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Your Street Style Photos: Houndstooth - The New York Times
Be your own street photographer by showing us your style or someone else's in your current climate. Every week, the Styles section solicits street fashion photos based on a theme. The best photos will be published on Nytimes.com/fashion on Mondays... -
Angel Gabriel
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Tara Parker-Pope
Sooner is better. As soon as you can is best.
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Does IMF Stand for Impressive Macroeconomic Flexibility?
So the IMF is holding a meeting on rethinking macroeconomic policy (I was invited but couldn’t make the timing work.) And the Fund’s chief economist has already made it clear that he’s open to some serious revision of the prevailing paradigm.
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/6-00am-greeks-stunned-as-troika-takes-power/
6.00am: GREEKS STUNNED AS TROIKA TAKES POWER
Spearheaded by Berlin, the Troika engaged in overseeing Greek debt management effectively cut out the possibility of a disorderly default late yesterday. In a strongly-worded proposal circulated to EU finance ministers, a German proposal called for Greece to cede sovereignty while all Greek State income to go first to creditors – by law. This is, basically, the takeover of a sovereign EU member State in order to calm markets and protect exposed banks in the eurozone and elsewhere.
Judging by the Greek media I’ve been scanning so far this morning, the average Greek has no idea as yet that the Troika of credit managers is effectively taking over the country. Needless to say, the BBC hasn’t got it, neither has Sky News. But reports are firming up and beginning to appear in German media, where headlines like ‘Greece asked to give up sovereign control’ are running. The FT has also obtained a copy of the German ‘recommendation’.
The writing was on the wall yesterday when Christine Lagarde gave a pretty testy interview to Bloomberg, saying bluntly “Greek progress on budgets and reform is simply unsatisfactory”. She talked of “putting together a programme for the country” although there was no sign at this point that it would literally be done ‘for’ the Greeks, not by them.
Last night, Athens News had a piece saying that ‘the threat of disorderly default is now concentrating minds across the EU’, but again there was no specific mention of a sovereign handover. But when she spoke with Bloomberg, we can be almost certain that Lagarde knew what was coming: EU finance ministers had already seen Berlin’s proposal.
The text specifically says, ‘Budget consolidation has to be put under a strict steering and control system. Given the disappointing compliance so far, Greece has to accept shifting budgetary sovereignty to the European level for a certain period of time.’
Note the dictatorial ‘has to’ in there. The proposal even more controversially demands that Greece pass a law ‘committing all State income first and foremost to debt servicing and reduction’.
Three immediate issues spring to mind:
1. What legal power does the EU have to enforce this?
2. How will the Greek people react?
3. Who else was in the loop apart from Troika and Finance Ministers?
We can be fairly certain that Washington approved the move – it may even have suggested it via the IMF. And the Troika’s 15-pt reform plus action plan of Thursday was largely written by the IMF….a Washington-based concern.
This act sends a message to EU States both inside and outside the eurozone: defaults vill be orderly at all timess: disorderly actions vill not be tolerated.
Mind-boggling. It all needs thinking about.
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/greek-sovereignty-heist-why-the-scale-of-injustice-here-is-mind-boggling/
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JoeNBC
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Push for Broad Budget Deal Intensifies Among Leaders
“@nytimes Push for Broad Budget Deal Intensifies Among Leaders - http://nyti.ms/o3x9YA”Did not happen.http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/federal_budget_us/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=federal%20budget&st=cse
Recent Developments
Jan. 26 Meeting for the first time, members of a new bipartisan, House-Senate committee negotiating a final version of a yearlong payroll tax cut agreed that a deal had to be struck before the end of February, when a short-term extension that passed in December will expire. But it was clear that presidential politics and a push by both sides to include pet measures could turn negotiations into the next partisan donnybrook.
Jan. 17, 2012 Members of the House returned to Washington, and both parties were largely in agreement on a yearlong extension of the Mr. Obama’s payroll tax cut. The fight ahead in Congress boiled down to how to pay for it, and Democrats appeared to hold an advantage.
Overview
Throughout 2011, Congressional Republicans battled President Obama and the Democrats who control the Senate over federal spending and taxes. In 2012, the fights are likely to continue and be complicated by the presidential election.
Emboldened by the gains in the 2010 elections that gave them the House, Republicans pushed for steep cuts in discretionary spending and for reshaping entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid. The clashes brought the government within hours of a shutdown in April, threatened another shutdown in October, put the country within days of a possible default in August and required a last-minute change of heart by House Republicans in December to stave off a tax hike that would have hit 160 million Americans.
Over the course of 2011, the two sides agreed on a series of short-term spending cuts but stalemated over longer term budgets. In July, talks on a “grand bargain’' proposed by President Obama to cut the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years collapsed over Republican opposition to the $1 trillion in new revenue he was seeking. A deal allowing an increase in the debt ceiling moved that debate to a special deficit reduction committee that was asked to come up with $1.2 trillion in savings; the committee deadlocked in November.
Earlier in the fall, Mr. Obama had proposed a $447 billion jobs bill, a mix of spending programs, tax cuts and tax increases meant to revive the flagging economy; it was rejected by Republicans who said its tax increases would kill more jobs than the package would create.
The final fights of the year revolved around measures due to expire on Dec. 31: a payroll tax cut and extension of unemployment benefits that were part of a deal reached by Mr. Obama and Republicans in 2010, and an item that has been dealt with annually by Congress for years — the “doc fix’' to prevent steep cuts in Medicare payments to providers.
Both sides wanted to extend the payroll tax holiday, but differed on how to pay for it, and House Republicans sought to attach a number of environmental measures to the bill. Senate leaders concluded that it would take too long to sort out their differences and passed a two-month extension of both measures; after briefly threatening to block it, House Republicans signed on.
In late January, a conference committee of House and Senate members started work on finding a compromise before the extension expires at the end of February. At the same time, both parties started preparing for a new round of battles over taxes and spending. In his State of the Union message, Mr. Obama issued a plea for “tax fairness’' and renewed his call for the so-called Buffett tax on high-earning households. But with even some Democrats wavering, the prospects for action seemed uncertain, if not remote.
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