Dallara: Start Greece's engines of growth

Gunter Grass poem: “Shame of Europe” (Europas Schande)

Shame of Europe [aka Europe’s Disgrace]


Close to chaos, because the market is not just, you’re far away from the country which was your cradle.

What was searched and found with one’s soul, is now considered to be as worthless as scrap metal.

As a debtor put naked on the pillory, a country about which you used to say you were grateful, suffers.

Poverty doomed country whose maintained wealth adorns museums of the loot you kept.

Those* who hit the country, blessed with islands, with the force of arms wore both uniforms and Holderlin^ in their knapsacks.

Barely tolerated country whose colonels were once tolerated by you as an alliance partner.

Country which lost its rights, whose belt is tightened and tightened again by the cocksurely powerful.

Antigone defying you wearing black and all over the country, the people whose guest you have been wear mourning clothes.

However, outside the country, the Croesus resembling followers have hoarded all what glitters like gold in your vaults.

Booze at last, drink! [European] Commissioners’ cheerleaders shout.
However, Socrates gives you back the [hemlock poison] cup full to the brim.

Curse you as a chorus, which is characteristic of you, will the gods, whose Mount Olympus you want to steal.

You’ll waste away mindlessly without the country, whose mind invented you, Europe.

* World War II German Nazi occupation soldiers

The Dark Days of the 'Greek' Memorandum

Greece in the Second World War

MUTE - The visualization of an economic rape

Nigel Farage

Charles Dallara, Managing Director, Institute of International Finance

Bank lobby chief Dallara in favor of giving Greece more lenient deficit reduction targets

ATHENS, Greece — Greece needs more lenient targets to reduce its budget deficit so that its economy can return to growth more quickly, the head of an international banking lobby said Wednesday.

Charles Dallara, managing director of the Institute of International Finance, said the 17 eurozone countries should find a better balance between policies that favor debt reduction and those that help growth.



An over-emphasis on budget cuts will cause the risk of a “protracted era” of recession or low-growth, he warned at a banking event in Athens.

Greece is approaching its sixth year of recession as it keeps cutting spending and raising taxes to comply with the demands of its international bailout.

“It’s my view that everything must be done to avoid this reality,” Dallara said of the deepening recession. “What is needed instead in my view is to ease the case of fiscal adjustment.”

Dallara led negotiations with Greece earlier this year to restructure the country’s debt held by the private sector, wiping some €100 billion off the national debt.

Despite that writedown, Greece’s debt load is still not falling quickly enough.

Its bailout creditors — the 16 other eurozone states and the International Monetary Fund — agreed in principle to give Greece more time to complete its current austerity measures, from 2014 to 2016. But they are still divided over whether to give Greece more time — until 2022 rather than the currently planned 2020 — to bring its debt down to a manageable level of 120 percent of GDP.

To help Greece, Dallara argued that the International Monetary Fund could increase its contribution in the bailout program and provide concessional rates reserved for poorer countries.

He said Greek governments had shown “impressive willingness to bear short-term pain for long-term gain” in passing a major new round of austerity cuts, approved last week and worth €13.5 billion ($17 billion).

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Source

Dallara calls for lower Greece rates

14 Signs That The World Economy Is Getting Weaker

The United States is not the only one with massive economic problems right now. The truth is that just about wherever you look around the globe things are getting even worse. China is experiencing a substantial economic slowdown, and Japan has resorted to yet another round of money printing in an effort to keep the Japanese economy moving. Unemployment in Europe continues to get even worse, and the riots this week in Spain and in Greece have been absolutely frightening at times. In the United States there are a whole host of signs that another recession is approaching, and the number of American CEOs that say that they plan to eliminate jobs in the coming months is rapidly rising. The world economy is more interconnected today than ever before, and that means that we are all in this together. Just remember what happened back in 2008 and 2009. The economic pain that started on Wall Street was felt in every corner of the planet. So anyone that believes that the United States (or any other major nation for that matter) is going to escape the next wave of the economic crisis is simply not being realistic. Why do you think central banks all over the world are in "panic mode" right now? They are firing all of their ammunition and printing money like there is no tomorrow in an attempt to keep the system together. Unfortunately, it is not going to work.

Greece Caught Underreporting Its Budget Deficit By Nearly 50%

There was a time about a year ago, before the second Greek bailout was formalized and the haircut on its domestic-law private sector bonds (first 50%, ultimately 80%, soon to be 100%) was yet to be documented, when it was in Greece's interest to misrepresent its economy as being worse than it was in reality. Things got so bad that the former head of the Greek Statistics Bureau Elstat, also a former IMF employee,faced life in prison if convicted of doing precisely this.

A year later, the tables have turned, now that Germany is virtually convinced that Europe can pull a Lehman and let Greece leave the Eurozone, and is merely looking for a pretext to sever all ties with the country, whose only benefit for Europe is to be a seller of islands at Blue Aegean water Special prices to assorted Goldman bankers (at least until it renationalizes them back in a few short years). So a year later we are back to a more normal data fudging dynamic, one in which Greece, whose July unemployment soared by one whole percentage point, will do everything in its power to underrepresent its soaring budget deficit.

Elder Joseph of Vatopedi for IMF and Turks

Elder Paisios - The Prophecies about Constantinople (English subs)

THE OTHER GREEK CRISIS

Mohammadi Younus grew up in Ghazni Province, in the east of Afghanistan, and studied medicine in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He had “a problem with the Taliban… a political problem” during the dark days of their rule, and he landed in jail. He decided to leave the country and crossed into Iran.

He bought a fake passport for a little more than two thousand dollars and made it to Turkey. He registered there as a refugee with the United Nations and chose Greece as his next destination because he had learned the Hippocratic oath, and Hippocrates was Greek. In 2004, he applied for asylum and was accepted, probably because of his medical education.


It was a rare achievement. That year, he estimates, about six thousand migrants applied for asylum in Greece; he was one of eleven who were accepted. Now there are about twenty-five thousand undocumented Afghans crowded into the country; the backlog of asylum applications has reached sixty thousand. Younus tries to aid the more recent arrivals from back home. He directs the Afghan Refugees and Migrants Community Organization from a modest office off Omonoia Square, in Athens. As he put it succinctly one recent afternoon, “Asylum doesn’t work.”

Spain should seek aid, Greece needs more time to pay: IIF

By Nick Edwards

BEIJING (Reuters) - Greece should get cheaper rates on its 130 billion euro aid deal and at least two more years from the European Union and International Monetary Fund to repay them, the chief negotiator of the country's private sector creditors said on Tuesday.

But better terms could only come after Athens delivers on commitments it has made to fiscal reform, Charles Dallara, managing director of the Institute of International Finance (IIF), told a news conference while on a trip to Beijing.

"Once that has been done, and I am confident it will be done, Europe and the IMF should move quickly to extend the adjustment period for at least two years and provide the modest additional financial support for that extension to be effective," Dallara said.

The Revolution From Above ~ Paul Craig Roberts

 

Today the Western peoples are experiencing the destruction of their well being that is comparable to what the one percent in Rome imposed on Roman citizens and conquered peoples. Here is how John Williams (shadowstats.com, 9-12-12) phrases the wipeout of Americans’ hopes:

“Consumers simply cannot make ends meet. Inflation-adjusted, or real, median household income declined for the fourth-straight year, plunging to its lowest level since 1995. Deflated by the CPI-U, the 2011 reading actually stood below levels seen in the late-1960s and early-1970s.”

Is the U.S. election keeping Greece in the euro?

 

Editor's note: Yanis Varoufakis is professor of economics at the University of Athens, visiting professor that the University of Texas, Austin and author of "The Global Minotaur: America, the true causes of the financial crisis and the future of the world economy."

Athens, Greece (CNN) -- My first memory of anything to do with a U.S. presidential election lurks in the mists of my Athenian childhood.

It was a warm June evening. My mother had taken me for a walk around the ancient stadium where the first modern-era Olympics were staged in 1896.

Suddenly I saw her eyes fill with tears after hearing a newsboy screaming, at the top of his voice, that someone called Bobby Kennedy was dead.

Spinning Bad Financial News Into Good ~ Paul Craig Roberts

 

Friday’s payroll jobs report says that 96,000 new jobs were created in August and that the unemployment rate (U.3) fell from 8.3% to 8.1%. As 96,000 new jobs are not enough to keep up with population growth, the decline in the U.3 unemployment rate was caused by 368,000 discouraged job seekers giving up on finding employment and dropping out of the work force as measured by U.3. Discouraged workers are not included in the U.3 measure of unemployment, which makes the measure useless. The only purpose of U.3 is to keep bad news out of the news. the U.3 unemployment rate only measures those who have not been discouraged by the inability to find a job and are still actively seeking employment.

Work Those Greeks! Advent of Modern Slavery?

EU Says Greeks Should Work Six-Day Week: Report ... In the leaked letter, reported in The Guardian newspaper, the European Commission, European Central Bank, andInternational Monetary Fund call for Athens to implement the measure as part of the bailout agreement with lenders. According to the paper, the letter states that more flexibility must be implemented to work schedules, including working into the weekend by increasing the number of maximum working days to six. The paper printed the following extract from the letter: "Increase the number of maximum workdays to six days per week for all sectors. Increase flexibility of work schedules; set the minimum daily rest to 11 hours; delink the working hours of employees from the opening hours of the establishment; eliminate restrictions on minimum/maximum time between morning and afternoon shifts; allow the consecutive two-week leave to be taken anytime during the year in seasonal sectors." – CNBC

To solve Greece crisis tightening should growth

Samaras, Greek Prime Minister’s trip to Germany and France, the recent results have been disappointing. The purpose of this trip is not to seek assistance, but rather to gain time. Samaras hopes the international community to give Greece more time to implement structural reforms. Short-term implementation of the excessive austerity, is bound to exacerbate the economic recession, resulting in further deterioration of the domestic situation. In this regard, Merkel appreciates the great sacrifices made by the Greek people to cut down the national debt and budget deficit, but refused to make concessions on the timing of reforms. Hollande reiterated its support for Greece to remain in the euro zone, and also asked Greece to honor its commitment to reform.