Meanwhile, In Pre-Mayhem Greece..

FT Report That Greek Bailout Package On The Verge Of Collapse After Surge In Greek Funding Needs Sends Stocks, Euro Plunging From Highs  Tyler Durden for Zero Hedge.  Excerpts:

Wondering what just caused the market to slump? Take a wild guess. That's right - Greece. Minutes after Greece passed a vote in which it promised to promise to promise to consider collecting 1998-1999 taxes (even as all of its tax collectors are about to go on permanent strike), the FT was breaking news that while the Troika was "bailing out" Greece in the past years, the country was spending itself into an  even greater oblivion. As a result, the terms of the July 21 Second Greek Bailout will most certainly need to be renegotiated, with banks having to take even greater write downs on the bond exchange, and with far more capital having to be injected into the country.

The Downward Spiral tightens; speeds up.

Strikes and protests mount against austerity in Greece  World Socialist Web Site.  Found it on Rense.  Excerpts:

“Today, it is no longer safe for us to go onto the streets,” a politician of the Greek ruling party PASOK told the Frankfurter Rundschau. “We are the government and we are alone.”



Widespread popular anger against the government in Greece has only intensified following the latest round of austerity measures. Incidents abound of politicians of both the social democratic PASOK and the conservative opposition New Democracy (ND) being pelted with eggs and on occasion stones when they show themselves in public. Angry crowds have repeatedly besieged the homes of politicians and chanted “thieves, thieves” and “Give the money back!”


According to surveys conducted by Eurobarometer, 82 percent of Greeks have lost confidence in the government and 83 percent distrust the parliament. Sixty-seven percent no longer trust the European Union. Other polls show that PASOK would today win just 15.5 percent of the vote in a new election.

It's all hanging by only several threads..  The Big Question remains:  How big the shock waves will be, and how hard those impacts will be felt.  Globally, of course.

Gonzalo Lira Provides Background On Europe's Upcoming Euro Crisis..

Europhrenia  Excerpts:

According to the dictionary, schizophrenia is “a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.”

In Europe, they’re having the same thing—only writ large: It’s not that the political/financial leadership of Europe is at odds with the people—it’s that they’re two minds locked in a single body, struggling for control.

In the one hemisphere of this divided brain, the political/financial leadership is convinced the European union is something devoutly to be wished—no matter what the costs, no matter what fortune and the people throw up in opposition.

In the other hemisphere of the europhrenic brain, the people of Europe overwhelmingly do not want integration “at all costs”. In some parts (a lot of parts) of Europe, they don’t want integration at all.
..
No country ever voted for monetary union—ever. European monetary integration only ever happened by either government diktat or the legislature overriding the will of the people.
..
The people of Europe never wanted total European integration, not even in the best of times—whereas the European leadership adamantly insisted upon it.
And:
The basic problem of the current crisis is, countries of the European periphery—Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy—took on too much cheap debt from banks in the core eurozone countries—France, Germany and Holland—and now are unable to pay for it. It’s not more complicated than that.

(One could argue that the reason the European nations overspent was that the leaders were basically bribing the people with a false sense of affluence, bought and paid for via debt, so that they would acquiesce to the European Union and the eurozone. But that’s for another post.)

And remember:  The real crisis has yet to begin!  The unrest so far is in response to the first wave of official responses towards keeping the Euro solvent and restarting the economy.  The real pain hasn't even started yet.  In Greece, they're protesting, and Portugal just threw out their government.  How long will it be before alienation and anger at the new government's inability to correct begins to rise?

The immediate question:  How quickly (and to what scale) will this crisis bloom?