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The G-20s Big Fat Zero——Now Comes The Bubble’s Demise!

The G-20s Big Fat Zero——Now Comes The Bubble’s Demise!

So doing, they essentially admitted that their money printing central banks are out of dry powder (“…but monetary policy alone cannot lead to balanced growth”) and that they are divided and confused on the fiscal front.

Indeed, the best result of the weekend is that the gaggle of G-20 statists acquiesced to Germany’s absolute “nein” on the foolish notion that a world self-evidently drowning in debt can still borrow its way back to prosperity. With respect to that ragged Keynesian shibboleth, Germany’s intrepid finance minister left nothing to the imagination:

Germany had made it clear it was not keen on new stimulus, with Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble saying on Friday the debt-financed growth model had reached its limits.

“It is even causing new problems, raising debt, causing bubbles and excessive risk taking, zombifying the economy,” he said…….“Fiscal as well as monetary policy has reached their limit.”

So this is not about a failed G-20 meeting; its about the end of a vast, long-running policy scam conducted by global officialdom and their central bankers. In a word, they did not save the world in 2008-2009 with the “courage” of extraordinary policies. They just temporarily buried the symptoms by resort to crank monetary theories and fiscal snake oil.

Indeed, every bit of the financial rot owing to the mutation of financial markets into debt-fueled gambling casinos and the vast economic deformations and malinvestments fostered by massive central bank financial repression prior to the 2008 financial crisis is still with us. Except it has subsequently metastasized into an even more egregious and incendiary form.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Schäuble’s Gathering Storm

Schäuble’s Gathering Storm

Europe’s crisis is poised to enter its most dangerous phase. After forcing Greece to accept another “extend-and-pretend” bailout agreement, fresh battle lines are being drawn. And, with the refugee influx exposing the damage caused by divergent economic prospects and sky-high youth unemployment in Europe’s periphery, the ramifications are ominous, as recent statements by three European politicians – Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, French Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron, and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble – have made clear.

Renzi has come close to demolishing, at least rhetorically, the fiscal rules that Germany has defended for so long. In a remarkable act of defiance, he threatened that if the European Commission rejected Italy’s national budget, he would re-submit it without change.

This was not the first time Renzi had alienated Germany’s leaders. And it was no accident that his statement followed a months-long effort by his own finance minister, Pier Carlo Padoan, to demonstrate Italy’s commitment to the eurozone’s German-backed “rules.” Renzi understands that adherence to German-inspired parsimony is leading Italy’s economy and public finances into deeper stagnation, accompanied by further deterioration of the debt-to-GDP ratio. A consummate politician, Renzi knows that this is a short path to electoral disaster.

Macron is very different from Renzi in both style and substance. A banker-turned-politician, he is President François Hollande’s only minister who combines a serious understanding of France’s and Europe’s macroeconomic challenges with a reputation in Germany as a reformer and skillful interlocutor. So when he speaks of an impending religious war in Europe, between the Calvinist German-dominated northeast and the largely Catholic periphery, it is time to take notice.

Schäuble’s recent statements about the European economy’s current trajectory similarly highlight Europe’s cul-de-sac. For years, Schäuble has played a long game to realize his vision of the optimal architecture Europe can achieve within the political and cultural constraints that he takes as given.

Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/germany-versus-france-italy-by-yanis-varoufakis-2015-10#BYuW6MBRmDtgTE3W.99

 

German FinMin Blasts Greek Proposal: Debt Restructuring Impossible, “Everyone Knows They Can’t Be Believed”

German FinMin Blasts Greek Proposal: Debt Restructuring Impossible, “Everyone Knows They Can’t Be Believed”

In the face of Latvia’s outgoing President’s comments, that debt writedowns for Greece will only come after the bankruptcy of the state…

“this [Greek] debt is so big that everyone understands that it won’t be repaid. Loans to Greece have just bought time so that those in power don’t have to take decisions. This is like a game: who can hold out longer by not  showing that this money has been lost?  This burden has become bigger and there obviously is no possibility to repay. The debt writedown of Greek debt will come after bankruptcy of state.”

German finance minister Schaeuble has once again gone on the offensive this morning saying that “we know from the Treaties that debt relief is not possible,” yet noting that “the need for help for Greece is obvious.” However, his concluding, seemingly ad hominem, remarks are the most troubling for those expecting smooth passage of Greek proposals and a renewed rally to record stock market highs… “Greeks won’t pay their bills… everyone knows they can’t be believed.”

Bloomberg headlines from Schaeuble’s tirade:

  • *SCHAEUBLE SAYS HE EXPECTS “EXTRAORDINARILY DIFFICULT TALKS”
  • *SCHAEUBLE: DEALING WITH FINANCE GAPS BEYOND THOSE OF PAST
  • *SCHAEUBLE: KNOW FROM TREATIES THAT DEBT RELIEF IS NOT POSSIBLE
  • *SCHAEUBLE SAYS GREEKS MUST SHOW `OWNERSHIP’ ON PROPOSALS
  • *SCHÄUBLE: WON’T PAY BILLS `EVERYBODY KNOWS CAN’T BE BELIEVED’
  • *SCHAEUBLE: GREEK GOVT DESTROYED HOPE AT `UNIMAGINABLE LEVEL’

More Europe means More Germany: is that really want Tsipras wants… actually not even Tsipras knows what Tsipras wants.

Just what exactly is Greece so enamored by that keeps them in this union – especially when friends are likely waiting to help post-Grexit.

 

Greece’s PM Tsipras says country prepared to accept most bailout demands

Greece’s PM Tsipras says country prepared to accept most bailout demands

Greece became first country to miss IMF payment since Zimbabwe in 2001

Greece’s government has made new concessions in talks with its creditors, though some European officials said they were still not good enough and that a deal was nevertheless impossible before a Greek referendum on Sunday.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras sent a letter Tuesday night, just hours before the country’s bailout program was due to expire, saying his government was prepared to accept creditors’ proposals made last weekend, subject to certain amendments.

The creditors did not accept Greece’s new overture, leaving the country’s bailout program to expire. But eurozone finance ministers will meet again on Wednesday to discuss the terms again. Hopes that Tsipras was softening his position — after refusing for five months the spending cuts that creditors had demanded in exchange for loans — boosted markets on Wednesday.

But German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble was clear that no deal was imminent, at least not before Greece holds a popular vote on the creditors’ proposals on Sunday.

“Before a referendum, there is indeed no basis (for an agreement),” Schaeuble said.

In Athens, crowds of anxious elderly Greeks thronged banks for hours from before dawn Wednesday, struggling to be allowed to withdraw their maximum of 120 euros ($167 Cdn) for the week after the government reopened some banks to help pensioners who don’t have bank cards.

APTOPIX Greece Bailout

Pensioners try to get a number to enter a bank in Athens on Wednesday. About 1,000 bank branches around the country were ordered by the government to reopen Wednesday to help desperate pensioners without ATM cards cash up to 120 euros from their retirement checks. (Daniel Ochoa de Olza/Associated Press)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

Grexit “Disaster” Looms As Greek Hospitals Run Out Of Sheets, Painkillers

Grexit “Disaster” Looms As Greek Hospitals Run Out Of Sheets, Painkillers

The default countdown is about to go under 10 days and it is becoming increasingly apparent that both Greece and its creditors have had enough.

Months of tense negotiations have gone nowhere and yielded exactly nothing and it now looks like PM Alexis Tsipras and FinMin Yanis Varoufakis may be willing to miss a June 5 payment to the IMF if it means proving they are serious about keeping their campaign promises and forcing the troika to the bargaining table. The implications of a missed payment aren’t entirely clear but Athens is keen to predict the worst as it tries to squeeze concessions from creditors.Bloomberg has more:

A day after Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Greek society can’t absorb any more austerity measures, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said his government has met the euro area and IMF three-quarters of the way, and that it’s up to creditors to cover the remainder.

“Greece has made enormous strides reaching a deal, it is now up to the institutions to do their bit,” Varoufakis said Sunday on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. “It is not in their interests as our creditors that the cow that produces the milk should be beaten into submission to the extent that the milk will not be enough for them to get their money back”…

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, meanwhile, signaled there isn’t much wiggle room after Tsipras’s government committed to policy changes in return for aid in a euro-area accord on Feb. 20.

“That is the condition for completing the current program,” Schaeuble said in a Deutschlandfunk radio interview aired Sunday. “The problems are rooted in Greece. And now Greece does have to fulfill its commitments.”

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Schäuble Warns of “Sudden” Greek Default

Schäuble Warns of “Sudden” Greek Default

The governments of Greece – new and old – screwed up. Other debt-sinner countries are able to borrow at near-zero or negative interest rates, simply taking money from investors with a promise to return it on a given day in the future if investors give it new money to do so. These investors, it must be said, had their brains washed by the ECB and other central banks in order to allow this to happen. But the governments of Greece somehow missed that gravy train.

Now, no one wants to lend Greece money at negative interest rates, least of all the Greeks themselves, who know their governments better than anyone else on the planet and have less trust in it than anyone else on the planet: they’re yanking their euros out of their banks even as the ECB is propping them up with fresh euros that ultimately belong to taxpayers elsewhere.

This weekend, representatives of the “institutions” – the unmentionable “Troika” – are trying the hash out a reform package with the new team from Greece that does not include Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who’d been shoved aside. On Monday, the finance ministers of the Eurogroup will meet in Brussels.

Without an agreement on the implementation of the reforms, Greece won’t get the outstanding relief funds of €7.2 billion. And then what? The government has practically no funds left. Time is running out. Monday is it. The Big Day. Again.

“I don’t see that everything will be solved by then,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said in an interview in the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest papers, throwing cold water on any hopes. He doubted that the Greek government even knew what exactly was going on in its finances.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

Germans Furious After Varoufakis/Tsipras Admit “Greece Will Never Repay Its Debts”

Germans Furious After Varoufakis/Tsipras Admit “Greece Will Never Repay Its Debts”

The Greco-Germanic war of words continues… Having pissed off The Greeks with his “Troika” remarks, Germany’s Schaeuble went on today to more ad hominum attacks by reportedly calling the Greek FinMin “foolishly naive.” The Greek ambassador has ‘officially’ complained to “friend and ally” Germany about the personal insult. But The Greeks had the last laugh, as first Varoufakis and then Tsipras explained respectively that “Greece would never pay back its debts,” and “Greece cannot pretend its debt burden is sustainable.” The German response, via tabloid Bild, “there must be an end to this madness. Europe must not be made to look stupid.”

As Bloomberg reports, Germany and Greece confirmed Thursday that the Greek ambassador in Berlin made an official protest late Tuesday to the German Foreign Ministry over comments made by Schaeuble.

Schaeuble and his Greek counterpart Yanis Varoufakis have traded barbs in recent weeks, with Schaeuble on Tuesday suggesting that Varoufakis needed to look more closely at an agreement that Greece signed in February: “He just has to read it. I’m willing to lend him my copy if need be.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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