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How the world sees Greece
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Greeks mark 39th anniversary of uprising for democracy with anti-austerity rally
Thousands of Greeks marked on Saturday the 39th anniversary of a student uprising which led to the restoration of democracy in Greece, with a customary mass march in central Athens, chanting anti-austerity slogans.
Greece district's radio station has deficit
Greece district's radio station has deficit Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Rob Linton, station manager at WGMC Jazz 90.1, goes on the air in the station's Greece Olympia High School studio. The station is trying to make up a monetary deficit. / ANNETTE LEIN//staff photographer ... |
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Fastjet takes EasyJet low-cost model into African airspace
Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou's low-cost African airline is ready for takeoff in Tanzania
The low-cost model pioneered by Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou that rocked Europe's traditional airlines is spreading across Africa. Tickets went on sale last week for the first flights on Fastjet, the latest brainchild of the Greek entrepreneur, which will start flying from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania at the end of the month for prices starting at 32,000 Tanzanian shillings (£13) – plus the inevitable baggage charges and taxes.
While Fastjet has yet to secure the final paperwork for its transnational routes, it expects to be selling Kenyan and Ugandan destinations alongside its regional service within weeks, and ultimately aims to grow into a pan-African low-cost airline.
Fastjet's chief executive, Ed Winter, a former director of easyJet under Haji-Ioannou, said: "It takes a long time in Africa to work beyond the bureaucracy and the politics, but the vision is a network across Africa."
The business has merged with Fly540, an airline that will gradually disappear as Fastjet grows, but gives it assets in Angola and Ghana as well as east Africa. Broader expansion will mean working with other airlines, to circumvent red tape, although consumers will fly in aircraft branded with Fastjet's African grey parrot logo and book through the same website.
Africa is ripe for aviation investment, with huge distances between cities and poor road and rail infrastructure. However, a poor safety record has blighted African airlines, with many carriers barred from European airspace by safety regulators.
Winter said: "At the moment, getting around is incredibly difficult. Put in a reliable service and people will want it. We'll be bringing travel to people who don't even dream of flying." He promised safety would be "everyone's number one priority" with pilot training consistent and centralised.
He said the cost of flying in Africa averaged four times that of Europe and that savings were clearly possible: "It's the standard low-cost model. You utilise assets, plan properly, get smart people to be efficient and drive lower costs.
"Fast turnarounds will be a challenge – some airports in Africa are not equipped to deal with that. But the lessons we've learned around the world from low-cost airlines will be imported into Africa."
Haji-Ioannou, who first got the business plan under way in partnership with Lonrho, retains a 5% shareholding and a consultancy agreement. He will join Fastjet's board but will not,Winter said, be "hands-on".
Winter hopes the African grey parrot is an apposite logo: "It's smart, and lives the longest of them all."
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Paul Tucker hopes luck holds for Bank of England run-in
The deputy governor is favourite to succeed Mervyn King in the top job, so another parliamentary appearance needs to go well
Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England, is odds-on favourite to get a promotion – and that's despite the Financial Times backing him to succeed Sir Mervyn King as boss.
The Pink 'Un did the same favour for Neil Kinnock just before the 1992 election, but despite what counts as a second setback to Tucker's campaign, the white smoke is still expected to be billowing out of Threadneedle Street to announce his ascension around the time of next month's autumn statement.
With that in mind, it may be worth staying awake longer than usual when tuning into this week's parliamentary commission on banking standards hearing, where Tucker will appear alongside King and the Bank's financial stability boffin, Andy Haldane. Tucker will hope for an easier ride than he got during his parliamentary grilling on the Libor crisis, although the odds suggest only a George Entwistle-style performance could fell him.
Still, while he may be way out in front, the 54-year-old is not the only horse still running. Lord Turner, bouffant-haired chairman of the Financial Services Authority, is giving evidence to the same hearing three days before his rival, when he'll be hoping to impress interviewers more than he has the bookies. Paddy Power now makes him joint third favourite (from four runners).
Troubled times at Homeserve
Homeserve is one of those companies that sells insurance to cover the cost of emergency plumbers turning up at your home. The company has been dealing with an emergency call of its own this year, having seen its value slump by a quarter after being hit by one of those Financial Services Authority mis-selling investigations that seem obligatory within the sector.
So the City will be looking forward to the group's interim results this week from boss Richard Harpin (who promises to be with you between 8am and 1pm, so expect him to arrive in time for tea).
Shareholders will be hoping that Harpin turns up with the right parts to fix their woes, although some wonder if he might soon be leaving, particularly if he's more concerned with telling gags. The best of those has been selflessly sending schools a copy of his book: A Mind for Business: The Secrets of how Award-Winning Entrepreneur Richard Harpin Built a £1bn Business – a tome rated by its one Amazon reviewer as the "least useful business book". That's an accolade equal to Harpin's Entrepreneur of the Year gong; useless business books are publishing's most competitive genre.
Double dose of eurozone bust-ups
This week promises not one crunch eurozone summit, but two – a brace of events that may yet rival our own election double-header last week (for police commissioners and a new Corby MP, if you recall) for raw excitement.
First off will be a meeting between finance ministers and IMF boss Christine Lagarde, who returns from her Asian tour early to tell Brussels exactly how they should be sorting out the Greek economy.
Lagarde reckons eurozone governments should absorb more of Greece's pain. Jean-Claude Juncker, the Eurogroup president, does not. "You know, it's not over until the fat lady sings," Lagarde told a press conference in Manila – in a virtuoso display of how to deploy an English cliche alongside a plausibly deniable dig at Angela Merkel.
Later in the week comes David Cameron's big chance to shine, by playing the role beloved by every Tory leader since Ted Heath and failing to get near the level of EU budget cuts that his backbenchers will applaud. Italian PM Mario Monti smirks: "Using British understatement, I would say our positions have points that are not completely aligned," – a line that might not please Cameron. Just like Lagarde, it sounds rather like Monti's taking the Mickey.
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George Osborne sticks to his core economic policy: blame Labour
The chancellor is pinning the government's re-electoral hopes on voters believing that Labour is responsible for the mess he has created
For some time now our chancellor of the exchequer has come across to the public as a kind of cheeky chappie. Last week we heard, through the medium of his father-in-law, my old acquaintance Lord Howell (energy secretary in Margaret Thatcher's first government) that George Osborne believes "the prime minister is not familiar with these [green] issues, does not understand them".
Then highly placed Conservative sources indicated that the chancellor was against the entire "green agenda" of a prime minister who once declared that he was leading "the greenest government ever".
Perhaps both prime minister and chancellor should reflect on another colloquial meaning of "green" – as in "inexperienced" or "not up to it" – which latter phrase was once used by Labour prime minister Clement Attlee on being asked why he was firing a member of his cabinet.
Nevertheless, as his economic strategy disintegrates in front of his, and our, eyes, one has to admire Osborne's insouciance. In hard times a sense of humour always helps, and in an article for the Times last week the chancellor demonstrated that he has certainly not lost his .
I am not referring to the main point, which was picked up by the rest of the media. The subject of gay marriage does not come into my definition of economic policy; nor, as far as I know, is it normally a subject of interest to Treasury officials.
What interested me were the chancellor's inferences of the significance of the US election result for politics in the UK. "First," he said, "the incumbent government was re-elected despite a historically weak economic recovery." So that's all right for the Conservatives in 2015, then.
Is it? We shall see. There is a difference between a historically weak US recovery of 2% a year and the experience of the UK, where there has been virtually no recovery to speak of and, according to the latest assessment by the Bank of England, there will be nothing like a return to pre-recession levels in the near future. Indeed, the talk is now of a triple-dip recession, although, in common with the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, I regard the economy as in depression until output returns to that previous peak, which has, one fears, gone outside and may be some time. It all depends on the semantics: recession returns, or depression persists. Either way, it is an Atlantic Ocean away from growth at 2% a year.
But the chancellor's humorous comparisons with the US do not stop there. Osborne believes that a key reason why Barack Obama won was that American voters still blamed the Republicans for the economic mess inherited by Obama, and, likewise, way ahead in 2015, British voters will still be blaming the last Labour government. With three years to go, and the brunt of the patently ill-conceived austerity programme still to come? I doubt it. Even now, slightly under half of voters blame the last government, and they have seen nothing yet.
Osborne views "our council tax freeze" as a vote-winner. This is the chancellor of a government that talks of localism but squeezes central government grants to local authorities to the limits. The impact on local services will not just be on the poor: Osborne's austerity programme will almost certainly hit the shires and the prosperous suburbs.
Now, the point about the austerity programme is not that it caused the crisis but that it aborted the recovery, and continues to inhibit it.
We experienced something close to a laboratory experiment in this country when, after the financial crash, the previous government lowered VAT and precipitated a recovery. That recovery was stopped in its tracks by the premature restoration of the earlier VAT rate, and the announcement of the austerity programme. At the time Osborne's sense of humour extended to such sick jokes as to compare our situation to that of Greece.
At the same time, we were told that the Bank of England, via monetary policy, would counteract the effect of the fiscal squeeze. Well, there is a limit to which interest rates can fall, and it does not help that banks have gone from one (pre-crisis) extreme to the other when it comes to the granting of credit. As Lord Skidelsky demonstrated in his recent GLS Shackle Biennial Memorial Lecture in Cambridge, the success of quantitative easing has been decidedly limited, probably more so here than in the US.
And last week Sir Mervyn King himself emphasised the limits of monetary policy. Of course, when the governor of the Bank said "there are limits to the ability of domestic policy to stimulate private demand", he did not add "especially when the stance of fiscal policy is calculated to restrict that demand".
I sympathise with King's concern about the effect on our international competitiveness of the 8% rise in the average value of the pound in the past year – a significant partial erosion of the earlier devaluation. But no doubt the credit ratings agencies will contribute to a reversal of this, since Moody's has indicated that the UK's triple-A rating will be threatened if the growth prospects worsen or the chancellor fails to stick to his deficit reduction timetable. The chances of both these things becoming reality are hardly slim.
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US embassy in Greece warns of rise in 'unprovoked' violent attacks on ...
 National Post | US embassy in Greece warns of rise in 'unprovoked' violent attacks on ... National Post The United States is warning its citizens travelling in Greece about the recent wave of violent attacks on those who look like “foreign migrants” amid the rise of a neo-Nazi party in the economically beleaguered country. “The U.S. Embassy informs U.S ... Police silent in Greece on migrant's jail ordeal US Embassy warns Americans of attacks in Greece Egyptians in Greece condemn police violence at embassy after Egyptian tortured |
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IMF, eurozone countries clash over Greek debt
European countries are pushing for additional credit lines and guarantees. The IMF is opposed to any debt extensions. Now many emerging countries remember the harsh conditions they endured in the past.
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