Zahuktava se...zakuvava se...

[vbo man]

* [new] Re: Europe - 25 February (4.00 / 2)
Greek rescue in danger as deputy prime minister attacks 'Nazi' Germany - Telegraph

    Greece has greatly damaged its chances of an EU bail-out by lashing out at Germany over war-time atrocities and accusing Italy of cooking its books to hide public debt.

    The escalating dispute came as a general strike in Greece spilled over into violent clashes between hooded youths and riot police in Athens. Chants of "burn the banks" are a foretaste of tensions once austerity measures bite in earnest later this year.

    Public and private sector unions joined forces to bring the country to a standstill for 24 hours, halting flights, trains, and shipping, and shutting schools and hospitals.

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Italy Masked Finances Worse than Greece: Pangalos - CNBC

    Italy did more than Greece to mask the state of its finances to secure euro zone entry, Greek Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos said, adding that Germany's history made it ill-placed to criticize his country.

    The European Union has asked Greece to explain reports that it engaged in derivatives trades with U.S. investment banks that may have allowed it to mask the size of its debt and deficit from EU authorities ahead of its entry into the euro zone.

    "You simply put some amounts of money in the next year ... it is what everybody did and Greece did it to a lesser extent than Italy for example," Pangalos said in an interview with BBC World Service radio broadcast on Wednesday.

    Greece is under mounting pressure from markets and EU policymakers to slash its large debt and deficit. It must prove to Brussels by mid-March that it can meet its ambitious targets to cut the budget shortfall by 4 percent of gross domestic product this year to 8.7 percent.

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Michael Hudson: Wall Street Moves in for the Kill

    The link between financial and fiscal crisis - and hence the need for a symbiotic fiscal-financial reform - is just as clear in Europe. The Greek government has pre-sold its tax revenues from roads and other infrastructure to Wall Street, leaving less future revenue to pay its public debt. To cap matters, paying income tax is almost voluntary for wealthy Greeks. Tax evasion is hardly necessary in the post-Soviet states, where property is hardly taxed at all. (The flat tax falls almost entirely on labor.)

    Throughout the world, scaling back the 20th century's legacy of progressive taxation and untaxing real estate and finance has led to a public debt crisis. Property income hitherto paid to governments is now paid to the banks. And although Wall Street has extracted $13 trillion in bailouts just since October 2008, the thought of raising taxes on wealth to pay just $1 trillion over an entire decade for Social Security or health insurance is deemed a crisis that would lead Wall Street to shut down the economy. It is telling governments to shift to a regressive tax system to make up the fiscal shortfall by raising taxes on labor and cutting back public spending on the economy at large. This is what is plunging economies from California to Greece and the Baltics into fiscal and financial crisis. Wall Street's solution - to balance the budget by cutting back the government's social contract and deregulating finance all the more - will shrink the economy and make the budget deficits even more severe.

    Financial speculators no doubt will clean up on the turmoil.

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The deal apparently was done so that Goldman's relationship manager with the Greek Government, Antigone Loudiadis, could advance her career to become a Goldman partner in 2000, become head of Goldman's investment banking group in Europe and make as much as $12 million per year in total compensation. Such enticements can readily overwhelm and supply balm for wounded consciences. Why the TBTFs need to pay such big bonuses, etc.

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France24 - French airport strikes cause days of disruption

    AFP - More flights to and from Paris' main airports were due to be cancelled Friday as an air traffic controllers' strike goes into its fourth day, aviation authorities said.

    Disruption could also be caused at the weekend by a separate action by Air France pilots' unions who called a strike from Friday to Monday to protest at restructuring plans.

Svi bi da ushtede na radnicima  :cry:
I da ne uznemiravaju gazde ...

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Civil servants to strike over redundancy pay | Politics | guardian.co.uk

    More than a quarter of a million public sector workers are to stage a two-day strike next month, bringing jobcentres, tax offices and the courts to a standstill in action designed to put maximum pressure on the government just weeks before the general election.

    Up to 270,000 civil servants - including air traffic controllers, benefits and customs officers, police support workers and pension administrators - will go on strike on March 8 and 9 over plans to reduce civil servants' redundancy pay-outs to save £500m.

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EUobserver / Germany failed to pay WWII compensation, Greece says

    EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Athens has accused Germany of failing to meet its World War II compensation obligations following the Nazi occupation of Greece in 1941, a claim Berlin has firmly rejected.

    In a radio interview on Wednesday (24 February), Greek Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos criticised Germany's attitude towards the ongoing Greek debt crisis, adding that Athens had never received adequate war reparations.

Germany denies accusations it failed to pay WWII reparations to Greece | Europe | Deutsche Welle | 25.02.2010

    Tension between Germany and Greece has risen after offensive doctored photographs have appeared in both countries' media. Some Greek officials have also claimed Germany owes them billions in war reparations.

    Germany has rejected recent accusations by a Greek official that the country still owed Greece billions of euros in reparations for World War II.

    Greek Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos was quoted on the BBC Web site on Wednesday saying that Germany "took away the gold that was in the Bank of Greece... and they never gave it back."

    Andreas Peschke, spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry, rejected the accusations at a press briefing in Berlin by saying Germany had paid Greece the equivalent of more than 4.4 billion euros ($5.9 billion) in formal war reparations and compensation for slave laborers.

    "A discussion of the past is not of great help in resolving Greece's problems," he added.

Opa Miki...ne kazu dzabe " kad glad zakuca na vrata, ljubav izleti kroz prozor"...
Stay tuned...bice josh cirkusa...poor Europe...a nisu se josh ni ljudski sastavili... :cry: Dok Srbija dodje na red i raspashce se...al ko zna zashto je to dobro :evil: xdrinka

[Pijanista]

ajd da ne ispadne da se vodi monolog...

[slawen]

 :mrgreen:

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PIIGS to the Slaughter

[alan ford]

bio je ovde jedan slican lik koji je lepio desetine tekstova iz raznoraznih medija pa bi na topiku naterao i na nekoliko stranica sam samcijat. Zeka ga zvali...

[vbo man]

Stvarno gde je Zeka? Bash mi fali...mozDa bih imala s kim da pricham :cry:

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Bloomberg: Greece Now, U.K. Next as Scots Ready for Pound Plunge

    While the eyes of the world focus on Greece's debt crisis, investors in Edinburgh are busy preparing for the U.K. to be next.

    Turcan Connell, which caters to rich families, expects the pound to lose between 20 percent and 30 percent against the dollar once investors turn their sights on Britain as the government sells a record amount of debt. Sterling slid to a 10- month low versus the U.S. currency today.

    "Alarm bells were ringing in Greece for a long time and when it happened, it happened very quickly," Haig Bathgate, head of strategy at Turcan Connell, said at the company's offices in the Scottish capital. "The U.K. is in a similar predicament. It could be hit very hard."

Kako ono ide..." Neka se pripremi...UK..."

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Greek Mess, Euromess, Western Nations Mess, World Mess? by Immanuel Wallerstein

    Everyone is discussing what Fortune magazine is calling the "Greek maelstrom" and everyone is pointing the finger at someone else. Whose fault is it? The Greek government is accused of cheating and allowing Greeks to live beyond their means. The European Union is accused of having created an impossible structure for the euro.

    Or is the fault with Goldman Sachs?
    ...
    What these multiple cross-cutting analyses of short-term blame and short-term gain miss is that the problem is worldwide and structural. Banks exist to make money. The games Goldman Sachs has been playing (and other banks as well) has not only been with Greece, but with many, many countries - even with Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, even with the United States.
    ...
    Greece's problems are indeed Germany's problems. Germany's problems are indeed the United States' problems. And the United States' problems are indeed the world's problems. Analyzing who did what in the last ten years is far less useful than discussing what, if anything, can be done in the next ten years. What is going on is a world-wide game of chicken. Everyone seems to be waiting for who will flinch first. Someone is going to make a mistake. And then we'll have what Barry Eichengreen has called "the mother of all financial crises." Even China will be affected by that one.

Tik , tik, tik....

Nama u Australiji izgleda niko nishta ne moze...Cene kuca su otishle 12 % proshle godine i 5 % u januaru, sa tendencijom josh veceg rasta jer se ne zida dovoljno novih , kazu na TV. Moja prijateljica koja ima vec $ 500000 duga upravo je dobila josh $ 1 000 000 loan od (ozbiljne) banke... a i ona proleter...prodaje labor xrotaeye.
Shares idu gore kao i mili nam dolar...ovde je ko u najbolja vremena.
Mi cemo valjda da odemo pod led tek posle Kine...a dotle da nas Bog vidi...nece ni biti proletera u ovoj zemlji :!:.Sve kapitalisti xdrinka

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UK

The number of mortgages approved for house purchases dived by 17% during January as the housing market suffered a steep fall in activity, figures showed today.
...On Friday, figures from the Nationwide suggested the drop in demand from buyers could already be feeding through to house prices. It reported a 1.1% fall in prices in February,

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Goldman Sachs, the international web -  Le Monde/Presseurop - English

    The giant American investment bank which is accused of helping the Greek state to conceal the real nature of its financial situation while speculating on its debts can count on a remarkable network of advisers with very close links to European leaders, reports Le Monde.

    Petros Christodoulou affects not to care about compliments or their source. Ever since he was a teenager, this top-of-the-class student has grown used to hearing his praises sung. Appointed on 19 February to the head of the organization for the management of Greek public debt, he has arrived at the top of the tree. However, the trouble is that the former manager of global markets at the National Bank of Greece (NBG) is at the centre of an inquiry, announced on 25 February by the United States Federal Reserve, on contracts relating to Greek national debt, which link Goldman Sachs and other companies to the government in Athens.

    The New York based investment bank was paid as a banking advisor to the Greek government while speculating on the Hellenic nation's sovereign debt. In particular, the American regulator is interested in the role played by Petros Christodoulou, who, in collaboration with Goldman, supervised the creation of the London company Titlos to transfer debt from Greece's national accounts to the NBG. Before joining the NBG in 1998, Mr Christodoulou had worked as a banker for -- you guessed it -- Goldman Sachs.