Posted on 04/30/2010 10:50:10 AM PDT by mainsail that
Europe must fight market 'attack': Portugal PM
(LISBON) - Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates on Friday urged the European Union to react against a market "attack" following downgrades in the credit ratings of Greece, Portugal and Spain this week.
"This attack is directed against the European project," Socrates said during a parliamentary debate. "This attack, without foundation, is targeting the euro as a whole and the sovereign debt of several countries," he added.
"Europe should take measures and go from words to actions," he said, stressing in particular the importance of ensuring that credit rating agencies are regulated in such a way as to make them more independent.
Socrates also said the government on May 27 would submit to parliament for debate a draft law allowing Portugal to aid Greece as part of a bailout by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
"This law will enable us to lend money to Greece so they are not the victims of speculators. This is how we will defend the European project," he said.
Portugal is considered by many investors to be the next weak link in the eurozone after Greece as it is also heavily indebted. Experts say, however, that Portugal's problems are far smaller than Greece's.
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(Excerpt) Read more at eubusiness.com ...
The highlighting is mine
Jose Socrates is most inappropriately surnamed.
Translation: We like Socialism and think that more of it is the solution to all our problems.
Defend the “European Project?” Just exactly what project is that? Is that where the Germans produce the goods and the French produce the food while the rest of the continent sponges off them?
Sounds familiar; I know it as “the 0bama Project.”
Where have all the adults gone in the modern world?
Europe would do better to free themselves from the globalists and fight the Muslim attack.
They spend more than they had for far too long as they tried to tax themselves to prosperity.
Nothing to do with speculators.
Europe is lost. The best of their kind were eliminated from the gene pool at Verdun, the Somme and Stalingrad.
Defend the “European Project?” Just exactly what project is that?
If reality doesn’t cooperate in supporting the fantasy then just regulate reality. This is a fantasy common to all leftists and to most politicians/”intellectuals”/media propagandists. If something happens that you don’t like or upsets the agenda just pass a new law or formulate a new regulation. That they have hundreds-of-thousands (at least) of laws and regulations on the books and reality persists in refusing to conform to the fantasy never seems to penetrate.
All too true, I'm afraid.
Europe is lost.
Europe is lost as to themselves. Like “wandering through the woods blindfolded without a compass, randomly bumping into trees” lost.
Well for example i live in europe (in one of the richer parts) and i don´t feel lost. There are many problems here, true but do i feel lost or it´s all over? well definitely not. If so i would dig out my US citizenship and leave but right now i like living here and have no intention to leave.
I guess the same could be said the other way around. Does the US has problems? Shure. Do you want to leave it because of that? i guess not.
greetings
The euro was a bad deal for the PIGS. Before the Euro they were stuck with inflation and lack of borrowing power when their govts overspent. Prices and wages were way below Germany and France..etc. With the Euro their govts got more borrowing capability in a currency that wasn’t inflating. They went on a spending spree and now they are paying for it. Most of the people in the PIGS resented and hated the Euro and rising prices that came with it. Only the govt people benefited with higher and higher salaries and retirement.
Well i guess the Euro had 2 main goals when invented.
First to kill exchange rates for inner european trade
and second to rival the US dollar on global stage.
Both have been important from a european point of view.
Of course the Euro has some major drawbacks too.
It´s allways the same some will make profit because of that
and others will lose because of that.
It only depends on which “side” you are “located”.
The winner will like it the loser... (well i guess you know
the answer ;-)
But believe me a “Euro is not a Euro”.
It depends where you are located.
The living standarts really differ between countries
which are using the euro.
For example for me in personal. Yes i felt a serious rising in prices when they introduced the euro. But the
next thing i felt was that short after that i “earned” more
money for my same job. So at the end for me after one year i´t was the same. Different products definitely cost more
but on the other side i get “more” money.
So it´s the same like before.
my “job” will buy me the same “living standart” like it did bevore.
So, how does one short the Euro?
So far in this thread I don’t see anyone addressing the perceived problem stated in the article: the rating agencies. S&P et al. Were not these agencies the ones that gave Lehman and the others AAA ratings when in fact they were all but bankrupt? Who rates/controls the “raters”? Too hot a topic?
Forget about the rating agencies: would you give Portugal and Greece your own pension money as a loan at 5% a year? No one is vouching for S & P but you have to be blind not to see where Greece, Portugal and probably Spain are heading:
"The red flags, unashamedly decorated with the hammer and sickle, that fluttered on the nearby headquarters of the local Portuguese communist party were a clue to the immense political battle awaiting prime minister José Sócrates as he tries to see off a Greek-style debt debacle.
The communists head a red-green coalition that governs this and a swath of large, battered industrial towns on the south bank of the Tagus, across from the capital Lisbon. "They are not real communists any more," said Da Silva, who spent five years in the jails of former dictator Salazar. "But they are all we've got."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/30/portugal-debt-crisis-workers-protests
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