily-indebted countries in the past, Greece is dealing with a destructive feedback loop of inexorably escalating interest costs that cause its debt to continue to rise regardless of what efforts it makes to control it. The Greek government claimed a debt to GDP ratio of 120% in 2010 during the first bailout talks. It is now estimated to be as high as 160%. Interest payments on that debt could be as high as 24% of GDP at current rates (the 10-year bond is yielding over 18%). Despite the first bailout and now the second bailout, interest rates keep going higher, the national debt keeps getting bigger and the problem keeps getting worse. If Greece defaults, will the other bailed out EU nations see this as an opportunity to say, "Screw it" and default as well? How far will the damage spread and will it take down the EU? Interesting times indeed.
That was easy. Iceland is looking very good right now. Argentina is doing so good they want the Falklands back. England has cut its military so much plus they are among many in a economic black hole. Estimated 1 trillion needed for European banks. O will write a check I guess. That's what our markets are looking for. They want some of his stash.
#3
Greece has already defaulted, in the sense Greece cannot make good on the money it's borrowed.
More interesting remaining questions are (1) which banks will now fail (2) what are the next sovereigns to default (3) how far will the resulting credit crunch extend.
[Dawn] YOUNIS Al Mauritani's arrest could well mark the renewal of active anti-terrorism cooperation between the ISI and US intelligence agencies after months of mutual distrust and unseemly public mudslinging. On Monday, while announcing the catch, both Islamabad and Washington emphasised the bilateral efforts that had gone into the arrest of Sheikh Mauritani -- dubbed Al Qaeda's 'foreign minister' -- and two of his colleagues in a Quetta suburb and pledged future cooperation. While Islamabad said the arrest was "planned and conducted with the technical assistance" of American agencies, a White House front man stated that the US continued to work "with our part-ner Pakistain". Mercifully, some sense now appears to have dawned. US-Pakistain ties had been deteriorating since the Raymond Davis affair in February and nosedived after the Abbottabad raid, triggering a row that seemed to uproot the relationship between America and a country that enjoyed the status of a major non-NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A single organization with differing goals, equipment, language, doctrine, and organization.... ally. The relationship seemed to spin out of control when some American officials publicly cast doubt on Pakistain's commitment to fighting terrorism and raised concerns about terrorist safe havens in Pakistain in a tone that appeared to disregard the country's own losses in terms of men and material. Certain voices in Congress demanded a total cut-off of aid to Pakistain and the administration decided to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid.
It appears, however, that broader geopolitical considerations have now managed to gain the upper hand, with both countries realising what is at stake. The latest thaw comes after Islamabad had to some degree been controlling its anger over the May 2 raid and senior American officials had on occasion been taking a softer line and mentioning that Pakistain plays a pivotal role in both the fight against terrorism and in any final settlement in Afghanistan. True, many issues still remain to be sorted out if Pakistain and the US are to overcome mutual distrust. But Sheikh Mauritani's arrest, and the positive reactions of both sides, could well herald a return to the pre-Davis state of intelligence cooperation.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/08/2011 00:00 ||
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[Dawn] THE disaster being inflicted by the monsoon in Sindh is now becoming tragically reminiscent of last year's devastating floods. On Monday, the chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority said that four to five million people in the province had been affected -- over a fifth of the number affected in 2010 -- and 132 had died. Nearly 700,000 houses had been damaged, he added, and standing crops on 1.7 million acres destroyed. Recent days have been especially deadly, with the majority of those who have died losing their lives within the last two weeks.
What makes this all the more unfortunate is that much of this year's devastation has resulted from a repeat of last year's mistakes and a failure to take preventive measures in light of that experience. Continued encroachments along drains have prevented their desilting, resulting in breaches. The construction and rebuilding of dykes and embankments planned after last year's experience was not completed in time. Various stakeholders are arguing, as they did in 2010, about who is responsible for breaches and which areas water should be diverted to. The NDMA and its provincial counterpart claim to be doing their job and the army has played an important role, but the real need is for disaster management expertise at the local level. District-level disaster management authorities have reportedly not been formed in most districts, and there is no provision for such entities at the union council and taluka level. As was the case last year, this leaves response largely in the hands of local government administrations, which are hardly resourced, equipped or trained to deal with natural disasters or their aftermath.
The cycle of human tragedy that has followed is also heartbreakingly familiar. As rainwater has turned to floods due to overflows and breaches in the irrigation system, tens of thousands of houses have been washed to the ground. Standing water has led to mosquito-bred and gastrointestinal diseases that have already taken lives. Roads, communications, electricity and gas have been cut off. Relief goods, including food and tents, are in short supply. The prices of essential items have skyrocketed. Most damagingly, families have lost the cattle and crops on which their livelihoods depend and which will take months, if not years, to regain. Meanwhile, ...back at the shattered spaceship, Fffflirgoll the Arcturan slithered stealthily toward the control room, where the humans had barricaded themselves... the danger is that the private funds that became such an important part of relief and rehabilitation last year may not be forthcoming until more damage has been done, or at least highlighted. It is past time for Islamabad to concentrate its energies and resources on mitigating the effects of this new monsoon tragedy.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/08/2011 00:00 ||
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[Dawn] TEN years after the devastating crime against humanity that altered New York's skyline and claimed nearly 3,000 American lives, there is evidence aplenty that so-called counter-terrorism can be deadlier than terrorism.
The violence of the weak cannot hope to match the vengeance of the powerful. The difference, of course, is that the latter is supposedly justifiable. America came under attack, so it had to retaliate. It considered itself at war, so that misconception had to be translated into reality. Open-ended conflict is the new reality. The idea of peace is so 20th-century; there's no visible room for it in the cowardly new world.
It is easy enough, and not entirely unreasonable, to blame the consequences of 9/11 on Al Qaeda. Its intentions were no doubt malicious in the extreme. Whatever the motivating factors, the intention behind the atrocities was to provoke a conflict. The United States could, of course, have refused to take the bait.
A special forces operation focusing on the Al Qaeda stronghold of Tora Bora may well have succeeded in targeting the instigators of the crime (the actual perpetrators were, of course, all dead). Combined with a judicious reassessment of American foreign policy -- possibly entailing a gradual withdrawal of support from Middle Eastern dictators and a loosening of bonds with the Likud mentality in Israel -- such a strategy may have brought the global view of the US into closer proximity with its broad self-image as a benign force in international affairs.
That would arguably have been too much to expect even from a relatively sensible regime in Washington. It was more or less out of the question for an administration dominated by neoconservatives -- in other words, the radical right -- who were eagerly on the lookout for an excuse to invade Iraq.
(The regime's self-described Darth Vader has lately confessed that aggression against Syria, too, was on his mind -- but no one else was quite crazy enough to concur. If the autobiographies of Tony Blair and George W. Bush deserved to be displayed in the crime section of bookstores, Dick Cheney's effort surely deserves a slot in the gothic horror department.)
The 'need' to conquer Afghanistan was viewed in certain quarters as something of a distraction, and the 'been there, done that' mentality prevailed when the focus shifted to Iraq within a year and a half. The excuse, it's easy to forget, was Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction'. A slightly more subtle assault on the public consciousness suggested he was somehow behind 9/11.
The absurdity of the proposition, inadequately tackled by the American media, did not lead to much subsequent embarrassment in Washington. Once more it was a case of been there, done that.
The security state inaugurated by Harry Truman and reinforced four decades later by Ronald Reagan had reached its apotheosis by reinventing its raison d'être. The extended assault on civil liberties in the name of combating communism had eventually begun to peter out. A new enemy had to be found following the Soviet Union's self-immolation, and Al Qaeda and its cohorts rose to the challenge.
Relative to the military power of the US, Al Qaeda has always been something of a nonentity, barely comparable in any reasonable analysis to the threat purportedly posed by the USSR and international communism. But it fit the bill, aided by its propensity to instigate or carry out spectacular acts of brutality.
It was, after all, nurtured in the culture of the crusade in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and its allies, when the Mujahideen received their training in cut-throat terrorist techniques directly or indirectly from American and other western sources. Jihad, at the time, was an exalted concept in the American vocabulary.
This is not an aspect of 20th-century that figures prominently in discourses about the aftermath of 9/11. It's inconvenient to recall, after all, that the Taliban are essentially the illegitimate products of a sordid ménage à trois that involved a fundamentalist military regime in Pakistain, the obscurantist rulers of Soddy Arabia and the 'freedom-loving' US.
It is similarly considered impolitic to dwell too much on the western support Saddam received during the war he launched against Iran. A more recent example of hypocrisy has emerged lately in evidence of collusion with the Libyan regime of Muammar Qadaffy ...whose instability has been an inspiration to dictators everywhere... , notably in the context of 'extraordinary rendition' -- which essentially involves those suspected of terrorist involvement or even sympathies being dispatched at great cost to countries where they are bound to be tortured.
Embarrassingly for the West, Abdul Hakim Belhaj, now the security chief in Tripoli, has demanded an apology from London and Washington for their role in seizing him in Bangkok in 2004 and handing him over to the Libyan authorities. But rest assured that such episodes will soon be all but forgotten.
Certain inconvenient aspects of 9/11 are indeed being revisited this week, notably the conviction among a number of former American intelligence operatives that better coordination between the CIA and the FBI could have foiled the dastardly plot.
Some attention has also been focused on the CIA's transformation from an information-gathering agency into a killing machine.
That may be something of an exaggeration, in the sense that 'eliminations' also figure fairly frequently in the Company's past, although its rededication to liquidations has entailed casualties on a much grander scale.
the late Osama bin Laden ... who went titzup one dark and stormy night... and his lot were driven to some extent by an aggrandised notion of their role in the defeat and demise of the Soviet Union, which led them to imagine they could also destroy another superpower -- by provoking a war. It was, on several levels, an incredibly stupid idea. But America came to the party, and even exceeded expectations by turning Iraq into a battlefield.
At a conservative estimate, the cost this has entailed in terms of human lives is almost a hundred times the 9/11 toll. For the most part, the victims, unlike their American counterparts, will remain unsung and un-eulogised. There's plenty of evidence that 21st-century imperialism will not long endure. But by the time that is incontrovertibly established, a great many more lives will have been wasted.The crime enacted 10 years ago on Sunday was horrendous. It would have made sense to treat it that way. The aftermath -- as western commentators, barring a few honourable exceptions, will no doubt neglect to note this week -- has literally been a hundred times worse.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/08/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
Sorry. I tried, but need more coffee to get all the way thru this flowery bit of frothing. However, this bit:
Theviolence of the weak cannot hope to match the vengeance of the powerful.
suggests that, just maybe, you shouldn't *bleep* with us and you might want to stop your fellow co-religionists from doing the same, non-state actors though they may be, just to prevent trouble from showing up on your doorstep unannounced in the dead of night.
#2
More apologist crap from the wienies and hand wringing nebishes on the left. What a bunch of limp dicks.
Boo hoo, you kill 3,000 people and do almost $100 billion in damage to our economy and we are supposed to do what? Sit on our hands and invite more attacks.
This person has no understanding of the mindset of these nutjobs on the jihad trail.
Or he is trying to lay off blame on the US for the havoc that cozying up to terror breeds more terror.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
09/08/2011 10:18 Comments ||
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#3
A hit piece. Has little nothing to do with reality.
Posted by: Barbara ||
09/08/2011 12:05 Comments ||
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#7
The aftermath -- as western commentators, barring a few honourable exceptions, will no doubt neglect to note this week -- has literally been a hundred times worse.
Check with the Japanese or Germans to find out how much higher that multiple can go. And think twice before you mess with us again.
#8
The entire arab world is in tatters.
All the dictators in the region are either dead or on the run.
Massive social unrest, food and water shortages, disease and pestilence.
There is a lesson to be learned here.
#9
The aftermath has only been a hundred times worse?
We're getting soft.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
09/08/2011 14:19 Comments ||
Top||
#10
Note that this piece was published in Dawn, the English-language "newspaper of record" for Pakistan. So this is a Pakistani perspective, not a Western lefty one.
#11
So this is a Pakistani perspective, not a Western lefty one.
A point worth noting and yet another reason to read the 'Burg. However, a cynical person might wonder if there were a nanogram of difference between the two.
#12
However, a cynical person might wonder if there were a nanogram of difference between the two.
Hey, for alittle charge of your cynicism batteries go Check out the 9/11 op/ed's at HuffPo - all of them. It's as if they used the exact same script as this guy.
#13
There are lessons that might be learned. If you kill Americans, they spend trillions to make war. Not the war of adventure, like waving a sword and riding out of the desert on a camel, but the war of hell in your house, your fields, your cities,your country and lots of dead kinsmen.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Yields on two-year Greek government bonds reached 46.84% recently. This is roughly comparable to yields on Argentine bonds in early December 2001 - only a month before the country defaulted on its debt.
THE disaster being inflicted by the monsoon in Sindh is now becoming tragically reminiscent of last year's devastating floods. On Monday, the chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority said that four to five million people in the province had been affected -- over a fifth of the number affected in 2010 -- and 132 had died. Nearly 700,000 houses had been damaged, he added, and standing crops on 1.7 million acres destroyed. Recent days have been especially deadly, with the majority of those who have died losing their lives within the last two weeks.
