Reblogged from Financial Post | Business:
LONDON - Parties committed to Greece’s multi-billion-euro bailout are on course to secure a slim parliamentary majority on Sunday, according to an official vote projection from the interior ministry.
The projection showed New Democracy taking 29.5 percent of the vote, with SYRIZA in second place with 27.1 percent. The Socialist PASOK followed in third place with 12.3 percent.
The result translates into 128 seats for New Democracy and 33 seats for PASOK.
In the midst of Greece's economic crisis, one entrepreneur has come up with a novel way to earn extra cash: He's renting out farmland. Dimitris Koutsolioutsos started gineagrotis.gr to connect city dwellers to rural farmers. The urban resident rents out a section of the farmer's land to grow whatever produce is desired, which is then delivered to the city each week -- either to the resident or, if desired, a local soup kitchen.
Reblogged from National Post | News:
ATHENS — A Greek far-right politician who slapped a left-wing politician in the face and threw water at another during a live television talk show sued his victims for defamation on Monday.
Ilias Kasidiaris, spokesman of the far-right Golden Dawn party, said he would also sue private TV station Antenna for wrongful detention after he was locked in a room in the studio following the attack until he broke down the door and escaped.
And so the Grexit continues to be nigh: George Soros may handicap Greece's June 17 election in favor of the pro-bailout parties deemed more likely to keep the nation in Europe's monetary union, but better-safe-than-sorry still applies. If you're a Greek saver, that may mean stashing some euros under your mattress. If you're the British banknote printer De La Rue, it means…
Reblogged from National Post | News:
ATHENS — Greece's surging leftist leader predicted on Thursday his party would sweep next month's election and refused to stop demanding an end to "barbaric" austerity policies he said were bankrupting the nation.
Increasingly worried about Greece's future in the euro zone, foreign lenders and mainstream parties have stepped up warnings that the country risks being cut off from aid if it fails to stick to spending cuts included in its latest bailout package.
Reblogged from National Post | News:
GREEK NEO-NAZI LEADER DENIES GAS CHAMBERS
The head of the Greek neo-Nazi party elected to parliament during May 6 elections has denied in an interview the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps during the Second World War.
The comments drew a sharp rebuke from the outgoing government, with a spokesman saying they distorted history and were an affront to Holocaust victims.
One reason the United States remained active in the politics and war in Southeast Asia in the 1960s was the so-called domino theory: if one nation in the region fell to communism, it was only a matter of time until its neighbors would too. The same can be said, perhaps, about some of the impetus behind U.S. involvement and troop presence in the Middle East.
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Source: New York Times.
«Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) has represented the Diamondback State’s sixth congressional district since 2001, cutting a pro-immigration, pro-trade, limited-government, anti-spending path that contrasts sharply with the mainstream of the Republican Party. »
Berlin and the European Central Bank (ECB) are deeply divided over the best way to handle the Greek crisis. The dispute reached a new high last week: Should they pursue a soft debt restructuring or give billions of euros in loans for years to come? Influential Germans fear the threat of austerity measures could be greater than a «haircut» of Greek debt.
Read The Rest Of The Story On Spiegel Online, And Don’t Miss John Mauldin’s Business Insider Article: Here What’s Going To Happen When Greece Defaults.
Source: Barron’s How to Fix Greece. HT: The Big Picture.
Cafe Hayek: Capitalists Tend Not To Like Capitalism. [Derived From This NY Times Article: Capitalists Who Fear Free Markets ].
Return Of The Bubble? LinkedIn Has the Highest Price-Revenue Ratio of Any Stock Anywhere – makes only $12 million/year but is valued at $9 billion.
Market Meme, Friday.
3 simple ways to protect your profits.
Independent Power! Norway, Iceland And Liechtenstein Froze Payment Of 235 Million NOK ($42 Million) In European Economic Area Grants To Greece.
Betting On Rising Demand: Manhattan Developers Are Planning The City’s Biggest Decade Of Office Construction Since The ’80s.
John Stewart On The Strauss-Kahn Matter: Being an economist is no defense (video).
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Mansour Bahrami, Tennis’ Greatest Entertainer (video).
The World’s Tallest Lego Tower (video).
Champagne Cocktail: Raspberry, Pomegranate, And Champagne // Wikipedia.
Image by centralasian via Flickr
In the latest Vanity Fair Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and The Big Short, did a fascinating piece on the Irish econopocalypse:
«A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will. Two weeks earlier the collapse of Lehman Brothers had cast doubt on banks everywhere. Ireland’s banks had not been managed to withstand doubt; they had been managed to exploit blind faith. Now the Irish people finally caught a glimpse of the guy meant to be safeguarding them: the crazy uncle had been sprung from the family cellar. Here he was, on their televisions, insisting that the Irish banks were “resilient” and “more than adequately capitalized” … when everyone in Ireland could see, in the vacant skyscrapers and empty housing developments around them, evidence of bank loans that were not merely bad but insane. “What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.” »
The rest here [via Paul Kedrosky]
Via Wikipedia
Bloomberg reports:
“Norway may become Europe’s next investor haven as the region’s fiscal turmoil raises the appeal of debt and currency markets in an economy with the world’s smallest default-risk.”
Details are located here.
The Columbia Business School-professor, makes the arguments in an updated edition of his book on the credit crunch, Freefall. In the new material, exclusively extracted in the Sunday Telegraph, he reveals his fears.
![The powerful European Central Bank [ E C B ] i...](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4066/4416970001_ed802ee026_m.jpg "The powerful European Central Bank [ E C B ] i...")
The European Central Bank in Frankfurt - via Flickr.
“The different needs of countries with high trade surpluses, particularly Germany, and those running deficits such as Ireland, Portugal and Greece, meant that the single currency was under intense pressure and may not survive. He suggests that one way to save the euro would be for Germany to leave the eurozone, so allowing the currency to devalue and help struggling countries with exports.
“Countries that share a currency have a fixed exchange rate with each other and thereby give up an important tool of adjustment,as long as there were no shocks, the euro would do fine. The test would come when one or more of the countries faced a downturn.”
More here.
Offshore oil plattform in the North Sea via Wikipedia
The world’s second largest sovereign wealth fund said it’s taking advantage of volatility to increase returns:
“If you look at what has happened during the financial crisis, a fund like ours actually came through it quite well and that to some extent increased our risk capacity and our risk willingness,” Yngve Slyngstad, head of Norges Bank Investment Management, said yesterday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “In a 30-year horizon you are actually paid for taking volatility; volatility for us is actually a good thing.”
Supplementary lessons from Norway’s Oil Fund on Bloomberg.
Image via Wikipedia
“France, Germany and the UK have already committed to introducing a bank levy, designed to cover the costs of any future financial crises.
Following the multi-billion-dollar bail-outs made by governments across the world in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, the leaders of Europe’s three biggest economies have argued strongly that taxpayers should not be expected to foot the bill for any future crises.
However, the ministers were unable to agree to a Europe-wide levy. They were also unable to agree to a tax on individual financial transactions.
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said: “It is very difficult to see how in practice you could make a transaction tax operate in a world in which capital markets and financial activity can move very quickly to jurisdictions outside the European Union.”
Details on todays meeting from BBC here.
The Wall Street Journal: How Gangsters Are Saving Euro Zone.
MarketWatch: Stocks Beat The Heat In July.
Bloomberg: Most U.S. Stocks Rise as Confidence Overshadows GDP.
The Financial Times: Europe’s centre-right leaders face a struggle.
Reuters: Emboldened RIM readies new touchscreen BlackBerry.
BusinessWeek: Oil-Rig Workers Gain Whistleblower Protections in House Bill.
AP: Greece turns to military to restore gas supplies cut by strike.
Forbes.com: Six Ways To Avoid Capital Gains Tax.
Cato Institute: “Even Keynesian Accounting Can’t Find All That ‘Stimulus’”.
Wall Street marks best month in a year in July – Dow added 7.1 %, the S&P 500 rose 6.9 % and Nasdaq gained 6.9 %. Stocks rally as worries over Europe ease; dollar, gold fall.
Interested in the Greek Tragedy? Marginal Revolution thinks this short essay worth spending a few minutes on:
“The lack of capital generation is the most serious implication of Greek geography. Situated as far from global flows of capital as any European country that considers itself part of the West, Greece finds itself surrounded by sheltered ports, most of which are protected by mountains and cliffs that drop off into the sea. This affords Greece little room for population growth, and contributes to its inability to produce much domestic capital. This, combined with the regionalized approach to political authority encouraged by mountainous geography, has made Greece a country that has been inefficiently distributing what little capital it has had for millennia.
Countries that have low capital growth and considerable infrastructural costs usually tend to develop a very uneven distribution of wealth. The reason is simple: Those who have access to capital get to build and control vital infrastructure and thereby make the decisions both in public and working life. In countries that have to import capital, this becomes even more pronounced, since those who control industries and businesses that bring in foreign cash have more control than those who control fixed infrastructure, which can always be nationalized (industries and businesses can move elsewhere if threatened with nationalization). When such uneven distribution of wealth is entrenched in a society, a serious labor-capital (or, in the European context, a left-right) split emerges. This is why Greece is politically similar to Latin American countries, which face the same infrastructural and capital problems, right down to periods of military rule and an ongoing and vicious labor-capital split.
Despite the limitations on its capital generation, Greece has no alternative but to create an expensive defensive capability that allows it to control the Aegean Sea. Put simply, the core of Greece is neither the breadbaskets of Thessaly and Greek Macedonia, nor the Athens-Piraeus metropolitan area, where around half of the population lives. The core of Greece is the Aegean Sea — the actual water, not the coastland — which allows these three critical areas of Greece to be connected for trade, defense and communication. Control of the Aegean also gives Greece the additional benefit of influencing trade between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Without control of the Aegean, there simply is no Greece.”
And here is a terrible song relating to the subject:
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