- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Lets push britains poo poo in.
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Jun 27, 2016 08:28
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- Adbot
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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Apr 28, 2024 08:04
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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The economy isn't gonna work if people can't afford to buy stuff though, so that needs to be solved.
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Jun 27, 2016 11:24
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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What, like it hasn't always been just that?
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Jun 29, 2016 07:26
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Actually, It's saying that Northern Europe hosed Greece for no practical reason at all, but I know this concept is difficult for you to accept so I will forgive you.
loving feels good?
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Jul 1, 2016 18:55
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Yeah, RIP
Unless paavo saves us ofc.
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Jul 1, 2016 18:56
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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What's the least damaging way of getting rid of the euro? Can't there be a controlled non-murder way of going back to individual currencies here? Can there be some kind of project to split the euro into regional euros or national euros? Is there a way, at all?
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Jul 4, 2016 09:39
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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But the euro is gonna run the EU into the ground anyway, so it's really just a choice of a managed descent vs. mad max fury road (towards brussels).
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Jul 4, 2016 10:28
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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You forget to whom you are speaking
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Jul 8, 2016 08:24
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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I wouldn't like to imagine what Germany would do if it had even more control over greece, would it destroy 60, 70, 80, 100% (!) of it's GDP through austerity instead of just 30%?
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Jul 8, 2016 09:42
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Perhaps a common currency is not a good idea then. Because that's what it'll take to make the eurozone work. Germany can't have it's cake and eat it too.
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Jul 8, 2016 11:43
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Not regulating the banks and regularly decimating (i.e. killing a tenth) the rich to keep them cowed is a bad idea.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/power_prejudice_the_politics_of_austerity_part_1
quote:It’s very cynical. But it’s very practical. Imagine you’re a German policymaker. You wake up one morning and there’s been this huge financial crisis and you say to yourself, ‘Well our bankers don’t do this dodgy Anglo-Saxon thing with derivatives.’ Then your policy adviser tells you that in fact Deutsche Bank is the world’s largest derivatives trader.
When you talk to market-makers they will tell you that Deutsche Bank is run entirely by Britons, Americans, Israelis and South Africans. The Germans basically make the coffee, sign the compliance forms, and have no idea what’s going on. But they were in hock for a couple of trillion dollars, constituting 86% of German GDP with an operational leverage of 44 to 1. That means that a 3% return against their assets renders them illiquid, if not insolvent.
Meanwhile, across the rest of Europe you had all these countries whose bonds are denominated in Euros. So they’re treated exactly the same as German bonds, which is why you have this yield compression in 2000 when all the interest rates on all the different bonds converge. So European banks bought as many of them as possible. They stuffed their boots full to make as much profit off of this declining yield. Basically, they became too big to fail as a business model. Because by becoming so big their cost of capital went down and they knew that if they got into trouble they could turn round to the national regulator and say, ‘If you allow us to fail you’ll wreck the whole economy.’ Then the regulator says, ‘Well we’d love to help you but we don’t have a printing press anymore, you need to go to the European Central Bank.’ And the ECB is run by the Germans who turn around and say, ‘Sorry, you want us to bail what!?’ Because the basic problem is that Germany is not big enough to bail the system that the Euro allowed the banks to build. The total assets and liabilities of the European banking system is about three times the size and twice the leverage of the American system.
So go back to that German policymaker. It wouldn’t be cynical at all for him to turn round and say, ‘Hang on a second, never mind Deutsche Bank, what’s the total assets and liabilities position of the collateralised European banking system? Holy crap! That big? Right, there’s no way we can bail this. If we try to take on all that debt what would happen? We would end up killing ourselves. Right, so what are we going to do then? We going to blame it on lazy southerners, we’re going to allow the ECB to add as much liquidity as possible, and we’re going to squeeze the crap out of these Southern economies until bond yields stabilise and in the pray that the whole thing goes away.’
Okay. But that doesn’t seem very feasible. If Germany can’t pay for the banking crisis, then how could Greece and Spain pay for it?
They can’t. That’s the dirty little secret. In Austerity at the end of chapter three I have written a kind of speech that will never be given from a Eurozone leader to the population of a country telling them what’s actually behind the Euro crisis. It has nothing to do with states spending too much, because for states to spend too much you have to have someone who is willing to lend them too much. So let’s look at the lending side. Well the lending side is the north European economies who were exporting like demons and earning all this money but not spending. So they take those savings and they buy southern debt. And what do the southern economies do with this credit (the reciprocal of the debt)? They go off and they buy German and Dutch products. The whole thing works as long as the credit cycle is going. But once it pops, the whole thing falls apart and that’s where we are.
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Jul 8, 2016 11:51
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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An EU-wide suggestion for wealth transfers would simply not fly in the current political athmosphere of his country. You can say that "lol your media is racist" and wouldn't be wrong, but that doesn't make it any more politically viable for foreseeable future.
I always figured Finland would be on the receiving end given our economy is also being assfucked by the euro in addition to our own efforts.
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Jul 8, 2016 12:26
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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I really liked this earlier part from the article
quote:Well part of it is that too many people’s careers, incomes, and prestige are at stake, people who have built their entire careers during 30 years of neoliberal growth. What we had prior to 2008 was basically a global asset bubble in equities, real estate, and commodities, which finally popped in 2008. The resulting bust was bailed out, which is basically reinsuring the global investor class with the taxpayer’s money. They privatised the profits and socialised the losses. Given this, it’s very difficult for these folks to admit that all the stuff they were talking about, you know, the great moderation, inflation targeting, all those growth models, were basically all crap. The folks in charge are not going to turn around and say, ‘Gee guys, I guess everything we thought since about 1970 turned out to be really dodgy, let’s put the brakes on and dust off a copy of Keynes’s General Theory and implement that.’ It’s just not going to happen. So there’s a lots of bureaucratic political reasons for austerity to continue because no one has any interest in explaining what actually happened: the greatest bait and switch in human history.
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Jul 8, 2016 12:49
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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We? So you say you belong to the group of private banks that got europe into this debt mess?
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Jul 8, 2016 13:01
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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I would hold the dissolution of the EU is more likely to happen
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Jul 8, 2016 18:00
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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gently caress the entire earth by the way:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9d29a55c-44f1-11e6-b22f-79eb4891c97d.html
gently caress him. gently caress you. gently caress everybody. This SHOULD. NOT. HAPPEN. I know it's common practice in the US, and it's kind of the field in which important people play, but can't people see that their best interests aren't protected when the people in charge can just go to a bank 1 year after effectively being in charge? HOW IS THIS NOT OBVIOUS?
I'm so furious right now.
Why can't governments just kill these people as a security risk? A drone strike and it's done. The US kills people and children for way less all the time.
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Jul 8, 2016 18:19
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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See, this is why the EU is doomed.
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Jul 9, 2016 10:42
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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What would have happened if greece left the euro? To the euro I mean.
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Jul 9, 2016 11:56
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Let he who is without Sinn cast the first stone (I dunno what I mean by this)
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Jul 10, 2016 10:59
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Reading through that austerity book by Mark Blyth now. Only 70 pages in but it's a pretty grim read so far. The euro sounds more hosed than ever, the european situation sounds more hosed than ever.
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Jul 11, 2016 08:38
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Oh pedantry, how original.
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Jul 11, 2016 10:49
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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I've been wondering, how could a non-destructive *xit be handled? There are no such mechanisms in place now, but If for arguments sake we assume a future scenario in which both the country that is leaving (greece, finland perhaps) and the rest of the eurozone have both agreed it'd be better for both if it left the eurozone and a proper framework for exiting with minimal disruption is made. Would such a thing be possible, what would it entail?
I am thinking perhaps having a transitional period where both currencies are in use, perhaps pegging the new currency against the euro for a time and the ECB backing the new currency initially to keep it stable until it gets it's footing and the euro is phased out from country X. Perhaps this could be done in a 5-10 year transitional period?
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Jul 12, 2016 13:43
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Making the Euro a more "flexible" currency, membership to which can gained or withdrawn on a whim, would totally undermine it, especially as a political project. You can have the most beautiful, well-oiled legal framework for such a process, and it will mean absolute poo poo-all if no-one believes in that framework.
Yes well what's the alternative, do you think the euro will be around in 10 years of the same? 20 years?
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Jul 12, 2016 13:53
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Not sure Greece will be around anymore by then if poo poo continues as-is.
Oh well, problem solved? Talk about a final solution though.
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Jul 12, 2016 14:03
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Lazy nazi greeks profligate public spending ARGH!
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Jul 13, 2016 04:44
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Yeah great experts there, we definitely need more of those.
We need more if we want a bigger bonfire.
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Jul 14, 2016 04:39
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Finished the austerity book, a great eye-opener, recommend it to anyone. I liked this bit from the end, which is conjecture, but a happy conjecture:
quote:The End of Banking
The story of the crisis reconstructed in chapters 2 and 3 can, and perhaps should, be seen in a bigger
context. At the end of the Bretton Woods era, when the United States finally went off gold in 1971,
states around the world had to adjust to what Eric Helleiner has called “the reemergence of global
finance.”3 Floating exchange rates, deregulation, disintermediation, and the rest, which made finance
the most profitable sector of the American and British economies by the 2000s, was the new order of
things. But what was it all really based upon? After all, finance is most properly thought of as a part of
the information system of the economy: linking borrowers and lenders while sitting in the middle
collecting a fee. It’s not an industry in the traditional sense, and it certainly should not have been
producing 40 percent of corporate profits in the United States on the eve of the crisis—so why was it
able to do just that?
Global finance made so much hay, not through efficient markets but by riding up and down three
interlinked giant global asset bubbles using huge amounts of leverage. The first bubble began in US
equities in 1987 and ran, with a dip in the dot-com era, until 2007. It was the longest equity bull
market in history, and it spread out from the United States to boost stock markets all over the world.
The smart cash that was being made in those equity markets looked around for a hedge and found real
estate, which began its own global bubble phase in 1997 and ran until the crisis hit in 2006. The final
bubble occurred in commodities, which rose sharply in 2005 and 2006, long before anyone had heard
the words “quantitative easing,” and which burst quickly since these were comparatively tiny markets,
too small to sustain such volumes of liquidity all hunting either safety or yield. The popping of these
interlinked bubbles combined with losses in the subprime sector of the mortgage derivatives market to
trigger the current crisis. A picture again is useful. In figure 7.1 we see these three asset bubbles (Dow
Jones Stocks, S&P’s Case-Schiller Index of Housing, and gold/oil prices) scaled against time.
We can clearly see the bust beginning in housing in 2006 hitting stocks and then commodities.
What we see since then are stocks rising due to central bank liquidity programs providing asset
insurance for purchases of underwater equities. Commodities have also rallied as investors
increasingly piled into them in an effort to find positive yield in a zero interest-rate environment. Real
estate has yet to recover.
Now, take away liquidity support and the hunt for yield and there’s a problem going forward. You
can only generate bubbles of this magnitude if there are assets that are either undervalued, or are at
least perceived to be undervalued, and that can serve as fuel for the bubble. US equities had been flat
for a generation back in the early 1980s. US housing was cheap and patterns of demand were
changing. Commodities used to be a niche market. Finance changed all that, pumping and dumping
these asset classes and taking profits along the way for twenty-five years. It was a great run while it
lasted, but now, after the bust, could it be over?
Sovereigns are stretched, and eventually liquidity support and zero rates will come to an end on
what will be a much weaker underlying economy. Equities will decline in value, commodities too, as
global demand weakens, and housing, outside a few markets, is not going to be increasing in value at 7
to 10 percent a year anytime soon. But deprived of fuel for the asset cycle, all those wonderful paper
assets that can be based off these booms—commodity ETFs, interest rate swaps, CDOs and CDSs—to
name but a few—will cease to be the great money machine that they have been to date. Having
pumped and dumped every asset class on the planet, finance may have exhausted its own growth
model. The banks’ business model for the past twenty-five years may be dying. If so, saving it in the
bust is merely, and most expensively, prolonging the agony. Anticipating John Quiggin’s Zombie
Economics, we may have endured austerity to bring back the nearly dead.
Is there any evidence for this bold conjecture? A bit. Banks everywhere are delevering, which will
reduce lending, hitting growth and thus the volume of business that they conduct. Bank equity prices
and market capitalization have fallen drastically over the past two years. Revenues by asset class are
falling. Underwriting has shrunk and trading is not what it used to be.4 Fixed costs are increasing
while bonuses are shrinking and the sector as a whole is getting smaller.5 Meanwhile, what growth
there is seems to be on the retail rather than the investment banking side.6 But retail depends more
directly on the real economy, which is shrinking because of austerity. In sum, we may have
impoverished a few million people to save an industry of dubious social utility that is now on its last
legs. This is a discomfiting thought that strongly suggests that we really should not have bailed them
after all. And there’s another reason for thinking this way, independent of this: it’s called Dublin.
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Jul 14, 2016 04:56
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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The only way to get immediately ejected from the EU is re-introducing the death penalty.
So even if I take your joke post seriously, it wouldn't work.
What if you just put them into camps, force them to work on a calorie restricted diet, eventually they should die on their own, no death penalty return needed.
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Jul 21, 2016 07:29
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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It could blow up the Sun.
Serves it right for running a permanent export surplus of photons against the earth.
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Jul 23, 2016 20:38
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Not part of NATO (Finland), kinda don't wanna be either. But even less would I want for more european integration in the form of some common defence, so better NATO than that. A defensive union of the nordic countries would be a different thing but brussels can gently caress the right off.
Absolutely no interest in europe playing on an international level or having military influence either, leave that kind of thing to the US. The few times the pathetic remnants of empire left in europe tried to get involved in global politics rather than keeping at home and build quality goods like they should, it's been disaster.
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Jul 24, 2016 07:05
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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It's sortof been tried with that 120 000 migrant resettlement plan, but there's too much NIMBY opposition to it to do it on a larger scale.
So what I'm saying is that yeah EU should be more federal.
The EU trying to become more federal would probably wreck it in the attempt. So yeah lets do that.
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Aug 4, 2016 20:30
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Here's a nice interview about the state of the world/europe:
http://www.e-ir.info/2016/08/13/interview-mark-blyth/
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Aug 17, 2016 10:49
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Nope there's at least two of us
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Aug 17, 2016 13:04
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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EU sucks poo poo, should be destroyed, news at 11.
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Aug 17, 2016 13:07
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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I'm not sure gunchat is better than burkinichat. Let's talk about the Common Agricultural Policy or something.
It's great, more money to farmers. gently caress capitalists (through reforms that help small farmers).
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Aug 17, 2016 13:33
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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What would you like to see happen then?
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Aug 17, 2016 13:53
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Less farmed land area in Europe so all that lip service to sustainability actually amounts to something.
Also small farmers tend to be regressive nativists who vote for Brexits and don't like foreigners except as tourists and stuff.
More CAP it is then.
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Aug 17, 2016 15:53
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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The actual answer from real world experience is that no, they're not. Europe is full of abandoned factories that were closed despite turning a profit, because they turned less of a profit than outsourcing to Chinese or Bangladeshi subcontractors did. (Then ten year later the subcontractors stop subcontracting and emerge as competitors, and the European company that used them is hosed because it has lost all of its know-how and cannot resume in-house production even if it wanted to. But that's what happens when you're looking for economic viability...)
It's too bad the people who made the decision get to keep on going and just move to another cushy high paid executive job rather than take the responsibility they were supposedly paid mad cash for and commit honorable suicide.
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Aug 19, 2016 06:47
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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Lucky bastards should be grateful to be part of the EU and euro!
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Aug 29, 2016 11:37
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- Adbot
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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Apr 28, 2024 08:04
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- His Divine Shadow
- Aug 7, 2000
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I'm not a fascist. I'm a priest. Fascists dress up in black and tell people what to do.
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More on the EU Apple Ireland.... thingy:
http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2016/08/31/the-european-commission-have-sparked-a-revolution-against-corporate-tax-avoidance/
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Sep 2, 2016 13:26
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Jun 27, 2016 08:28
