Greece in control, France face uphill task

Fifa.comGreece in control, France face uphill taskFifa.comUkraine and Greece secured solid home victories in the first legs of the European play-offs for the 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil™, seeing off France (2-0) and Romania (3-1) respectively. Both will now fancy their chances of defending their two-goal ...

READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.fifa.com

Deflation could drag Ireland back into the eurozone crisis

Just as Enda Kenny announces his nation's break with its creditors, the threat of another meltdown rears its ugly head

For Ireland, it reads like a happy ending. Enda Kenny announced on Thursday that Dublin would make a clean break with its creditors next month, after a gruelling three-year economic fitness programme of tax rises, spending cuts and reforms.

Instead of requesting a precautionary credit line from the International Monetary Fund, to be triggered in the event of a future crisis – as most investors had expected – Ireland will kick out the hated "troika" of the IMF, the ECB and Brussels, and go it alone.

With Spain, too, signalling last week that it wouldn't need any more money from its eurozone partners to bail out its crippled banks, and Cyprus pledging to lift restrictions on cross-border capital flows that have been in place since its fumbled bailout last March, it would be tempting to think that the worst of the turmoil that has gripped the eurozone over recent years had come to a neat and tidy close, and that "normalcy", as Irish finance minister Michael Noonan calls it, had been restored.

Yet while Noonan was right to say that the eurozone currently looks quite tranquil – making it a good moment for Ireland to dip its toe back into the public debt markets, instead of relying on the troika to fund its deficits – last week brought a host of reminders that there may still be trouble ahead.

For one thing, the economic weather across the 17-member single currency bloc is deteriorating. While the 18-month eurozone recession came to an end in the second quarter of 2013, the latest data, published last week, showed GDP expanding by a paltry 0.1% in the third quarter, with the French economy recording a contraction.

Alongside that sluggish growth performance, there is an increasingly credible threat that the eurozone could slip into deflation: indeed, some of the hardest-hit peripheral economies are already there.

Across the eurozone as a whole, prices rose by a negligible 0.7% in the year to October. In Greece, they fell by almost 2%.

It was undoubtedly the fear of deflation that prompted Mario Draghi to cut European Central Bank interest rates to a record low earlier this month: it is most central bankers' worst nightmare.

If falling prices become entrenched, it can be extremely difficult to escape from a vicious cycle of declining profits, wages and growth – and unlike US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, Draghi won't just be able to turn on the money taps and implement quantitative easing, as it's not clear the ECB even has the authority to do so – QE is certainly taboo in Germany, still haunted by memories of Weimar-era hyperinflation.

For debtors, of which there are many across the eurozone – households, companies and governments – deflation is particularly pernicious, as liabilities tend to be fixed, unlike the incomes from which they must somehow be paid. And when debtors get into trouble, so do banks – still the weakest link in the eurozone recovery story.

Meanwhile, the ECB is preparing to shine a light on banks' balance sheets through its asset quality review – and with negotiations about a eurozone-wide banking union still ongoing, no one quite knows what will happen if they find a black hole. Oh, and with the Federal Reserve contemplating withdrawing the $85bn-a-month of cheap money it has been pumping into world markets through QE, government bond yields worldwide – and thus their borrowing costs – are expected to drift higher over the next 12 months.

And just in case all that wasn't enough to fret about, Friday saw Brussels deliver its sinisterly named "fiscal surveillance package", part of the new co-ordination regime put in place in the wake of the crisis, which doled out homework to a whole list of countries. Spain and Italy were urged to revise their budgets or risk missing stringent debt targets; France was told to get its act together on structural reforms; and even Germany, which likes to see itself as a shining example to its eurozone neighbours, was criticised for ignoring the commission's calls for reform.

In other words, even if Dublin's politicians have made the right judgment and Ireland is fit enough to stand on its own, it could yet be sucked back into the mire by a eurozone-wide crisis not of its own making.

From On the Buses to on your bike

Forty-five years have passed since Reg Varney – aka Stan Butler in On the Buses – became the first person to withdraw cash from a hole-in-the-wall machine. It heralded a revolution in banking. No longer was cash accessible only from a teller sporting a rubber thimble between 9am and 3pm on weekdays and for a couple of hours on a Saturday morning. It was available 24/7. There have been other revolutions since – debit cards, telephone banking, call centres, which have all resulted in fewer high street banks and tellers. And now another is under way.

The proliferation and popularity of online banking means that an average customer now visits a branch just twice a month, while mobile banking services are used more than once every two days. A survey out on Friday showed that one in six of 18-to-30-year-olds had never stepped inside a bank branch.

So it is not exactly a shock that last week Barclays said it wanted 1,700 of its 33,600 branch staff to put their hands up for voluntary redundancy. That is just over one job going from every branch in the Barclays network. People are being replaced by iPads and smartphones: customers can sort out their bills and standing orders from their sofas. And even those who still venture inside branches are being encouraged to think digital, with iPads available for use there too. The labour and other costs of offering a retail banking service are, basically, being transferred to the customer.

There are other huge changes under way: customers can transfer cash directly to their friends in bars and restaurants with the Pingit app. The UK's three largest mobile phone networks, EE, Vodafone and O2, have joined forces to turn smartphones into virtual wallets. Shoppers will walk into a store, pick out a purchase, scan the barcode, and pay by tapping their phone on an Oyster-card-style reader, rather than at the till. There are even safety deposit boxes in the cloud.

Antony Jenkins, the Barclays boss, has been talking about automation ever since he took the top job a little over a year ago. Analysts believe he could slice 40,000 off the 140,000 workforce. It will be brutal. And it will be universal. Tellers could soon be history.

PPI scourge could do with a bank job

There was a bit of moaning when Natalie Ceeney was named chief financial ombudsman four years ago. What does this former director of the British Library know about the financial services industry, was the cry. She went on to treble the size of the Financial Ombudsman Service so it could tackle 500,000 cases a year – up from 150,000 – as it was swamped by complaints about mis-sold payment protection insurance. "The biggest clean-up in financial services history," is how she has described the scandal, refusing to heed the banks' whines that claims management firms are to blame for the high level of complaints. The banks are still cleaning up the PPI mess – and, knowing how the industry operates, we are no doubt not far away from another scandal. Now Ceeney has quit, those same banks might consider giving her a job sorting out their customer service operations.

DeflationEuroEuropean UnionEuropean monetary unionEconomicsBankingEuropean banksFinancial crisisFinancial sectorPayment protection insuranceIrelandEuropetheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com

Golden Dawn shootings: group claims responsibility

Militant People's Revolutionary Forces says killing of far-right Greek party's supporters was retaliation for stabbing of rapper

A Greek anti-establishment group has claimed responsibility for a drive-by shooting this month that killed two supporters of the far-right Golden Dawn party and raised fears of an escalation of political violence.

The previously unknown group, the Militant People's Revolutionary Forces, said the attack had been carried out in retaliation for the fatal stabbing of anti-fascism rapper Pavlos Fissas, to which a Golden Dawn sympathiser has confessed.

Police could not confirm the authenticity of the claim, which came on the eve of rallies to commemorate the 40th anniversary of a bloody student uprising against the military junta that ruled Greece at the time.

"The brazen murder of Pavlos Fissas was the drop of blood that made the glass overflow," the group wrote in an 18-page letter filled with anti-establishment invective published on a news website. It called the rapper's killing a turning point.

"The armed attack-response ... is the starting point of the people's campaign to send the neo-Nazi scum of Golden Dawn where they belong, to the dustbin of history," it said.

The shooting of the two young Golden Dawn supporters outside the party's offices in Athens on 1 November came at a time of growing public anger against a party widely regarded as neo-Nazi and accused of attacks against migrants and leftists.

Golden Dawn denies accusations of violence, rejects the neo-Nazi label and says it had no involvement in Fissas's killing.

An opinion poll released on Saturday indicated that support for Golden Dawn had grown since the two men were gunned down.

The party, Greece's third most popular in recent surveys, shed almost a third of its support after Fissas's death in September. A poll by Alcofor Sunday's Proto Thema newspaper, conducted on 12-15 November, put support for Golden Dawn at 8.8%, up 2.2 points in a month but still below the 10.8% it enjoyed in June.

A government crackdown on Golden Dawn after evidence linking it to Fissas's killing has led to party leader Nikolaos Mihaloliakos and five more of its politicians being charged with belonging to a criminal group. Mihaloliakos and two of the politicians have been remanded in custody until their trial.

Golden Dawn partyGreeceThe far righttheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com

Previously Unknown Group Says It Shot Greek Extremists

The GuardianPreviously Unknown Group Says It Shot Greek ExtremistsWall Street JournalATHENS—A previously unknown urban guerrilla group has claimed responsibility for the shooting of three alleged members of Greece's far-right Golden Dawn party earlier this month outside local party offices in a suburb north of Athens. The group, the ...Unknown group says it killed 2 activists in GreeceBoston.comall 52 news articles »

READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT stream.wsj.com

Greek theatre at Kelaniya Campus

‘The Greek Theatre Festival at the University of Kelaniya -2013’ will present ‘Ada Wage Dawasaka Antigone’ based on Sophocle’s ‘Antigone’ on November 21, ‘Visekariyo’ based on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata on November 22 at the Lionel Wendt ...

READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.sundaytimes.lk

Greece arrest two smugglers after boat capsizes off island of Lefkada

The GuardianGreece arrest two smugglers after boat capsizes off island of LefkadaNEWS.com.au"The 58-year-old appears to have set up a criminal organisation for the illegal smuggling of migrants from Greece to Italy, along with four Greeks (three men and a woman) and another foreign national," the coastguard said. Authorities are still ...Greece: 12 migrants dead after boat capsizesUSA TODAYMigrants found dead after boat capsizes off GreeceThe Guardian12 dead after boat overturns off GreeceThe AustralianTIMEall 66 news articles »

READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.news.com.au

Unknown group claims it killed 2 extreme-right activists in Greece, threatens to kill more

Greek police are investigating a statement by an unknown group claiming responsibility for the killing of two members of the far-right Golden Dawn party.

READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.foxnews.com