| Countdown to the Eurogroup on Sept 14 | |||
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 Below is a schedule of the main political and economic appointments betweeen now and September 14, when Eurozone leaders will meet in Cyprus September 4 Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras meets with his German counterpart, Wolfgang Schaeuble, in Berlin September 5 Meeting between the three coalition leaders: Antonis Samaras, Evangelos Venizelos and Fotis Kouvelis September 7 Prime minister to meet with the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy Arrival of the troika to Athens September 9 Meeting between Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras and the troika heads: Poul Thomsen (IMF), Klaus Masuch (ECB) and Matthias Mors (EU) Later, the troika team will meet with the governor of the Bank of Greece, Yiorgos Provopoulos September 10 The Prime Minister meets the troika representatives September 11 Meeting between the prime minister and the head of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt September 12 German court ruling on European Stability Mechanism, ESM. September 13 Meeting between Yannis Stournaras and his French counterpart, Pierre Moscovici, in Athens September 14-15 The Eurogroup - as the finance ministers of the eurozone are known – meets in Nicosia, Cyprus. If the troika report is not ready, Eurogroup ministers will have to take it up at their subsequent meeting in Luxembourg on October 8 The Austerity demands will not be met before or after the inspectors leave. To meet the demands would unseat the coalition. A new election would install Syresia. That would have Greece abandon the Euro. Draghi presents 'umlimited' bond buying plan to ECB council 05 Sep 2012 | 45 Comments Debt crisis: as it happened - September 5, 2012 05 Sep 2012 | 575 Comments Brinkmanship as Spain warns over bail-outSpain issues a veiled warning that it will not accept a full bail-out from Europe if the terms are too harsh, a move that would paralyse the ECB and call the euro’s survival into question.04 Sep 2012 | 382 Comments Bond buying will not happen while Germany objects.  Euro rises on report of ECB plan to buy unlimited debt 5 Sep 2012: Mario Draghi expected to announce plan to buy unlimited quantities of government debt from troubled eurozone members
http://blogs.ft.com/economistsforum/2012/08/is-the-euro-the-21st-century-gold-standard/ "By A. Edward Gottesman It’s only money, for heaven’s sake! The euro is a great convenience for trade and travel, and it is a powerful symbol of unified purpose for countries that have been at each other’s throats for 1000 years. But it doesn’t cure cancer or the common cold. In October, Angela Merkel, German chancellor, said: “If the euro collapses, then Europe collapses.” This hyperbole may have worked as scare politics, but it was bad economics. Keynes identified as long ago as 1923 what we can now call the Merkel mistake: “Conservative bankers regard it as more consonant with their cloth, and also as economising thought, to shift public discussion of financial topics off the logical on to an alleged ‘moral’ plane, which means a realm of thought where vested interest can be triumphant over the common good without further debate.”Germany and other core countries in the eurozone have a vested interest in preserving the single currency and keeping the deficit members committed to it. The euro exchange rate for the strong economies might rise to a level (in relation to the US dollar and dollar-linked currencies such as the renminbi) where their exports are uncompetitive and excess capacity built up in the long boom becomes redundant. High savings in the rich countries of the eurozone have financed excess consumption in the periphery in the same way that the “savings glut” facilitated easy money and unsustainable debt in the US, the UK and other developed countries. Negotiated withdrawal from the eurozone by some countries on the rim of the EU may not be easy, but it is the better alternative for heavily indebted economies otherwise facing prolonged price and income deflation. In the early 20th century, gold standard countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Australia enjoyed the stability of a fixed exchange rate during boom periods. They quickly abandoned it when the turn of the trade cycle crippled demand for their commodity exports and reduced their attraction for capital inflows. If growth will be weak for years, as many believe, no amount of long-term borrowing by Greece, Portugal and Spain will equalize their levels of per-capita output and export potential with those of Germany and France. The economic asymmetry of core and peripheral countries during the gold standard era from 1870 to 1914 has been well researched and analyzed. A 2003 IMF working paper documented the reliance of the peripheral countries in the first decade of the 20thcentury on demand “which was highly sensitive to world income growth and mostly financed by capital imports from the core.” The euro also benefited from a period of strong demand, both from emerging economies and the US. After 2008, financial turmoil and de-leveraging reversed the impressive growth of the euro’s first decade. Now, the peripheral countries are being forced to switch to income adjustment (internal devaluation) to stay in a currency union that has become unsound. Relative labour cost inflation and current account deficits were enabled in the periphery by both borrowing and capital imports. Bad loans were made by bankers around the world who were either naïve or inexperienced in financing businesses and governments that shared a newly-minted currency. After all, as Warren Buffett pointed out in 2002, you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out. Banks and governments in both debtor and creditor countries are desperately resisting withdrawal by peripheral countries from the eurozone, with the consequent devaluation and default. None of these efforts addresses the fundamental economic and income imbalances. Experience with the gold standard before the first world war makes clear that exchange rate adjustment is key to improving trade flows between core and peripheral economies. The adjustment mechanism appears to be direct and prompt. As the authors of the IMF paper say: “In all cases, the results unanimously indicate that trade flows are significantly sensitive to REER [real effective exchange rates]. . . This is quite a strong effect, especially when one takes into account the relatively large magnitude of REER fluctuations in some of the periphery economies considered. The respective speed of trade balance adjustment is not particularly slow – the average . . . indicating a half-life of about one year.”Adjustment by internal devaluation will be slower and more uneven. Negotiated devaluation and withdrawal from the euro is the best route back to economic health for some peripheral countries. That may have the ring of heresy to central bankers or eurocrats in Frankfurt and Brussels. But it has the ring of truth. It will not be pain-free – nor will it destroy the EU. Fiscal discipline and labour cost stability for the new floating currencies will be market-driven, not enforced haphazardly by rules of a “fiscal compact.” Returning the deficit countries to trade balance as the current recession ends will strengthen both their economies and global financial prospects, which have been suffering from distortions caused by ill-thought-out fiscal and monetary policies for much of the past 40 years. The writer is a US lawyer practising in London and a member of the President’s Council on International Activities at Yale University." Software is changing very fast. I have and will have no need of anything other than a spread sheet program. There is one in Microsoft office. There is another in Xoffice. My choice is MySQL under Linux. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysql I see Pogue is reviewing new phones. "Tomorrow is another day." Krugman was late with a good excuse. Real Life IntrudesDealing with matters filial. I will try to put up a couple of posts, but limited time and access." Is The Economy On The Mend?Advance excerpts from Bill Clinton’s big speech tonight have him making the obvious argument: In Tampa the Republican argument against the President’s re-election was pretty simple: We left him a total mess, he hasn’t finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in.But is the economy being cleaned up? The best case for that proposition, I think, comes if you believe that excessive household debt was at the core of the issue. Obviously this is a view I like; Gauti Eggertsson and I have done some formal modeling (pdf), and Atif Mian and Amir Sufi (pdf) have provided strong empirical evidence. And if that’s what you think the problem is, we have in fact made significant progress. Here’s the ratio of household liabilities to GDP:  Even if that’s true, by the way, inadequate stimulus and debt relief have inflicted huge, gratuitous suffering. But the case that we have been healing all the same is pretty good." I am expecting another whack. It will probably be late enough to not influence the election. EmpowermentI’ve spent most of the day with a parent in the hospital; and my thoughts turned to the GOP platform, which boasts that Our reform of healthcare will empower millions of seniors to control their personal healthcare decisions.If you’ve ever been in this situation — and I assume that many readers have — you’ll understand what I mean by saying that empowering seniors to “control their personal healthcare decisions” is very definitely not what you want right then (or what they would want ex ante). It’s really amazing how this notion of patients as consumers, just like people buying furniture or gardening supplies, has taken hold; anyone with the least experience of actual medical situations, which means almost everyone, has to know how totally unrealistic it is." Another look at gas generators and bed. . | |||
Thursday, September 6, 2012
@0:00, 9/5/12
There will be no Greek resolution this month.
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