{"id":10159,"date":"2015-07-18T07:56:42","date_gmt":"2015-07-18T12:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10159"},"modified":"2015-07-18T07:56:42","modified_gmt":"2015-07-18T12:56:42","slug":"the-curse-of-the-euro-money-corrupted-democracy-busted-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10159","title":{"rendered":"The Curse Of The Euro: Money Corrupted, Democracy Busted"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Curse Of The Euro: Money Corrupted, Democracy Busted<\/a><\/h3>\n

The preposterous Gong Show in Brussels over the weekend was the financial\u00a0\u201cBen Tre\u201d moment for the Euro and ECB. That\u00a0is, it was\u00a0the moment when the Germans\u2014\u2013imitating\u00a0the American military on that\u00a0ghastly morning in February 1968\u2014\u2014set fire to\u00a0the Eurozone in order to save it.<\/p>\n

Some day history will judge good riddance\u2026\u2026..but that get\u2019s ahead of the story.<\/p>\n

According to an American\u00a0soldier\u2019s\u00a0first hand recollection of the Vietnam event, it was a\u00a0Major Booris who infamously told reporter Peter Arnett,\u00a0\u201cIt became necessary to destroy the town to save it\u201d.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

After the\u00a0massacre of Greek democracy in the wee hours Monday morning, Angela Merkel said the same thing\u2014even if\u00a0her language was a tad less graphic:<\/p>\n

It reflects the basic principles which we\u2019ve followed in\u00a0rescuing the euro<\/strong><\/em>. It now hinges on step-by-step implementation of what we agreed tonight.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now no one in their right mind could think that lending another $96 billion to an utterly bankrupt country makes any sense whatsoever.\u00a0After all, the Greek\u00a0economy has shrunk by 30% since 2008 and is\u00a0wreathing under what is objectively a\u00a0$400 billion public debt already\u00a0in place today.<\/p>\n

That figure follows from the fact that on top of Greece\u2019s acknowledged\u00a0$360 billion of general government debt there\u2019s at least\u00a0another $25 billion loan embedded in\u00a0the ELA advances to the Greek banking system. The latter is deeply insolvent, meaning that\u00a0some considerable portion of the $100 billion\u00a0ELA currently outstanding\u00a0is\u00a0not an\u00a0advance against\u00a0good collateral\u00a0in any plausible banking\u00a0sense of the word,\u00a0but merely a backdoor\u00a0fiscal transfer from the ECB to keep Greece\u2019s\u00a0financial shipwreck afloat.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Likewise, as I demonstrated Friday, given the even deeper\u00a0deep hole into which the Greek economy has tumbled\u00a0during the last six months, the fiscal targets extracted from\u00a0Greece under\u00a0this weekend\u2019s\u00a0demarche\u00a0are utterly\u00a0ridiculous.\u00a0Indeed, even\u00a0if the\u00a0targeted\u00a0primary surpluses of\u00a01,2,3 and\u00a03.5% of GDP are miraculously reached\u00a0through 2018,\u00a0upwards of\u00a0$15 billion of budget deficits after interest\u00a0accruals would be\u00a0incurred anyway, and a lot more than that\u00a0if there are material budget\u00a0shortfalls, which is a\u00a0virtual certainty.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Curse Of The Euro: Money Corrupted, Democracy Busted The preposterous Gong Show in Brussels over the weekend was the financial\u00a0\u201cBen Tre\u201d moment for the Euro and ECB. That\u00a0is, it was\u00a0the moment when the Germans\u2014\u2013imitating\u00a0the American military on that\u00a0ghastly morning in February 1968\u2014\u2014set fire to\u00a0the Eurozone in order to save it. Some day history will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[1890,63,95,124,5979,2120,195,200,204,233,4890,280,353,359,418,2868],"class_list":["post-10159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-angela-merkel","tag-banks","tag-brussels","tag-central-banks","tag-contracorner","tag-david-stockman","tag-debt","tag-default","tag-democracy","tag-ecb","tag-ela","tag-euro","tag-gdp","tag-germany","tag-imf","tag-troika"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10160,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10159\/revisions\/10160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}