Central banks from Tokyo to London checked their ammunition on Friday in preparation for any turmoil from Greece’s election, with the European Central Bank hinting at an interest rate cut and Britain set to open its coffers. – Reuters
Leftist Alexis Tsipras of the Syriza Party.
ALL EYES ON GREECE tomorrow for what could evolve into a game-changing world event vote. Will the anti-austerity wave hitting the eurozone continue?
After you’ve read the Reuters article above [h/t CNBC's Becky Quick], here’s a report from the BBC:
Yet until last month most people outside the country – and some within it – had never heard of Syriza. For years they struggled to win more than 5% of the vote, but in the first round of the general election, this anti-austerity party rocketed from nowhere to second place with more than 17%.
Such is the demand for Syriza officials from news broadcasters, that several offices in party HQ have been emptied and turned into studios.
It really all begins with answering the question who is Alexis Tsipras, besides charismatic, young and handsome.
“On Sunday, the old world will die,” Tsipras said at an Athens rally Thursday, his brow knitted and sweaty on a sultry Greek night. Invoking what has become Greece’s modern version of a mythic beast — the “memorandum” that lays out the strict conditions for the country’s bailout loans — he made clear what will happen if his Syriza party wins enough parliamentary seats to form a government. – Greek election: Candidate Alexis Tsipris hopes an earthquake will shake the euro zone Sunday
Or better yet, what does he plan to do? From Bloomberg:
The following are the main pledges and economic policy of Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras for the Greek national election on June 17.
– Cancel Greece ’s bailout and implementation laws and replace them with a national recovery plan
– Reduce the number of ministers and government advisers
– Renegotiate the country’s loan agreement and seek a European solution to the Greek debt crisis
– Restore Feb. 28 wage reductions, special bonus cuts and labor collective agreements; minimum wage of 751 euros
– Restore unemployment benefit of 461.5 euros and extend payment to two years from one
– No special taxes for the unemployed, people on low incomes and pensioners
– Set a primary spending plan of as much as 43 percent of Greek GDP instead of 36 percent
– Increase the country’s revenue by taxing higher incomes to reach a European level of 4 percent of GDP
– Halt implementation of cuts in wages, social spending and pensions
– Implement and extend public spending control using technology
– Implement a Greek citizens’ property registration system
– Gradually reduce sales taxes, minimize them for basic food products
– Modernize and staff tax offices, enhance information technology
– Sign a special national agreement with shipowners, cancel 58 tax reductions
– Help return bank deposits to Greece, stabilize the Greek banking system
– Nationalize, socialize banks
– Redesign management of European funds
– Write down loans for heavily indebted businesses and households
– Freeze program of privatizing state-run companies and gradually bring strategically significant companies back to state control (OTE, PPC, Hellenic Postbank, Athens Water)
– Restructure the public sector and administration
– Amend constitutional law on ministers’ responsibilies
– Declare a Greek exclusive economic zone
– Find a mutually acceptable solution of the dispute over the name “Macedonia” in the United Nations . Greece, the northern third of which consists of the region of Macedonia, objects to use of the name by the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
The New Democracy party, led by Antonis Samaras, believes a Tsipras win would force Angela Merkel to make an example of Greece by forcing them out of the euro-zone.
As Becky Quick of CNBC noted with Chuck Todd on Friday, the European Central Banks are not sitting idle and don’t seem at all ready to let the world financial markets begin a contagion that could roil the world.
Greece is a true tragedy. this is agreat piece right now about it- the vote from hell it looks like. Toss in egypt’s vote and it is a watershed weekend for sure:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/168394/greeces-knife-edge-election
It’s no wonder we can’t discuss the economy sensibly. The idea that we’re still on some sort of gold standard currency still prevails even at a progressive publication like The Nation:
Every modern economy “prints money”, in the sense that the money supply is an artificial and often arbitrary determination of how much money there should be in an economy. That decision is typically made by the central banks.
Anyway, sad article, to be sure. Regardless of how the election goes, Greece’s troubles are far from over.
Hell, if he were here in America I would vote for him in a New York second! Iceland, now Greece…tell the people who are responsible for this economic catastrophe the PEOPLE are not going to take one so the 1% can stay rich and comfortable!!
I love this guy. Maybe he took a long hard look at what Iceland did and liked what he saw. They told their banks and Britain’s banks to drop dead and have not been the worse for it.
Greece’s problems are somewhat different from Iceland’s, but I suspect that a default and an exit from the Euro may be their best move in the long run. It won’t be fun in the short term, though. Iceland, which was in bettter shape at the time, went through a depression. It’s almost certain that Greece will be worse in the short run.
Of course, it’s probably going to be worse no matter what.
Sometimes you kind of miss the ‘ole Soviet Union. Ironic that in the late 1940′s, Greece and Turkey were on the ropes. The communists were making great gains with the voters there due to the economic catastrophe following World War II. Great Britain was broke and passed on the burden to the U.S.
The U.S. came in with both feet, resulting eventually with the Marshal Plan. Churchill called it “the most unsordid act in human history.” It brought Europe (and especially Greece and Turkey) back from the brink of economic collapse.
Now there is no Soviet Union. There is no Iron Curtain, but a Green Curtain, which multinational banks have imposed. The answer now is the anti-Marshal Plan, endless austerity to protect the proprietary gambling of these banks. Only Josef Stalin could have appreciated the strategy and cold cunning of these institutions.
At least in a couple of countries the people have said NO WAY! The 1% money whores did this, let them pay for it.
The begining of the end for neo liberalism?
France didn’t vote for austerity and voted out Washington’s favorite French President Sarkozy. I hope the greek people vote in their best interests instead of what Germany or any other country wants them to do.
From early reports, it seems that the anti-Austerity party has gone down by a 31-26% margin, and Greece will “fulfill it’s obligations” to sell out it’s middle and lower classes in order to provide a nice soft landing for the 1% and to stay in the precious European Union. No doubt today’s result will be hailed as a great victory for Sensible Austerity and be followed by a call for the rest of Europe, and the United States, to embrace the philosophy that while benefits have been hoarded by the 1 percent for the past thirty years, the costs for those benefits are a burden that must be carried by the 99 percent which, by now, should be used to getting screwed over anyway.
Even more unfortunately for us, we have a two-party oligarchy in this country which have both embraced Austerity as their newest shrine. God help us all.
strongly second what jjamele said.
After WW1, in 1919, the economist John Maynard Keynes (yes, that Keynes and I’m a Keynesian) attended the Paris Peace Conference (the Versailles Conference and the Treaty of Versailles) as a delegate of the British Treasury and argued for a much more generous peace than .
Later that same year, Keynes resigned his position in disgust over the course of the negotiations and the way the Treaty of Versailles (1919) was shaping up. When he returned to England, he wrote this article, “The Economic Consequences of Peace”. In it, he condemned the treaty as levying excessive reparation demands against Germany that virtually guaranteed the continued economic defeat of the country and correctly predicted that such economic dislocation would have serious effects on the rest of Europe. He was quoted as saying, “you cannot ask a country to pay reparations more than they can afford to pay” which is what the Treaty of Versailles demanded of Germany.
The economic mess in Germany laid the foundation for the rise of Hitler who never forgot what he felt was the humiliation of Germany by the England, France and the US regarding the reparations demanded which Germany could not afford.
How ironic that in some intrinsic way Greece is now Germany and Germany is England/France/US.
What is scary here is the rise of the Nazi party in Greece, the Golden Dawn (if there was ever a misnomer it’s the name of this fascist party) Party which saw one of it’s MP’s assault two leftist women who differed with him. http://tinyurl.com/7tvujus This economic mess has turned into an anti-immigration and anti-woman fubar.
Obama came out not long ago praising the conservative win and their drumbeat of austerity/austerity/austerity. I am not so sure what this may mean for the US because many in Europe have rejected austerity and it has been utterly a failure in the UK only magnifying and making worse the recession.
Given how divided our country is about sensible solutions to our economic problems and how deeply this country has been “three card monty’d” by the austerity police and how we must cut spending and taxes now to “save our children” from the deficit zombie NOW, and how cowardly and inane and insane our representatives are to agree to a rational solution, we, the middle class and working class are screwed. And, what’s even more egregious is that most people (not their fault as this is the job of our press to explain to say nothing of our politicians many of whom know jack shit about economics even those on financial committees in Congress) don’t know the difference between the debt and the deficit and how our economy works. And, any big mouthed lying SOB or incompetent asshole running for office, even the highest office in the land, can propagandize their way into power where most of us will be on the losing end of austerity politics. To say nothing of the Americanized version of Golden Dawn and/or the Taliban as already exemplified by teh innumerable bills introduced by various and sundry and sick woman-hating and/or woman-fearing men (and some compliant woman-hating women) to curtail a woman’s reproductive autonomy or any autonomy over her own being and body.
And, this will only be made worse by the outcome of the Egyptian election which gives the population the non-choice between the corrupt former Mubarak official and the Muslim Brotherhood candidate. Neither of whom have any smidgen of the equality and democracy gene. And, neither outcome will be good for anyone except a minor few while women will mostly be ignored and/or supressed much more than they ever were during the Mubarak regime (and I’m not advocating a return to that oppressive puppet).
While, on the one hand, women’s agency and their capacity for resistance must be acknowledged, the Islamists’ attempts at curbing women’s rights cannot be underestimated. It is a great cause for concern because the conditions of choice that women are facing now are increasingly constrained by the power of the Islamists to use the religious card to make their case. With the increase in their power effectively seek to decriminalize female circumcision? Will the marriage age be lowered? Will they promote a discourse of restricting women’s mobility and work? Already the position of Azza Garraf, MP, who blames women for their exposure to sexual harassment, has infuriated many activists who have struggled to demand safe streets for all Egyptians. The diffuse impact this agenda has on the wider society is generating a competition between highly conservative actors over who can control women more tightly. Very recently, Bishop Bishoy of the Coptic Orthodox Church, said that he admired the attire of Muslim women and that Coptic women should dress more modestly like Muslim women – a statement that has infuriated Coptic activists who have argued that the comparison is intended to play into the Islamists’ agenda. We are witnessing the stalling of an incomplete process of progressive social change here.
All in all, these are not good times, economically and socially for all but the very wealthy white men and those who are married to them or are their children. Austerity for the rest of us and curtailing women’s intrinsic right of autonomy over their own human bodies and undermining the Voting Right’s Act of 1965 to zap American’s from voting many of whom have voted since they fought for our rights (including the hard fought and hard won right to vote) in WW2.
And, I come back to Keynes again and again when he said about the reparations asked of Germany after WW1 during the Treaty of Versailles: “you can’t ask a country to pay more than they have or can give.”