Posted on 07/11/2013 1:39:59 PM PDT by mojito
Europe’s debt-crisis strategy is near collapse. The long-awaited recovery has failed to take wing. Debt ratios across southern Europe are rising at an accelerating pace. Political consent for extreme austerity is breaking down in almost every EMU crisis state. And now the US Federal Reserve has inflicted a full-blown credit shock for good measure.
None of Euroland’s key actors seems willing to admit that the current strategy is untenable. They hope to paper over the cracks until the German elections in September, as if that is going to make any difference.
A leaked report from the European Commission confirms that Greece will miss its austerity targets yet again by a wide margin. It alleges that Greece lacks the “willingness and capacity” to collect taxes. In fact, Athens is missing targets because the economy is still in freefall and that is because of austerity overkill. The Greek think-tank IOBE expects GDP to fall 5pc this year. It has told journalists privately that the final figure may be -7pc. The Greek stabilisation is a mirage.
Italy’s slow crisis is again flaring up. Its debt trajectory has punched through the danger line over the past two years. The country’s €2.1 trillion (£1.8 trillion) debt – 129pc of GDP – may already be beyond the point of no return for a country without its own currency.
Standard & Poor’s did not say this outright when it downgraded the country to near-junk BBB on Tuesday. But if you read between the lines, it is close to saying the game is up for Italy.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
They're going to be replayed.
Where’s the IMF wisdom?
What? You mean the EU was not a good idea afterall?
How can this be? Isn’t socialism the answer to everything?
Mass taxation and spending....always works....
Even the USA has elected a socialist “president” twice!
It must be good......well, uh......
Coming soon to the USA...
They don’t call them P-I-G-S for nothing. (PIIGS if you add Ireland)
The IMF wisdom has always been more good money after bad.
Lots more.
Tahrir Square in Paris, later in DC...?
Hmmm.
WILL NOT END WELL.
Sky . . . Dark . . . Chickens . . . Home . . . Roost.
I don’t think it’s the EU. I think it’s trade policy. The EU embraced free trade with communist China just like the US did.
They saw cheap stuff and didn’t consider that it was going to throw their own people out of work. That cheap stuff comes at the cost of your country’s industries and your citizen’s jobs.
All Ponzi schemes end eventually. I think it just boils down to that.
Wheels coming off of Europe Ping.
All those European socialist MEPs. All those professors, with their degrees and honors and textbooks. Their endowed chairs. Their sabbaticals. So much smarter than ordinary people.
Who keeps screwing things up for them? I can’t figure it out.
“..That cheap stuff comes at the cost of your country’s industries and your citizen’s jobs.”
:::::::::::::::
Our jobs have gone away due to confiscatory corporate taxation levels, over-regulation, and government-supported unions. That is why we cannot compete. And now business has Obamacare to raise the costs of doing business even higher.
No, we know WHY we have lost our jobs and businesses.
So socialism doesn’t work. Too bad no one is learning the lesson from the failure.
The big question remains: what is the trigger of the collapse?
DC........10 million strong.......we can only hope.
DHS and all the rest can’t handle all of us!
Central Planners FAIL
Don’t believe it. You could eliminate all taxes and regulations and you still won’t compete with Chinese labor rates of $2/day.
The taxes and regulations are pains in the butt, but we’ve had taxes and regulations for decades and it didn’t kill jobs. It’s the lowering of trade import tariffs that killed jobs.
I will give you one thing though. Our import tariffs are about 1% but our employment taxes on domestic producers averages about 10%. So the tax structure does provide an incentive to offshore. However that’s small compared to the wage differential.
But I’m also all for lowering our taxes by the amount we raise import tariffs, so it’s tax neutral. We’d still get a huge bump in government revenues when 25% of Americans went back to work.
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