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Starving Greeks queue for food in their thousands as debt-wracked country finally forms a coalition government... but how long will it last? Samaras will be hurtling into a massive political shitstorm, no matter what he tries or ultimately does. No action will please a majority of Greeks. And there already quite a few who are super pissed off and riot-y. There will be no honeymoon period. Congratulations again, Mr. Prime Minister, on your "victory." Daily Mail. Excerpts:
Starving Greeks queued around the block for free food handouts yesterday as the country's politicians managed to end a crippling stalemate to form a coalition government.
Young children as well as the elderly waited in line in Athens to collect the parcels of fruit and vegetables donated by farmers from Crete to help ease the devastating austerity faced by many Greeks.
But as hungry people collected food, a few miles away a new conservative-led alliance was formed, vowing to renegotiate the country's strict European bailout in a bid to breath economic life back into the debt-stricken country.
Don't forget, Merkel has already stated she Will Not Re-Negotiate any terms of Greece's bailout. It's all theater on Samaras' part; Greece's harsh realization in three.. Two..
Conservative Antonis Samaras was sworn in as prime minister and head of a three-party coalition that will uphold the country's international bailout commitments.
In the hot seat: New Prime Minister Antonis Samaras vowed to rescue Greece's economy as he spoke for the first time after being sworn in to office at the presidential palace
The move ends a protracted political crisis that had cast grave doubt over the country's future in Europe's joint currency and threatened to plunge Europe deeper into a financial crisis with global repercussions.
Samaras, an American-educated 61-year-old economist, was sworn in three days after his party won the second national elections in six weeks but without enough votes to form a government on its own.
His New Democracy party will join forces with the socialist PASOK party, which came in third place, and the smaller Democratic Left led by Fotis Kouvelis.
Discussions on the lineup of ministers were expected to be completed by Wednesday night.
‘I will ask the new government that will be formed tomorrow to work hard so that we can offer tangible hope to our people,’ Samaras told reporters as he left the presidential mansion.
Greek stocks rose marginally in response to the news, with Athens shares closing up 0.5 percent, limiting earlier gains.
The new prime minister was to meet with outgoing Finance Minister Giorgos Zanias, PASOK head Evangelos Venizelos and Kouvelis on Wednesday evening.
All three parties broadly back Greece's pledges to bailout creditors for further austerity and reforms, although they have pledged to renegotiate some of the terms for the rescue loans.
Again, Merkel and the rest of Germany will not budge. The Greeks will only bring back bad news. How long will this coalition last?
Dark, yes; But Doomy? Yes, well; That too.. The Economic Collapse, via The Extinction Protocol. First and last paragraphs:
June 20, 2012 – ECONOMY – Yes, it is officially time to start freaking out about the global economy. The European financial system is falling apart and it is going to go down hard. If Europe was going to be saved, it would have happened by now. The big money insiders have already pulled their funds from vulnerable positions and they are ready to ride the coming chaos out. Over the next few months, the slow motion train-wrecks currently unfolding in Europe will continue to play out and things will likely really start really heating up in the fall, once summer vacations are over.
And: Restated for effect..
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has declared that Germany will not budge at all on the terms of the Greek bailout. If you are looking for some kind of a global financial miracle; you can stop watching. If European leaders had a master plan to save Europe, they would have shown it by now. The entire house of cards is starting to come down and things are going to get really messy. A lot of people both in the United States and in Europe are going to lose their jobs and their homes over the next few years. It is likely that the next recession will be even more painful than the last one was.
Our global financial inter-connected-ness will come as a big shock to many people. Also shocking will be the lack of preventative monetary firewalls that could have averted this looming crisis.
Hey! You live; You learn!; You know?
Whoopsie. Things just got wobbly for JP Morgan. Street Insider. Excerpts:
Shares of JPMorgan (NYSE: JPM) are under heavy pressure after-hours Thursday after announcing a surprise conference call and large surprise mark-to-market loss in its chief investment office and exposure to a possible credit downgrade.
Since March 31, 2012, the company said its CIO has had significant mark-to-market losses in its synthetic credit portfolio. JPMorgan said the portfolio has proven to be "riskier, more volatile and less effective as an economic hedge than the Firm previously believed."
The company said it now see a loss of $800 million in its CIO unit, versus an expected profit of up to $200 million. (A one billion dollar swing from projections!) Although CEO Jamie Dimon said it could "easily get worse."
The company said the loss was driven by $2 billion trading loss in its synthetic credit portfolio.
Despite the loss, JPMorgan said at this time it still expects to earn $4 billion in the quarter.
My guess is this is just the first of many surprise calls and losses in store for many, many corporations, finance-related or not. If JP Morgan cannot sustain, the worldwide economic repercussions will be significant and quick. Could JP Morgan be that falling domino that starts the chain reaction crash?
Guest Post: When Debt Is More Important Than People, The System Is Evil From Zero Hedge. The excerpt is from the site, red emphasis theirs, light colored emphasis mine:
The ethics of debt, at least in the officially sanctioned media, boils down to: nobody made them borrow all those euros, and so their suffering is just desserts. What's lost in this subtext is the responsibility of the lender. Yes, nobody forced Greece to borrow 200 billion euros (or whatever the true total may be), but then nobody forced the lenders to extend the credit in the first place. Consider an individual who is a visibly poor credit risk. He would like to borrow money to blow on consumption and then stiff the lender, but since he cannot create credit, he has to live within his means. Now a lender comes along who can create credit out of thin air (via fractional reserve banking) and offers this poor credit risk $100,000 in collateral-free debt at low rates of interest. Who is responsible for the creation and extension of credit? The borrower or the lender? Answer: the lender. In other words, if the lender is foolish enough to extend huge quantities of credit to a poor credit risk, then it's the lender who should suffer the losses when the borrower defaults. This is the basis of bankruptcy laws--or used to be the basis. When an over-extended borrower defaults, the debt is cleared, the lender takes the loss/writedown, and the borrower loses whatever collateral was pledged. He is left with the basics to carry on: his auto, clothing, his job, and so on. His credit rating is impaired, and it is now his responsibility to earn back a credible credit rating....The potential for loss and actually bearing the consequences from irresponsible extensions of credit was unacceptable to the banking cartel, so they rewrote the laws. Now student loans in America cannot be discharged in bankruptcy court; they are permanent and must be carried and serviced until death. This is the acme of debt-serfdom.
Much more at the link. Required reading.
"She's breaking up! She's breaking up!"(heh..) The question remains: Can we rebuild him?? Suddeutsche Zeitung: EU prepares for Greece to declare bankruptcy Short, and not sweet excerpts: According to EU sources in the European capitals it is already running the preparation on Greece to declare bankruptcy, German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung announced...Meanwhile, the Ministry of Finance denied preparing an emergency plan for Greece.Not that Greece isn't going bankrupt, mind you, it's just that France doesn't have an emergency plan in place. Already gone (and probably not ever coming back) is Greece's refugee/asylum system, at least from the German perspective.. Excerpts:Berlin announced this week that it is halting deportations to Greece for a year, despite European Union rules stating that the first country a refugee arrives in is responsible for processing any asylum request.
Germany's Interior Ministry announced on Wednesday that the new measure is aimed at reducing the burden on Greek authorities, who are struggling to deal with the volume of refugees reaching the country's shores and borders.And:Humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), have voiced concern about the conditions that asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are forced to endure in Greece, with overcrowded detention facilities and a dysfunctional and overstretched system of assessing asylum claims. Kind of like their banking system! Speaking of which, the Finance Minister says that Greece won't try debt re-structuring(read; anything new) as it might worsen the country's financial situation. Instead, they'll continue to follow the EU/IMF approved directives for their bailout. Although they wouldn't mind to(unofficially) stretch those payments out a little..Hell, it's worked really well so far!
Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre's extraordinary photographs documenting the dramatic decline of a major American city
These pictures fill me with such sadness. We have allowed our cities, our infrastructures, our cultural and architectural landmarks to fall into a state beyond repair. Detroit fucking Michigan was THE industrial hub of this nation not even 50 years ago, and now it has become an urban wasteland. This city is a metaphor for the gradual decline-into-disintegration of America as Crumbling Empire.
The cancer of concentrated money and power flowing to the Controlling Interests of this country to the exclusion of the rest of society metastasizes first in Detroit, and will spread quickly around the country, destroying cities and spirits alike. The pundit class continues to "search" blindly for the root cause, blaming all those but the ones to blame, those who sign their checks, and sadly, all are unwilling to make any sacrifice to keep us, our country, and our former way of life alive. We will all continue to die slowly, until we begin to die quickly.
And then, the real chaos will begin..
Uh-Oh! From Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge:
Bank of America just fired the preemptive escalation shot in its duel with Wikileaks. Late on Friday, America's biggest mortgage lender, and the firm that is now getting sued left and right for various mortgage transgressions, announced it is joining MasterCard, Paypal and Visa in ceasing transactions for Wikileaks. While this decision will certainly not improve Operation Anonymous' empathy toward the North Carolina bank, it may just precipitate overt retaliation by Assange, who is now rumored to be in possession of data that could prove harmful to BAC. Which is why this sudden escalation out of left field by the bank strikes as surprisingly odd: BofA's upside is very limited while its downside could be 100% - even if Wikileaks is bluffing, why provoke them. And as expected, Wikileaks has already retaliated: in two sequential tweets it advised its 568,117 (and very rapidly growing) subscribers to pull their money out of Bank of America, and also to close all their accounts with the firm, urging them to put their money "somewhere safer." What is curious is to see whether this sudden escalation, in what has now become synonymous with a quest for preserving the first amendment for a substantial deal of people (and freedom of speech globally), will have a far broader impact than the comparable "Pull Your Money" out of the Big Banks venture that was attempted by Huffington Post over a year ago, with unsatisfactory results. If people suddenly personify Bank of America with a First Amendment threat, arguably the one freedom most cherished in America, which is precisely what Assange is trying to do, all bets for the Countrywide acquirer may soon be off.
The seeds were also sown earlier this month in France with Eric Cantona's December 7th Bank Run fail. I think history will look at Cantona's efforts more as a template than in judgement for the non-starter event its first attempt (But certainly not last)proved to be. We seem to be at a point in history where random variable people and events could expand or escalate local-to-global situations beyond expectations ever supposed even in the recent past, through the viral, random, and variable nature of the Internet itself.
One last thought from Clif High at Half Past Human(Which deserves a more detailed comment at a later time) regarding the upcoming WikiLeaks/BofA bloodbath.. And there will be blood.. *But* It might not be Bank of America at all, or it might be BofA AND the New York Fed..
The rumors of the next round of Wikileaks 'releases' (hint hint on language)...include not only the promise of deep banking secrets which many people speculate to be centered on Bank of America, while others, perhaps more in the know, are thinking it is actually to be 30/thirty plus years worth of 'secrets' to be revealed about the NY Federal Reserve Bank. The ramifications of either are severe for the banking system which is already stressed to levels never before encountered as it stumbles headlong into the upcoming currency collapse. Note that leverage and derivatives are now being piled upon each other as the fraud of the global 'reserve' banking system comes undone as a direct result of its nature (criminal) being taken to its logical extreme by those persons trapped in the myth of acquisition (e.g. where the 'ego/i' thinks that if it acquires more, and continues to acquire, then everlasting life (for the ego) shall result).
I think people are beginning to understand, with the help of these concrete, but fast developing examples, how information knowledge is power, and how that power is tearing apart the collective perceptions of this reality, thereby altering the course of what would have been Our Future, into a new course of what Our Future will be.
And hopefully, that future contains the total destruction of corporate systems and structures, new types of energy, and aliens, lots of friendly aliens..
Asia Session: Awaiting the Irish Budget
The Euro continued to move higher in Asia as markets looked ahead to the hopeful passing of the 2011 Irish budget which is due later in the day. Now loaded with new austerity measures in order to appease the EU and IMF after securing a bailout package the proposed Irish budget for 2011 was to be put in front of the parliament later today. The passing of the budget without any hitches would surely help the Euro currency and that optimism was seen in today’s Asian moves from 1.3280 to 1.3350 in EUR/USD. The ECB’s move to extend its bond purchasing program also proved beneficial to the European currency as investors welcomed the determination of the European Central bank.
At the moment, the proposed budget looks like it will pass. Of course, bankers and politicians are pretty happy with that projected outcome, but the non-ultra rich, non banker, non politicians aren't happy, and will be expressing their displeasure later today, and probably frequently for quite some time..
And then there's the World wide bank run, originating in France, scheduled for today. Your host? Eric Cantona.:
Following an idea put forward by Eric Cantona recently the 7th December is planned to be ‘bank run’ day. The general idea is that nowadays protesting in the street doesn’t achieve much – but if we all withdraw our money from the banks at the same time the banks will collapse.
Will this destroy the European banking system? Probably not, and most likely not in America, but people in other countries are paying attention, and we won't know what the end result will be tomorrow, or in the near term.. And it all starts today.
So much information, so much to disseminate, so little time..
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