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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (82771)	11/6/2011 4:42:15 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 218043

France goes for the most rigorous budget since 1945, wants to keep France's excellent credit rating amid Europe's debt crisis. French braced for austerity budget (UKPA) – 3 hours ago Prime minister Francois Fillon has warned the French that belts must tighten next year to reduce the debt. He said that the 2012 budget "will be one of the most rigorous France has known since 1945", the end of the Second World War. Mr Fillon spoke ahead of a meeting called by President Nicolas Sarkozy with a small group of ministers to plot measures aimed at filling public coffers with up to eight billion euro more in funds. A plan could be announced on Monday after a special Cabinet meeting. Mr Sarkozy, expected to seek a new mandate in next year's presidential elections, wants to keep France's excellent credit rating amid Europe's debt crisis. The summit he hosted of the Group of 20 failed to deliver funds to ease the panic before it closed on Friday.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (82771)	11/6/2011 4:45:00 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 218043

Increases VAT in food and restaurants and cut one holiday. Your socialist holiday destination is tightening its belt, Mr. TJ...

To: TobagoJack who wrote (82771)	11/6/2011 6:48:50 AM
From: elmatador	4 Recommendations Respond to of 218043

Been there: former Argentinian minister talks about Greek crisis November 6 2011 at 11:05am “Sooner or later the Greeks will abandon the euro,” Martin Lousteau told the packed theatre on Thursday evening. Lousteau should know about these sorts of things; he was briefly the Minister of Economy and Production in Argentina, which famously defaulted in 2001. The packed theatre was the central point of a four-day festival of economics and comedy, taking place in Kilkenny, a medium-sized town in the middle of rural Ireland and this, the first session of the festival, was entitled: “What the hell is happening right now?“ The audience of a few hundred had come in search of some insight into the protracted EU crisis. Twelve hours earlier the “protracted EU crisis” had become more critical with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou performing a series of political flip-flops – speculation about a referendum was quickly followed by reports of a parliamentary confidence vote and as quickly followed by news of the establishment of a government of national unity, the prospect of which seemed to fade with growing signs of an inability of the fractious Greek MPs to unite – even in the face of crippling challenges. Meanwhile, in Ireland the government’s decision, just 24 hours earlier, to repay e715 million (R8 billion) to Anglo Irish Bank’s unsecured bondholders seemed briefly to stir the population out of its passive/aggressive response to rule by the European Central Bank. So this week’s events could suggest that the “protracted EU crisis” has moved to its next phase, with developments being recorded not in matters of days but of hours. Despite three years of wall-to-wall news coverage there still seems to be a lack of fundamental understanding of what had caused the crisis and what the potential outcomes might be. Or it could be that the situation is so desperate that people are constantly looking for explanations. The Irish – and the Greeks, Portuguese and Spanish – had borrowed too much and spent too much, and the Germans were now being relied on to rescue them from their profligacy. That was the simplistic analysis. But as former Irish Central Bank economist David McWilliams told Thursday’s audience, this simplistic analysis verged on the neurotic. “This is the first crisis faced by the euro and the neurotic response has been to blame everyone who is not German,” he said. It was regrettable that the EU-wide debate had become jingoistic. Lousteau reckoned Greece was currently in a considerably worse situation than Argentina was when it decided in 2001 it had no option but to default. “When you abandon your currency, you have no way of tolerating the shocks suffered by your economy and no way of managing your idiosyncrasies with the world.” As Lousteau sees it, the combination of forced payment of interest to foreigners and a tied currency will ensure that Greece is unable to grow its gross domestic product (GDP) to any significant degree. Argentina, which Lousteau describes as having a “very bumpy” economic history, pegged its peso to the US dollar in the late eighties and appeared to thrive throughout most of the nineties. During this period, because the peso was pegged to the US dollar, Argentinians were able to access funds from abroad and were thus able to maintain an “unrealistic level of spending”, he said. It took less than a decade for the flaws in the tied-peso strategy to become apparent. From 1998 to 2002, as the country tried to repay its debts while still tied to the dollar, GDP shrank and Argentinians suffered from severe economic cutbacks. “Attempts to repay the debt was destroying the tissue of society,” the Argentinian politician said. Lousteau believes that, like the Argentinians, the Greeks used the money they were able to access “artificially” through membership of the EU unwisely, and are now faced with the impossible situation of each Greek family owing e360 000. What makes the Greek situation considerably worse is that unlike Argentina, “they have no industrial capacity”. The five months that followed the December 2001 decision to default were characterised by chaos, massive inflation and political turmoil. Nobody knew what to expect, so everybody stopped trading with Argentina. Inflation meant that the middle class became poor and the poor became even poorer. Lousteau said about 25 percent of the population went hungry, there were protests – in which 21 people were killed – and in one week alone the country had five presidents. He reckons that the situation was aggravated by the fact that it was a “disorganised default”. After the initial shocking five months the country started showing signs of having bottomed out. Once those signs became apparent, Lousteau said, there was little difficulty in borrowing, not from the banks against whom we defaulted but from others. As McWilliams noted, markets and banks have no memory, they don’t look back, only forward. Between 2003 and 2011, the Argentine economy has doubled in size