Markets are entering the Bear Zone (20% fall from the high, next blood on the streets?)
Eurozone finance ministers have delayed making a decision on giving Greece its next instalment of bailout cash, sending European shares down sharply.
It came after Greece said it would not meet this year's deficit cutting plan.
A meeting set for 13 October, when finance ministers had been expected to sign off the next Greek loan, has now been cancelled, said BBC Europe correspondent Chris Morris.
French shares fell 2.8%, German stocks by 3.5%, and the UK's FTSE by 2.8%.
As a result of the decision by finance ministers, Greece may not get its next loan tranche until November.
Its Finance Minister, Evangelos Venizelos, said that should not cause any difficulties as the Greek government had no funding problem until November.
Continued on Page 47
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he wants to bring ex-Soviet states into a "Eurasian Union" in an article which outlined his first foreign policy initiative as he prepares to return to the Kremlin as the country's next president.
Putin said the new union would build on an existing Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan which from next year will remove all barriers to trade, capital and labor movement between the three countries.
"We are not going to stop there and are setting an ambitious goal -- to achieve an even higher integration level in the Eurasian Union," Putin wrote in an article which will be published in Izvestia newspaper on October 4.
Putin said last month he would run in the March 2012 presidential election and his current public approval ratings show that he is set to win.
Putin's initiative comes as Russia nears the end of its 18-year-old negotiations to join the World Trade Organization. In the article Putin made no secret of his skepticism about the global trade watchdog.
"The process of finding new post-crisis global development models is moving forward with difficulty. For example, the Doha round (of international trade talks) has practically stopped. There are objective difficulties inside the WTO," he wrote.
In 2009, Putin threw Russia's bid to join the WTO into disarray, saying Russia would instead form the Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. The new initiative will have to be explained to WTO members.
WRONG CROSSROADS
Putin, who once called the collapse of the USSR in 1991 "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century," said his new project would not resemble the Soviet Union.
"It would be naive to attempt to restore or copy something from the past. However, a stronger integration on a new political and economic basis and a new system of values is an imperative of our era," Putin wrote. With Russia at the head of it all, of course. Continued on Page 47
#2
For most of recorded human history, that runs about 4,000 years, the lack of food and outright starvation has been the problem. It's only been in the last fifty years that 'overweight' has been a 'problem'. Which demonstrates that we really have no history. We only remember a span equal to about our lifetimes. Otherwise, we'd actually be celebrating our liberation from that which haunted mankind for most of its existence.
#3
Gee, I wonder what the US GDP growth would look like w/o the combined federal and state deficit spending of 12% GDP? 11% of GDP by the federal government alone.
#5
#1 - oversimplified, and not the common definition of GDP.
GDP is a sum of Consumption (C), Investment (I), Government Spending (G) and Net Exports (X M).
Y = C + I + G + (X − M)
I think that's what most economists use. They do conveniently leave out debt.
If you create a new term, GDP corrected for debt, and use US figures going back about 30 years, the US economy has grown little if at all. The apparent improvement seen in that time frame has mostly been an illusion, similar to people spending extravagantly by taking out a 2nd mortgage. That used to work pretty until, until it didn't.
#7
Follow 3 figures, not just 1, but be clear about it: GDP, GDP/governmental debt, and GDP/total national debt (add up governmental, business & private)
The other figure I can't get my head around is the idea that it is possible for economies to grow indefinitely. Seems mathematically impossible.
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.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he wants to bring ex-Soviet states into a "Eurasian Union" in an article which outlined his first foreign policy initiative as he prepares to return to the Kremlin as the country's next president.
