I’ve posted on the titanic scale of economic refugees living in Greece many times before.

Thanks for the video clip.

Folks, their are COUNTLESS souls living in Greece that are OFF THE BOOKS.

Athens — and Brussels — do not want to admit that these dependants exist.

It’s the huge under-story to this Greek drama.

A lot of these migrants end up on the island of Lesbos and as such become Lesbians. [Not that there is anything wrong with that.]

Why read fiction?
Why read satire?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/08/is-putin-playing-puppetmaster-in-greece.html

Tsipras has another sugar daddy on the side. And everyone knows it.

That’s why he looks so confident. And the others in the Eurozone don’t appear eager to pressure Greece too much. But the other PMs have to walk a tightrope, particularly Merkel, because she faces a popular revolt at home and her party may join it.

What’s blowing up is its EXCHANGE RATE.

The critical take away is that the treaty terms in Black Letter Ink specified that each individual sovereign nation was the SOLE and ONLY backer of its “Euros” per se.

Way, way, way back — at the very founding of the Euro the Germans wanted each note to read:

German Euro
French Euro
Austrian Euro
Spanish Euro

etc.

PARIS nixxed that! It was PARIS that drove Berlin to accept using the exclusive term Euro for what are — in REALITY — separate currencies trading at a 1:1 exchange rate.

Most real trade is done digitally — electronically — and ALL of the central banks were never disbanded. They are STILL keeping track of which nation owes which.

Get it?

The fiat notes circulating in the street are actually not relevant. In our modern times, the BULK of all finance is done electronically. Currency notes are down to about 4% of all transactions.

{Italy is taking steps to entirely eliminate currency commerce all together. }

The BIG PROBLEM for the non-Greeks is that THEY’RE in the hot seat — as the convention is that their banks have to book 100% of the defaulted notes / currency positions as DEFAULTED — and for their reserve capital requirements — WORTHLESS.

When, and if, these positions can be liquidated into other instruments, then a ‘recovery’ can be booked. Any such recoveries look to be years into the future.

This impairment of their Tier 1 capital means that almost all of the players will be restricted WRT commercial bank lending.

Right now the primary victim is the hapless ECB which — via its slow rolling program — has picked up the garbage.

This is a multinational creature that will have to PROMPTLY turn around and demand that Rome, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, et. al. PONY UP FRESH CAPITAL — PRONTO.

This emergency funding will be, must be, in the many billions of Euros — supplied by taxpayers far and wide.

Translation: total universal ‘dynamite’ underneath every sitting European government.

The only player that is not affected: Greece. It’ll have its own poison to swallow. ( Chopped up credit cards. )

All of this slow rolling drama is to delay the collapse of the Euro — and the European dream.

The commercial and financial interests that have been the biggest financial benefactors of the top politicians are deer in the headlamps at this time. They were making their gravy precisely because of the Euro and the Eurozone.

(Particularly in France, Germany, Austria and Holland.)

While Greece was France’s trading partner…
Spain and Portugal and Italy were the big counter-parties to Germany, Holland and Austria.

It’s been centuries, but look how these polities STILL line up as power blocs.

!!

Amusing.

—-> While You Were Sleeping:
On the day after a crash the most important question is: who gets the chair when the music stops? Ben Stell and Dinah Walker, writing in the Council of Foreign Relations blog explain how the French got the Italians and Spaniards to hold the bag through the simple device of turning French exposure in Greece into someone elses’, a process called “mutualization”…
… The French now have a chair. It is the Spaniards and Italians who will have to hop around some….

Mutualization ….hmmm

However I believe that Greece is actually running a primary budget surplus, not a deficit.

Sorry.

snopercod Says:

Let’s take a moment to recall that it was Goldman Sachs who showed Greece how to cook the books to gain entry into the EU

Don’t forget that the EU knew that the books were cooked; there was a lot of looking the other way. They wanted Greece in the EU.

Milton Friedman, the Chicago-school economist gave the Euro ten years and noted that it’s fundamental flaw was in trying to create a common currency without first having a common political will. This just evinces the prescience of his remarks even though his timing may have been off.

Were Greece still on the drachma, the govt could devalue the currency and renegotiate its debts; none of this is possible because they “sold” their economic sovereignty to the EU for the promise of living in a welfare state supported by the industrious Northern European countries (Germany, mostly). Now the only course of action is to either total economic collapse or to have people (e.g., Germans, French) who had nothing to do with this pay for their prodigal socialism.

Now, just think of California . . . Illinois . . . New York . . . . As we become a more diametrically divided country (red economic states v blue economic states, Sherrif Joe Arpaio v Commissioner Brad Avakian, etc.) we are evolving as a mirror image of Greece. We have the common currency and we had the common political will of Americans. Now, after more that half a century under the influence of the “hate America” crowd, the common currency remains but the common political seems to lie almost in ruin.

If this keeps up, the end result will be the same.