The no vote by Greece is an extraordinary act of political courage, defying threats and intimidation from the European Union, the US government and the Greek ruling class and sends an alarming signal to the global elite that the game has dramatically changed. The “no” vote itself has made clear the social chasm separating the working class from the ruling elites of Greece, Europe and America and sets the stage for needed social change but it won't be easy escaping our Black Hole of debt: Allen L Roland, PhD
"Since the troika austerity
measures began in 2010, the Greek economy has shrunk by a quarter, unemployment has skyrocketed to 25 percent, and because
most of the money it's been lent has gone straight back to the banksters, Greece is still more than $271 billion in debt.
Whatever way you look at it, austerity has been a complete and utter disaster, and Greece’s Syriza-led government is completely justified in opposing more cuts, even if doing so might force Greece to abandon the Euro": Thom Hartman
Whatever way you look at it, austerity has been a complete and utter disaster, and Greece’s Syriza-led government is completely justified in opposing more cuts, even if doing so might force Greece to abandon the Euro": Thom Hartman
On March 5, 2012,
Nick Dunbar, who appears in the BBC documentary on the Goldman Sachs deal and
author of The Devil’s Derivatives, penned a revealing article for Bloomberg News with Elisa Martinuzzi.
The writers describe the Goldman Sachs deal with Greece as follows:
“On the day the 2001
deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793
million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou,
who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price
of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs
persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to 5.1
billion euros, he said…
“A gain of 600
million euros represents about 12 percent of the $6.35 billion in revenue
Goldman Sachs reported for trading and principal investments in 2001, a
business segment that includes the bank’s fixed-income, currencies and
commodities division, which arranged the trade and posted record sales that
year. The unit, then run by Lloyd C. Blankfein, 57, now the New York-based
bank’s chairman and chief executive officer, also went on to post record
quarterly revenue the following year…
“The revised deal
proposed by the bank and executed in 2002, was to base repayments on what was
then a new kind of derivative ~ an inflation swap linked to the euro-area
harmonized index of consumer prices…
“That didn’t work out
well for Greece either. Bond yields fell, pushing the government’s losses to
5.1 billion euros, according to an analysis commissioned by Papanicolaou. It
was ‘a very bad bet,’ he said in an interview.”
The deal was
restructured again in 2005 according to the Bloomberg article, this time
locking in the 5.1 billion euro debt.
For the unschooled to
the ways of Wall Street, one might jump to the conclusion that Greece and its
finance officials were knowing participants in the deal. That would be a
reasonable assumption were it not for counties and cities and school districts
across America that were similarly fleeced and hoodwinked by investment
banksters on Wall Street especially Goldman.
See article ~ https://www.transcend.org/tms/2015/07/goldman-sachs-doesnt-have-clean-hands-in-greece-crisis/
Shanghai Composite
Index
Meanwhile, Since mid-June,
Chinese stocks experienced their biggest three-week decline (-29%) since 1992 ~
and fueled by skeptical investors have so far shrugged off each step the
government has taken to keep share prices aloft: an interest-rate cut, threats
to punish rumormongers, allowing the national pension fund to buy stocks and
even plans to investigate short-sellers who have placed bets that the market
will fall.
RT:Is it time to run
for cover in Europe, or would a Grexit not so horrendous? Where is it going to
go?
Max
Keiser:
I’ve been watching the stock price of Deutsche Bank today, Germany’s largest
bank, one of the largest banks in the world, certainly with the biggest
derivatives book in the world. They are the counter party to the Greek debt.
And their stock got hammered. Deutsche Bank could go the way of Lehman Brothers
or Bear Stearns, which would set off a global liquidity crisis that would make
2008 look tame by comparison. Look, the thing about Greece is that the Syriza
government has said all along that “we have no money, and we’re not going to
pay this debt.” And now, Jean-Claude Juncker has woken up to the fact of what
he has been told now for a year.
Remember Jean-Claude
Juncker is the guy that said not long ago that “when the going gets tough, you
have to lie.” So anything that comes out of his mouth, we have to assume that
he is lying, because certainly the going has started to get tough
RT: How tough is it
going to get? What’s actually going to happen by your best estimation?
MK: As I’ve been
saying all along, Greece should grexit and now it looks like they will grexit,
which is fantastic for Greece, they will get to restart their economy. It’s
terrible for their counter parties, it’s terrible for the Eurozone, and of
course Italy and Spain are probably the next countries that will come under the
same kind of stress that we’re seeing in Greece right now.
RT: If it chose
bankruptcy, would Greece walk free from all of its debt or will it be pursued
in the future by the rest of Europe?
MK: They can be
pursued all they want, but it’s a global economy, it’s global competition, and
Greece has the right to compete in global competition and not have a
colonization of their economy by Germany, the ECB, the IMF – the Troika. They
have the right to be a free people. The Troika, unfortunately, overplayed their
hand, now they must suffer the consequences. Greece will be fine, but I can’t
say the same about the Eurozone. I think now they’ve lit a fuse to total
destruction of the euro and the banks. In particular Deutsche Bank is the most
exposed. This is a hundred trillion dollar derivatives book that could go the
way of Lehman Brothers. That’s an enormous shellacking to the global economy,
and I think now we’ve got to raise the odds of this happening above 50 percent.
See
keiser article ~ https://www.transcend.org/tms/2015/07/grexit-would-trigger-liquidity-crisis-worse-than-2008/
"The
way the black hole sucks in entire countries is as follows. If the black
hole doesn’t have enough to suck in for a period of time, it gets hungry and
makes the financial markets go into free-fall. The financial instruments of
countries that happen to be farther away from the black hole ~ out on the
periphery ~ fall faster. In search of a “safe haven,” money floods out of
these countries and into the “core” countries that are clustered tightly around
the black hole ~ the US, Germany, Japan and a few others. The black
hole gobbles up this money, but is then hungry for more. But since the
periphery countries are now financially too weak to resist, they can easily be
turned into black hole fodder. This is done by saddling the country with a
foreign debt it can never repay, then forcing it to keep making payments
against this debt by making it a condition for maintaining a financial lifeline
~ keeping the banks open, the ATMs stocked, the lights on and so on. To be able
to make the payments, the country is forced to dismantle its society and
economy through the imposition of austerity, to privatize everything in sight
turning it into collateral for more loans, and to surrender its sovereignty
to some transnational organizations, such as the IMF and the ECB, which are
directly involved in the care and feeding of the black hole." See article ~ https://www.transcend.org/tms/2015/07/the-care-and-feeding-of-a-financial-black-hole/
Allen
L Roland, PhD
Heart centered spiritual consultant and advisor Allen L Roland can be contacted at allen@allenroland.com Allen is also a lecturer and writer who shares a weekly political and social commentary on his web log and website allenroland.com. He is also featured columnist on Veterans Today and guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net
"I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride"
ReplyDeleteGreece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis