“Fall mountains, just don’t fall on me.” But the collapsing Eurozone mountain will fall on us all. Here’s some key news in this fast-breaking, tumultuous story.
The end of the euro: a survivor’s guide.
Ponzi financing in Greece continues; Greek banks receive €18bn transfer.
Greek banks have been shut off from regular ECB liquidity operations due to lack of sufficient collateral. Today the banks have that collateral thanks to a disbursement of funds from the EFSF which in turn will be used as collateral for more loans from the ECB.
If that happened here and the lending entity was public, there would be shareholder lawsuits due to the recklessness and stupidity of the loans.
Greek retailers stocking up on shutters in case of riots, alcohol inventories plunge.
Greece will leave Europe on June 18 if populists win election, says money manager.
Capital controls coming to Greece and Switzerland.
Spain’s Bankia revises 2011 results to 3.3 billion euro loss from 41 million profit.
Spain may need $30 billion more on top of the $19 billion for Bankia.
Greek Debt/GDP Ratio is 421.7%
Greece is now a “dead man walking” and the execution chamber is primed and ready. The only remaining questions, really, are who is going to flip the switch and at what time.
Barry Ritholtz in an interview about the US finacial crisis and its causes. This applies completely to Europe too.
So it really was about fucking the poor?
I don’t know if the guy who said that was being a little flamboyant, but, ultimately, yes. Here’s the problem with banking. People have described a banker as someone who is willing to lend you an umbrella on a sunny day, ie, if you really need the money, you can’t get it. As I said in Bailout Nation, the history of commercial credit has, for millions of years, been based on the borrower’s ability to service the debt. What took place from 2002 to 2007 is that the borrower’s ability to service the debt was replaced with a new standard for making loans. That standard wasn’t, “Hey, how do we fuck the poor?” but it was the ability of the lender to sell that debt to a Wall Street securitiser.
Meanwhile, the rest of the global economy is going south.