ECB may take losses in second Greek debt restructuring

The "Last" last chance, after the last one and before the next one,  for Greece

By Jan Strupczewski and John O'Donnell and Luke Baker

European policymakers are working on "last chance" options to bring Greece's debts down and keep it in the euro zone, with the ECB and national central banks looking at taking significant losses on the value of their bond holdings, officials said.

Private creditors have already suffered big writedowns on their Greek bonds under a second bailout for Athens sealed in February, but this was not enough to put the country back on the path to solvency and a urther restructuring is on the cards.

The latest aim is to reduce Greece's debts by a further 70-100 billion euros, several senior euro zone officials familiar with the discussions told Reuters, cutting its debts to a more manageable 100 percent of annual economic output.

This would require the European Central Bank and national central banks to take losses on their holdings of Greek government bonds, and could also involve national governments also accepting losses.

The favored option is for the ECB and national central banks to carry the cost, but that could mean that some banks and the ECB itself having to be recapitalized, the officials said.

The ECB declined comment on Friday.

Planning is in the early stages and no formal discussions have yet taken place. But there is an awareness that Greece is way off-track in improving its finances and that aggressive action is needed to keep the country inside the euro zone.

Officials described a further restructuring of Greek debt as a last chance to restore the country to solvency, with the agreed goal of cutting its debt to 120 percent of GDP by 2020 already seen as far beyond reach.

The International Monetary Fund, a party to the two rescue packages Greece has so far received, is in favor of overhauling Athens's official-sector loans - a process policymakers refer to as "OSI" or official-sector involvement.

"If I were to assign a percentage chance to OSI in Greece happening, I would say 70 percent," one euro zone official involved in the deliberations told Reuters.

Connecting the dots

The Governing Elite Are The Greatest Threat To the World's Middle Class

By Charles Kadlec

The crisis of the governing class is intensifying. Last week:

• The 100 billion euro bailout of Spanish banks and massive tax increases to narrow the government’s budget deficit are followed by a rise in interest rates on Spanish government bonds to a euro-record high.  
• San Bernardino became the third California city in the past month to file for bankruptcy.
• Faced with a budget crisis that threatens to eliminate thousands of teachers, California’s government voted to spend more than $3 billion on a high-speed train to nowhere.

New research showed strong evidence that increased government spending reduces economic growth.

Their effort to refashion society by redistributing income and regulating markets is now hitting the reality of insufficient cash flow. Even worse, the governing elite’s self-love, sense of noble entitlement and arrogant belief that their good intentions trump bad results have led to a series of policy blunders that have destroyed jobs and businesses in the productive private sector, intensifying the government debt crises here and abroad.  

The Killing Machine

Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand

by Alvaro Vargas Llosa

Che Guevara, who did so much (or was it so little?) to destroy capitalism, is now a quintessential capitalist brand. His likeness adorns mugs, hoodies, lighters, key chains, wallets, baseball caps, toques, bandannas, tank tops, club shirts, couture bags, denim jeans, herbal tea, and of course those omnipresent T-shirts with the photograph, taken by Alberto Korda, of the socialist heartthrob in his beret during the early years of the revolution, as Che happened to walk into the photographer’s viewfinder—and into the image that, thirty-eight years after his death, is still the logo of revolutionary (or is it capitalist?) chic. Sean O’Hagan claimed in The Observer that there is even a soap powder with the slogan “Che washes whiter.”

Che products are marketed by big corporations and small businesses, such as the Burlington Coat Factory, which put out a television commercial depicting a youth in fatigue pants wearing a Che T-shirt, or Flamingo’s Boutique in Union City, New Jersey, whose owner responded to the fury of local Cuban exiles with this devastating argument: “I sell whatever people want to buy.” Revolutionaries join the merchandising frenzy, too—from “The Che Store,” catering to “all your revolutionary needs” on the Internet, to the Italian writer Gianni Minà, who sold Robert Redford the movie rights to Che’s diary of his juvenile trip around South America in 1952 in exchange for access to the shooting of the film The Motorcycle Diaries so that Minà could produce his own documentary. Not to mention Alberto Granado, who accompanied Che on his youthful trip and advises documentarists, and now complains in Madrid, according to El País, over Rioja wine and duck magret, that the American embargo against Cuba makes it hard for him to collect royalties. To take the irony further: the building where Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina, a splendid early twentieth-century edifice at the corner of Urquiza and Entre Ríos Streets, was until recently occupied by the private pension fund AFJP Máxima, a child of Argentina’s privatization of social security in the 1990s.

Uncertainty and the Keynesians

Expectations and Investment

by Chidem Kurdas

At the current economic juncture two camps offer diametrically opposed macro policy prescriptions. Economists on the Keynesian side such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman advocate further monetary easing by the Federal Reserve and massive new federal deficit spending. The opposing camp includes Austrians and monetarists. Among its distinguished members is Allan Meltzer, who in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed column argues against monetary stimulus and favors reduced government spending.

These correspond to two ways of understanding the sluggishness of the US economy, explanations based on different time horizons and levels of analysis. For Keynesians, the key is demand, which needs to be boosted by government action. For the other side, the key to slow growth and job creation is heightened uncertainty.

Don't Mention Argentina and Greece In the Same Breath!

Global renegades

By James K. Glassman

Judging from conversations I had in Europe a few weeks ago with journalists, academics, and policymakers (including at least one foreign minister), I’d say there’s growing worry about two countries being used in the same breath: Argentina and Greece.

These Europeans are deeply concerned that Greece – not to mention Spain and Italy — will follow Argentina’s example in renouncing debts, flouting international norms, and getting rewarded for its irresponsibility.

Argentina holds the record for the largest sovereign debt default in history. In 2001, the nation presented creditors with “a take-it-or-leave-it offer of 35 cents on the dollar,” as The Economist magazine put it, on about $80 billion in loans. Creditors “considered this derisory: previously, delinquent countries had typically paid 50-60 cents.”

Still, Argentine lenders had no choice, and many foreigners accepted. Others, however, refused. According to Graham Mather, president of the European Financial Forum in London, Argentina still owes $15 billion to private individuals – including tens of thousands of Italian pensioners and several institutional investors — and over $6 billion to the Paris Club of government creditors.

Worse, Argentina has ignored more than 100 court decisions around the world. Thomas Griesa, a U.S. District Court judge who handled many of the cases, has called Argentina’s stiffing of its creditors “immoral.” Argentina has also thumbed its nose at awards to creditors by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the World Bank’s arbitration mechanism.

Why Greece will be let go and more

Two Events Will Shape The Next Tragic Act In Europe

By Raúl Ilargi Meijer

I don't really know why it is, but as much as I see pundits and experts and everyone in between address the euro mudbath lately, nobody seems to have caught on to the two main events (inflexion points?!) that shape the latest reincarnation of said bath. So here's for them, and you, and anyone who's not yet tired of the story:

Event no. 1: it’s not so much that it's an entirely new notion, it's the realization that it has come to pass that is new. And even then it will take a while for most pundits and experts to understand the significance.

It is not economics that will determine the end of the European fantasy but politics

As A Matter Of Evidence

"Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different."

                                                                         -Sherlock Holmes

by Mark Grant

The article referenced the tremendous shrinkage in lending of the banks of Europe. It pointed specifically to the French banks and how they were setting up for all funding to be at the local level and to stop funding from the parent banks in France. The article concentrated on the notion that the French banks were setting up for some kind of break-up in the Eurozone. To me, though, there was ever more than met the eye at first thinking, meaning what happens after reading. It is relatively simple to read some headline or story and absorb it; much more complicated and useful to think through the meaning of what is presented. Here, past the obvious, was a rather large indicator for the Emerging Markets and their bonds as these entities are primarily funded by the European banks so that lending here, one may realistically surmise, is shrinking dramatically so that first the Emerging Markets will shrink as funding dries up and then their bonds will spike in yield and their equities fall as their main basis of support is pulled. I think now that whatever play anyone got in the Emerging Markets is now done and I would be pulling in my horns from these markets. As Europe bounces off various walls and as the American banks will have little to do with these areas; the play is over and I suggest a thoughtful retreat.

The Dark Knight

Evil and Human Liberty

by Jeffrey Tucker

The problem of evil is a big theme for a movie, and certainly for a movie based on a comic book, but Batman: The Dark Knight deals with it expertly, and with a message that offers profound support to the idea of human liberty.

It does so in two ways: it supports the view that human beings are capable of cooperating toward the social good, and it shows the unpredictable level of evil that state intervention unleashes. Yes, I know it sounds implausible, but please hear me out.

Occupy Gotham?

The Dark Knight Rises

By Zach Foster

One of the remarkable things about this Batman series is the way Hollywood — a bastion of tired, often-rehashed, leftist propaganda — has unwittingly allowed an obscenely wealthy capitalist who lives a decadent bourgeois lifestyle (when not fighting crime) to be the hero! It was noted somewhere that Murray Rothbard was a fan of the James Bond films partly because Bond was unrepentantly bourgeois and knew how to live it up in style. I think Rothbard — who has forgotten more about Austro-libertarianism than I could ever hope to learn in my lifetime — would have liked Christian Bale's portrayal of Bruce Wayne, neither afraid to make large investments nor afraid to be seen driving the ladies around in his European sports cars.

Decadence Destiny

How New Orleans got that way

By NICOLE GELINAS

New Orleans’s American tourists often feel that they’ve arrived in a foreign country, and they’re not entirely wrong. The city’s history dates back to its status of uneasy observer of the nation’s founding. As the 13 colonies were forging a nation, the elite Spanish subjects in New Orleans looked on not with elation, but with unease, Tulane professor Lawrence N. Powell writes in The Accidental City, his chronicle of the Big Easy’s pre-1812 history. Plantation owners and wealthy merchants worried about what kind of message their slaves would absorb from the inconvenient republican rhetoric up north. New Orleans has always been just a bit different, and those differences endure to this day.

The Crescent City’s location is its original sin—but the sinners, like many of their lot, had their reasons. In the early eighteenth century, the French crown, Louisiana’s first royal sponsor, needed money to pay off its massive debts, and it hoped tobacco might wean the populace off British-controlled imports. “New Orleans was founded as a company town,” writes Powell. Impresarios of the royally chartered Company of the West, which would administer the new colony, found an easy mark at Versailles, as French colonial policy under Louis XIV “was largely one of aimlessness and drift.”

The Convergence of Marx, Orwell And Kafka

It would be impossible to loot this much wealth if the State didn't exist to enforce the "rules" of parasitic predation

The global crisis is not merely economic; it is the result of profound financial, sociological and political trends best captured by Marx, Orwell and Kafka.

by Charles Hugh Smith

The global crisis is best understood as the convergence of the modern trends identified by Marx, Orwell and Kafka. Let's start with Franz Kafka, the writer (1883-1924) who most eloquently captured the systemic injustices of all powerful bureaucracies--the alienation experienced by the hapless citizen enmeshed in the bureaucratic web, petty officialdom's mindless persecutions of the innocent, and the intrinsic absurdity of the centralized State best expressed in this phrase: "We expect errors, not justice."

If this isn't the most insightful summary of the Eurozone debacle, then what is? A lawyer by training and practice, Kafka understood that the more powerful and entrenched the bureaucracy, the greater the collateral damage rained on the innocent, and the more extreme the perversion of justice.

The entire global financial system is Kafkaesque: the bureaucracies of the Central State have two intertwined goals: protect the financial Elites from the consequences of their parasitic predation, and protect their own power and perquisites.

Why Listen To Keynes In The First Place?

A “how to” guide on winning elections

by James E. Miller

In a recent BBC News article, philosopher John Gray asks the quaint but otherwise vain question of what would John Maynard Keynes do in today’s economic slump.  I call the question vain because practically every Western government has followed Keynes’ prescribed remedy for the so-called Great Recession.  Following the financial crisis of 2008, governments around the world engaged in deficit spending while central banks pushed interest rates to unprecedented lows.  Nearly four years later, unemployment remains stubbornly high in most major countries.

Even now in the face of the come-down that inevitably follows any stimulus-induced feelings of euphoria, certain central banks have taken to further monetary easing.  The Bank of England recently announced an extension of its quantitative easing program by £50bn.  Not to be outdone, both the People’s Bank of China and the European Central Bank cut interest rates in an effort to boost consumer borrowing.  Still, these new rounds of monetary stimulus don’t appear to be doing the trick.  The Keynesian miracle cure has been a spectacular dud thus far.  All that modern day disciples of Keynes can do is scratch their heads and say “more should have been done.”  They never allude to how many more trillions of paper dollars should have been created or spent; just call it the excuse that keeps on giving.

The sharks are still circling other bodies in the water

Why France is on the road to becoming the new Greece

By Thomas Pascoe

The euro is headed south today against all comers except The Great British Krona  which is engaged in a nosedive of its own. The reason this time? Spanish 10 year debt is yielding 7.5pc, half of what it ought to yield but enough to spook markets not yet ready to face the inevitable deflation of what has long been a bond super-bubble.

This bubble is particularly evident in France. The debt levels which the country has are as unsustainable as Britain’s, yet its policies are more irresponsible and its remedies more restricted. Although it is considered a core country in the eurozone, France’s economic profile now bears more resemblance to Greece’s the Germany’s.

Public debt in France is at 86.1pc of GDP (146 pc if ECB liabilities and bank guarantees are included). The projected budget deficit this year is 4.5pc, with France having exempted itself from the EU’s instruction to bring deficits down to 3pct by the end of the year.

A Greek Exit Announcement Would Probably Come On A Sunday Night

An Interview with Niall Ferguson

By Matthew Boesler

Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson went on Fareed Zakaria GPS on Sunday to discuss the euro crisis and how a Greek exit from the common currency would play out.

Ferguson told Zakaria it would go down on a Sunday night:

So, what you would be talking about would be an announcement, presumably on a Sunday night, along the lines of "news just in, those euros that you have in your bank from tomorrow, will be drachma. There'll be a little bit of a teething problem because the ATMs won't work for a few days while we get the drachmas into place, but don't panic. There's going to be a bank holiday until, let's say, Thursday."

However, this would cause panic to spread across Europe as everyone begins to ask, "who's next," said Ferguson. And listening to his stories, you would think Europe is primed for panic.

The perils of confirmation bias

How scientists collect positive evidence rather than test theories

By Matt Ridley

There's a myth out there that has gained the status of a cliché: that scientists love proving themselves wrong, that the first thing they do after constructing a hypothesis is to try to falsify it. Professors tell students that this is the essence of science.

Yet most scientists behave very differently in practice. They not only become strongly attached to their own theories; they perpetually look for evidence that supports rather than challenges their theories. Like defense attorneys building a case, they collect confirming evidence.

In this they're only human. In all walks of life we look for evidence to support our beliefs, rather than to counter them. This pervasive phenomenon is known to psychologists as "confirmation bias." It is what keeps all sorts of charlatans in business, from religious cults to get-rich-quick schemes. As the philosopher/scientist Francis Bacon noted in 1620: "And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener, neglect and pass them by."

Europe is in more danger than at any time since the 1930s.

One nationalist demagogue could cause an earthquake

By Thomas Pascoe

Ours is a complacent continent. Despite impending events that would have precipitated a revolution in almost any other place at almost any other time in history – either a collapse of the currency or the complete secession of budgetary control to a supra-natural body in the EU – we expect the fabric of European society to endure without major changes. I think we are wrong.

There is a presumption of perpetual peace in Europe which rests in turn on a presumption of the perpetuity of our existing capital structures. Once the latter are undermined, the former is called into question.

They don't make 'em like that anymore

Alexander Cockburn, RIP

by Justin Raimondo

The death of Alexander Cockburn, columnist for the Nation and author of many books, is an irreplaceable loss not only personally, for those who knew him, but for the broad “progressive” movement, where his populist brand of anarcho-syndicalism — the leftist equivalent of “crunchy conservatism” — set him apart from the bullhorn-shouters and sloganeering ideologues of the haute cuisine Left. His passing, after a two-year battle against cancer, marks nearly the end of what remained vital and interesting about the American left in this country. There is simply no one even remotely like him. As Jesse Walker described his first encounter with Cockburn’s prose: “I had never read anything like this before.”

Alexander Cockburn, RIP

It is the end of an era

By Anthony Gregory

Journalist Alexander Cockburn has died after a painful battle with cancer at the age of 71. Cockburn wrote for The Nation and co-edited Counterpunch, my favorite radical leftist website. Whenever I talked about there being hope on the left, I was mainly thinking about people like Cockburn.

How Darwin would reform Britain's banks

Top down design is flawed even in finance

By Matt Ridley

It is not yet clear whether the current rage against the banks will do more harm than good: whether we are about to throw the baby of banking as a vital utility out with the bathwater of banking as a wasteful casino. But what is clear is that the current mood of Bankerdämmerung is an opportunity as well as a danger. The fact that so many people agree that some kind of drastic reform is needed, all the way along a spectrum from Milibands to mega-Tories, might just open the window through which far-reaching reform of the financial system enters.

All the actors involved bear some blame. First, investment bankers and the principals in financial companies that cluster around them have trousered an increasing share of the returns from the financial markets, leaving less for their customers and shareholders, while getting "too big to fail", so passing their risks to taxpayers.

There Is No 'Euro Crisis'

The single currency doesn't have to be "saved" or else explode

Politicians created an artificial link between national budget problems and the functioning of the single currency.

By PASCAL SALIN

Contrary to what is claimed daily in the media by politicians and many economists, there is no "euro crisis." The single currency doesn't have to be "saved" or else explode.

The present crisis is not a European monetary problem at all, but rather a debt problem in some countries—Greece, Spain and some others—that happen to be members of the euro zone. Specifically, these are public-debt problems, stemming from bad budget management by their governments. But there is no logical link between these countries' fiscal situations and the functioning of the euro system.