How the world sees Greece
Political Corruption and Media Retribution in Spain and Greece The Nation. Meanwhile, in Greece, reporters investigating tax fraud in the oil market have received death threats. Rajoy's government in Madrid is fighting dirty, as more details emerge of kickbacks and money laundering in the ruling party. “Those who filter ... |
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 Gulf Times | Qatar said to be in talks to buy beachfront resort from Greece Gulf Times Greece is striving to attract foreign investment as the economy faces its sixth straight year of contraction and an unemployment rate that reached 27% in November. An Astir Palace deal would mark the first sale of a property freehold in the country ... Qatar Eyes Purchase of Astir Palace Crisis: Greece; Qatar sets sight on ex Athens airport |
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Macedonian, Greek women join in EU development project Southeast European Times The experience from our Greek partners helps a lot, as they have … become one of the eminent organisations in the development of women's entrepreneurship," Meri Stojanova, head of the project, told SETimes. Popi Sourmaidou, managing director from ... |
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 Scranton Times-Tribune | Boulevard Diner owner features authentic Greek dishes Scranton Times-Tribune jake danna stevens/staff photographer Antonios Kalyvas, left, and his son, Apostolis, serve up Greek specialty dishes, including spinach pie, gyro platters and Greek chicken salad at Boulevard Diner in Green Ridge Corners. Food and Wine. Boulevard ... |
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 News 10NBC | Police ID victim in deadly car crash in Greece News 10NBC Greece Police have released the name of the man who died in a two car crash in Greece Wednesday night. Greece Police tell News10NBC 57-year-old Michael J. Thomson, of Greece, was driving westbound on Latta Road around 5:10 p.m. when his car hit a ... Man Dead After Greece Crash Greece man dies in 2-vehicle crash |
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The aim of the financial transaction tax is to make banks and markets contribute more – and it's coming to 11 EU states soon
Last week I created a pioneer moment within the EU. At the request of 11 states, I proposed the first financial transaction tax (FTT) – often referred to as the Tobin or Robin Hood tax – to be implemented at regional level. The proposal had originally been tabled in September 2011 to cover all of the EU, but was opposed by some countries, including Britain. Now 11 member states – including Germany, Greece, France and Spain – have decided to move ahead as a smaller group.
Why are these states so keen to press ahead? First, they are responding to the persistent demands of their citizens, who have long called for a harmonised FTT in Europe. The levy will ensure that the under-taxed financial sector finally makes a fair contribution to the public purse.
Second, the tax offers substantial new revenues. Around €30-35bn (£26-30bn) per year will be generated from this small tax of just 0.1% on bonds and shares and 0.01% on derivatives. This means new resources for growth-friendly investment, stabilising public finances or wider commitments such as development aid.
Finally, it should help to deter the irresponsible financial trading that contributed to the crisis we are in today. It will favour steady financial activity over high-risk speculation and steer the financial sector towards the real economy.
Since the tax will apply to any transactions with an established economic link to the 11 states, the only way to avoid it would be to give up all financial trading with those in the FTT-zone – a highly irrational response to a small tax, especially given the fact that the participating countries constitute two-thirds of the EU economy.
In short, what I propose is fair, sensible and well-designed. Nonetheless, I am aware of the questions and concerns that have been voiced, especially in the UK. Many of these fears are a reaction to the scare-mongering of vested interest groups or a misunderstanding of how the tax will work. So let me address them head on.
Will the tax be borne by ordinary citizens? We have taken every measure to ensure that it isn't. This is a tax on the financial sector, and 85% of liable transactions are purely between financial institutions. Day-to-day financial activities of citizens and businesses are outside its scope. Even if the financial sector passed on some costs to clients, the outcome would not be disproportionate. For example, anyone buying, €10,000 in shares should be able to afford a €10 tax on the transaction.
Will the tax hamper growth in the EU? No. Our economic studies show that it will have no impact on jobs, and could even have a positive impact on growth if revenues are reinvested wisely. The tax rates proposed are very low, to prevent an increased cost of capital affecting the real economy, and the activities of central banks and public debt managers are exempt.
Will the tax reach beyond its boundaries – into the UK? If there is an economic link to the FTT zone, it will apply, regardless of whether the other parties to the transaction are based in London, Singapore, Copenhagen or New York; there is no extra-territoriality to this. Taxing cross-border services is a well-established principle in taxation and fully in line with international law. For comparative examples, we need only look at how VAT and even UK stamp duty work. The FTT is on sound legal footing and totally proportionate in its scope.
Will the regional FTT have any impact on the UK in the end? Certainly not a negative one. If anything, the UK will benefit from a less fragmented single market and a more stable financial sector, as a result of others applying the tax. In an ideal world, the UK would come on board, so that it, too, could reap the revenues. It has opted not to for now, as is its sovereign right. But the door is always open to join at any time. In the meanwhile, eleven member states march ahead as pioneers with a regional FTT, ready to prove that this fair and robust tax can and should be applied widely.
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 Cyprus Property News Magazine | Greek-style crisis fears cloud Cyprus vote Financial Times Rapidly shrinking consumption is one indicator of Cypriot voters' anxiety the island may be heading for a Greek-style economic disaster. Household borrowing is high, and a rising unemployment rate, which reached 14.7 per cent in December, is squeezing ... No change expected after Greek Cypriot elections |
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 EU News | Greece faces more than 70000 euro daily fine over illegal dumps Kathimerini The European Commission said Thursday it is taking Greece back to the European Court of Justice for failing to implement an earlier ruling on illegal landfills. “In 2005, the Court ruled that Greece was not taking sufficient measures to close down and ... EU takes Sweden, Greece to court over environment |
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ROME (Reuters) - Billionaire showman Silvio Berlusconi has again astonished Italy with a storming comeback that has frayed nerves in European capitals and among investors, but the signs are his final gamble has failed. The 76-year-old media magnate and four-times prime minister looked down and out for much of 2012 after a jeering crowd hounded him from office in November 2011 as Italy tottered towards a Greek-style debt crisis. His indecision over whether to stand in this weekend's election brought his People of Freedom Party (PDL) to the brink of disintegration. ...
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 EurActiv | Official: We are already preparing the Greek EU Presidency EurActiv By January 2014 Greece will be much closer to exiting the sovereign debt crisis than today - and its EU Presidency will be organised in the best possible way, Dimitris Kourkoulas, the Greek deputy foreign minister told EurActiv in an exclusive interview. |
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 The West Australian | Greek Bonds: A Nice Earner for ECB Wall Street Journal Net profit for the central bank rose 37% from a year earlier to €998 million ($1.32 billion) in 2012. The figure included €555 million in interest income from Greek government bonds, down from €654 million in 2011, the ECB's annual accounts showed. ECB earns €555m on Greek bond holdings UPDATE 1-ECB Greek bond profits promise funds for Athens |
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AFTER 30 months in the deep freeze Turkey’s bid to join the European Union is for once warming a bit. France, which under Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency blocked five of the 35 chapters that must be completed, has lifted its veto on one to do with regional aid. In Cyprus Nicos Anastasiades has a big lead in the presidential election (see article). He backed a 2004 UN plan to reunify the island that was accepted by Turkish-Cypriots but rejected by Greek-Cypriots. He could give Cyprus’s settlement talks a new push that might lead to its dropping some of its own vetoes on new chapters. Queasiness over letting in a big, powerful and prickly Muslim country aside, the EU’s biggest gripe with Turkey is its refusal to open ports to Greek-Cypriot vessels.“No force can tear us away from Europe,” said Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, at a recent conference. Yet Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, has talked of joining the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation with Russia, China, and Central Asia (he later recanted). Such frustration is understandable: popular Turkish support for EU membership has fallen from over 70% when talks began in 2005 to as low as 33%. Nothing grates more than the various forms of watered-down membership...
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Greece to Approve Gold Project Wall Street Journal ATHENS—Greece's government will within days approve a gold mine project in the north of the country, which promises to create jobs and bring much needed investment to the area, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said. Giving the green light to a planned ... |
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TEXT-Fitch affirms National Bank of Greece covered bonds under Programme I Reuters Feb 21 - Fitch Ratings has affirmed National Bank of Greece S.A.'s (NBG; 'CCC'/'C') mortgage covered bonds outstanding under Programme I at 'B-' with a Negative Outlook and has removed them from Rating Watch Negative (RWN). The rating action follows ... |
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 Quartz | I watched Greece rise, and now I've seen it fall Quartz It was a gorgeous spring day in Paris in 2010 and I found myself on a cafe patio in Place des Contrescarpes next to a group of women who had just come from an island holiday in Greece. I had been curious about their impression of Athens, a place I knew ... |
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 Kathimerini | Greece told to follow rules on pig welfare Kathimerini Final written warnings were sent to Poland, Denmark, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, Ireland and Cyprus as well as Germany and France. If the nine countries fail to respond adequately within two months, the Commission said it would start formal legal ... |
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 My Moinfo | ECB earns €555m on Greek bond holdings Financial Times The bank also revealed for the first time that nearly half of its holdings in the so-called Securities Markets Programme are of Italian debt. At the end of 2012 it held €99bn in Italian sovereign bonds, €30.8bn in Greek debt, €43.7bn in Spanish paper ... ECB Banks Over Half a Billion From Greek Debt |
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Employment has risen, despite a stalled economy, with the rush for barista positions showing how our job market is changing
With economic news usually so bad in Britain, Europe and the US, it's hard to know how to react to news that looks good, at least on the face of it. Despite the lack of growth in the last quarter of 2012, employment rose again in Britain (by 154,000), bringing the year's increase to 584,000.
How can that be when the UK economy is stalled? Good question and no one has a certain answer beyond Britain's much-vaunted, Thatcherised flexible labour market. It offers a sharp contrast to rigid Spain and Italy, where unemployment is much higher. Meanwhile France has attracted a terrific raspberry from a US tyre maker. Rescue your ailing tyre plant where staff work only three hours a day? "Do you think we're stupid?" Maurice Taylor asked the French minister who had rashly (shamelessly?) put out feelers for a takeover.
The Guardian tucked the new employment figures away in a corner of the financial pages – not gloomy enough to warrant more? – whereas the Times and Daily Mail decided the important detail was the ministerial claim that most extra jobs are now going to British-born workers (surely not quite the same as the "white British" label beloved of the tabloids). That is in contrast to the lax immigration policies of the New Labour era when three in four jobs went to foreigners, the papers emphasised.
Well, that may be, though these things are tricky to measure. Ministers claim that by cracking down on bogus students (quite right too) and immigration rule changes that exclude the low-skilled – along with IDS's benefits reforms – have contributed to the shift. "British jobs for British workers", as Gordon Brown famously promised, but did not quite deliver.
I have always assumed that it's better for individuals and their families to have work than remain unemployed and have long been puzzled why so many jobs in what we now call hospitality industries are held by young foreigners, not young Brits. In the wake of Costa's revelation that its Nottingham outlet had 1,701 applications for just eight jobs, Leo Benedictus has a charming article in today's Guardian about the challenge of being a barista – quite different from being a barrister, Hermione dear.
But he doesn't explain why so many such jobs go to Poles or Italians. You encounter that awkward fact all over Britain in my travelling experience, even in some remote areas with high unemployment. Is it education and motivation among mobile English-speaking EU citizens who will probably go home? Or does the benefits system not make it worthwhile for young locals to try? Unemployment among the 16 to 24 year olds remains high – though many are students.
I happened to be in Costa in byelection Eastleigh for a panini lunch on Wednesday and was struck by the fact that it was pretty busy in a town of only middling prosperity (more people in it than in Poundland round the corner). That's the way it is in Britain now, plenty of people who have enough money to enjoy Costa's and plenty who don't. "It is Costa which pay its taxes, unlike Starbucks and Caffe Nero," I assured a colleague.
But it's also hard work for staff (mostly local in Eastleigh, I think) getting the coffee and panini orders right, all for the £7.15 an hour that Benedictus reports. "I was going to be there [in Starbucks in Belfast] all the time anyway, so I might as well be paid," explained one barista.
Coming back along the M3, I used Starbucks to write my report because it has the free Wi-Fi I needed. It was busy too, a young family cheerfully slurping ice-cream at the next table, Brits who can afford it.
But that's the rub of the employment figures (as the FT predictably notes in its report). Unemployment is up 10,000 to 2.5 million – lower than analysts were predicting when the recession and austerity first bit deep – and the jobless rate inched up to 7.8% from 7.7%. That's low by Greek or Spanish standards (25% plus) and at 29.7 million there is a record number of people in work, 13.8 million of them women.
However, the price paid for that flexible labour market – which makes it both easier to hire and fire than in a French tyre factory – is that pay is still falling in real terms as average earnings again fail to keep up with inflation as they have since 2009, up 1.2% in the fourth quarter against inflation rate of 2.9%.
That appears to confirm trends that suggest much of Britain is heading towards a low productivity/low wage economy – the evidence being that more workers are producing the same amount of goods and services, as Larry Elliott notes, pricing themselves into work by accepting lower pay in tough times. It's the right call, but it's a tough one.
There is a macro-economic price to be paid as well as a personal one. Together with higher bills, lower in-work benefits and higher taxes, that constitutes serious downward pressure on demand, which helps keep the economy in the doldrums. If individuals are still paying down debts they acquired in the boom decade and companies are nervous about investing their cash piles in an uncertain economy.
It's government spending, via the public sector, that keeps the ship afloat. That's why it's so hard for George Osborne to meet his own targets – he's caught in a downward spiral when even the 4G mobile spectrum sale tanks – and why Sir Mervyn King, outgoing governor of the Bank of England, wanted to pump some more helicopter funny money into the economy but (as we just learned) was outvoted by 6 to 3.
When so staid a figure as King is sounding a bit like a leftie, times must still be pretty scary. But more jobs is always better than fewer. Better to see a coffee cup half full than half empty.
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