How the world sees Greece
CANADA FX DEBT-C$ firms to two-week high as Greece hopes rise Reuters C$ at C$0.9920 to the US$, or $1.0080 * Hope for Greece aid deal, improving German outlook cheer investors * Currency breaks through week-long block * Canada inflation higher than forecast, still tame * Bank of Canada rate increase seen a long way off ... |
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COMMODITIES-Greek hope, German data boost index to 1-month high Reuters NEW YORK Nov 23 (Reuters) - Commodity markets rose to their highest in a month on Friday as signs of progress in Greek aid talks and upbeat German economic data pressured the U.S. dollar and elevated raw materials. In a post-Thanksgiving trading ... |
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Greek federation issues strong rebuke at "burden" claims Chicago Tribune ATHENS (Reuters) - The Greek Football Federation (EPO) on Friday strongly rebuked local media reports that accused the organisation of becoming a burden for the crisis-stricken country's taxpayers. Several news outlets published articles this week ... |
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Japanese banks are by some measures in better shape than their UK counterparts, but the rest of the economy is looking decidedly shaky
First Britain was compared to Greece – sunk by debt. Then when the worst of the financial crisis passed and a battered exchequer was still solvent, Britain was likened to another capitalist basket case - Japan.
With two lost decades under its belt, Tokyo is considered the capital of stasis, a place where nothing grows.
Hardly a week goes by without someone arguing that Japan's lack of growth, its ageing population, massive debts or its strong currency spell the end of a renaissance that propelled the country into the first rank during the 1970s.
To many people the situation remains benign. If you are happy with your domestic situation, job and income, an economy that is going nowhere does little to provoke the forces of change. So far outside investors have adopted a similar view.
However, not everyone is content.
The traditional prop for a government that repeatedly spends more than it generates in taxes, is the Japanese saver. They put their money aside to lend to their own government. Japanese government bonds (JGBs) are famously 95% owned by Japanese investors (who believe misguidedly that it is better to get a return on loans to the government than pay tax, which has no return).
Japan's savers have been ageing for some time. Every year there are fewer people putting money aside. In recent times the banks have made up the difference, but this has only made the situation worse as they tie themselves to the fortunes of the government in an ever-closer union.
Polls this week showed the refusal to pay enough tax persists and voters are turning to opposition leader Shinzo Abe's plans to unleash unlimited amounts of free cash to push inflation up to 3% and interest rates below 0%.
This free cash is printed by the central bank and will flood the Japanese financial markets in the hope that some people will spend it. It is a scheme that has worked in the US, but in Japan is more likely to mimic the Bank of England's quantitative easing programme, which has flopped as a spur to growth. In the UK, the people who benefit - those who discover their debt payments are cheaper - tend to hoard the savings while those without debts find their income cut as savings interest declines. All the new money gets swallowed by the banks, which are grateful because they are also suffering terribly, and recycled back to the government.
Japanese banks are by some measures in better shape than their UK counterparts, but the rest of the economy is looking decidedly shaky.
Exports fell in October by 6.5% on the previous year (imports dropped by 1.6%). Exports to the EU are down 20%, while exports to China have slumped by 11.6%, in part due to tensions over disputed islands in the East China Sea. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp are on the slide along with much of the tech sector.
Worse, domestic consumption dropped 0.5% and capital expenditure fell 3.2%, both registering the second-largest falls since the height of the 2008-09 recession.
Graham Turner at GFC Economics says Japan stands on the brink of an almost complete reversal in fortunes. After years of rising spending and debt, supported by domestic and foreign lenders, the government could find itself spiralling downwards.
He says: "The determination of the government to beat deflation via a loose fiscal policy could be the tipping factor, which drives the current account deeper into deficit. In this respect, Japan may begin to mirror the peripherals of the eurozone, prior to the euro crisis, where a loose fiscal policy goes hand in hand with poor external fundamentals."
The poor external fundamentals he refers to are the lack of demand for Japanese goods and the increasing unease of foreign lenders at Japan's plight. Already the interest rate the government pays on its debt has risen. It doesn't need to go up by much to add billions of pounds to the bill.
George Osborne is also looking at rising debts and zero growth. He is relying on the Bank of England to create growth with money created in the bowels of Threadneedle Street. We didn't want to follow Greece, and we don't want to be the next Japan. If we continue on the same path we will undoubtedly have the same outcome.
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Pioneering research brings new stories of Egyptian life and death to revamped Ancient Worlds gallery at city museum
Late at night, when most of the hospital is quiet and dark, a van arrives, bringing very elderly neighbours of the Royal Manchester children's hospital: the mummies from the nearby university museum, come to have the secrets hidden within their ancient shrouds and bandages penetrated by the hospital's CT scanner.
The children's hospital is regularly used because its scanner is less in demand than those of other nearby hospitals, and never at night except in dire emergencies. Some of the results are already on display, as Manchester Museum's renowned Egyptian galleries, with one of the best collections in the country, reopened this month redisplayed and rebranded as Ancient Worlds.
The old gallery, always the best-loved part of the museum, had 14 mummies on display, but now with hundreds of newly displayed objects and an emphasis on daily life as well as death in ancient Egypt, there are only three: slightly to the surprise of the museum authorities, there has been no protest from visitors over so many old friends disappearing into storage.
The visitors will now learn that Asru the temple singer, one of the most famous mummies in Britain, suffered what must have been agonising arthritis in her neck, and that under the beautiful, undisturbed wrappings of a mummy of a bearded man there is a chaotic jumble of bones – and no brain.
Asru's shrivelled, leathery skin had already been exposed in the craze for unwrapping mummies as public spectacles in the early 19th century. She died around 750BC, and was given to the museum in 1825 with some of the original wrappings, and her lavishly painted double coffins, which revealed her name and that she had been a singer in a temple at Karnak.
Manchester has been a pioneer in mummy research since Margaret Murray, the first female Egyptologist on the permanent staff of any British museum, carefully unwrapped a mummy in 1908. The public was admitted, and it was standing room only in the university's largest lecture theatre, but the procedure was far from the earlier sideshow atmosphere, with the first multidisciplinary team ever assembled to study a mummy in attendance.
Since then, the museum has taken advantage of every advance in medical science to study the mummies further, and has established a database of almost 2,000 tissue samples.
Earlier research on Asru showed that although wealthy and highly regarded enough for an expensive funeral, her body was riddled with parasites including intestinal worms, which would have produced miserable side effects including anaemia and diarrhoea, but probably would not have killed her. The new scans suggest that although she lived into her 50s, at some point she must have been doing hard physical labour, as the arthritis was probably caused by carrying heavy weights on her head.
The other mummies scanned bear the startlingly realistic portraits painted in pigment thickened with wax, made around 2,000 years ago in a fusion of Greek, Roman and Egyptian artistic traditions in the Fayum region, which astonished the west when they were first discovered. Most of the portraits painted on wooden panels, originally bandaged on to cover the heads of the mummies, were separated more than a century ago from the bodies, so the intact examples in Manchester are particularly valuable.
The paintings are so lifelike, preserving their original brilliant colours, that since they were discovered in the late 19th century some scholars have speculated that they are idealised images of the subjects in youth, and others that they must have been painted from life.
Campbell Price, curator of Egypt and Sudan at the museum, was one of the small group including his predecessor Rosalie David, and Professor Judith Adams, head of diagnostic radiology at the university medical school, who stood in awed silence as the mummies were put through the scanner, revealing in minutes what could not be done physically without destroying the elaborate and beautifully decorated bindings and the mummified bodies.
One portrait shows a handsome, bright-eyed young man, and the well-preserved remains shown in the scan appear to be of a young man with a fine set of teeth, matching the painting. The other is of an older, bearded man, and the scan revealed a man who died in middle age, perhaps in his 30s. The wrapping, however, elaborately decorated with studs and gilding, concealed a badly disarticulated body, kept in shape by being bound on to a wooden plank.
Further analysis of the scan may reveal inscriptions on the plank that could name the dead man. In both cases the brains were missing. "We can take from this that, in the Roman period in Egypt at least, appearances were more important than the physical preservation of the body," Price said.
Scanning will continue on all 24 mummies in the collection, and Price hopes to find funding to reconstruct the heads of the portrait mummies from scanned measurements – another technique in which Manchester University is an international pioneer – which should also help reveal whether they are true likenesses.
• Ancient Worlds, free, open daily at Manchester Museum
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PRECIOUS METALS: Gold Futures Climb on Hopes of Greek Deal Wall Street Journal NEW YORK --Gold futures settled higher Friday, as investor appetite for the yellow metal was bolstered by a stronger euro and signs of progress in the Greek debt talks. The most actively traded contract, for December delivery, rose $23.20, or 1.3%, to ... |
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Creditors confirm that negotiations with EU and IMF to help Cyprus are making headway
After months of haggling over the details, Cyprus announced on Friday that it had struck a deal with the EU and IMF to bail out its once vibrant but increasingly flagging economy, making it the fourth EU state to apply for a rescue programme since the eruption of Europe's debt crisis.
Hours after a government spokesman announced the step, international creditors confirmed that headway had been made although they stopped short of confirming an agreement had been sealed.
The island's finance minister Vassos Shiarly earlier estimated the financial assistance could be up to €17.5bn – as much as its entire annual economic output – following the battering of Cypriot banks by their exposure to debt-crippled Greece. The final amount will depend on a forthcoming analysis of how much Nicosia will need to recapitalise its lenders.
"Discussions are expected to continue from respective headquarters with a view to making further progress toward a potential program," creditors representing the EU, ECB and IMF said in a joint statement.
Acutely aware of the plight of Greece – whose unprecedented recession through endorsement of internationally-mandated austerity measures has been covered copiously by the Cypriot media – the bloc's easternmost member has argued doggedly with potential lenders over issues ranging from pension reforms to the privatization of state-owned organisations.
The island's veteran communist president Demetris Christofias, who trained in Moscow, has publicly flirted with the idea of securing funds from Russia as an alternative despite Nicosia currently holding the EU's rotating presidency.
Well-placed insiders said the leader, whose five-year term runs out in February, was privately appalled when he learned this week that the bailout, originally set for some €10bn, would now amount to around €20,000 per capita for the former British colony's internationally recognised Greek-controlled south. "On hearing the amount he went ballistic," said one source. "He's got his legacy to think about."
Visiting Athens last month Christofias openly conceded that he did not want Cyprus to experience the same fate. "We've seen what has happened to you and we don't want [to suffer] the same," he told reporters.
Despite having come up with a package of €13.5bn of austerity cuts and now heading for a sixth year of recession, the Greek government has been kept waiting for a promised tranche of aid worth up to €44bn, with eurzone policymakers this week yet again deferring a decision, now set for a finance ministers meeting on Monday.
In the island's war-divided capital, the government spokesman Stefanos Stefanou admitted the aid would come at a price, insisting that the government had tried strenuously to avoid being admitted into the financial assistance programme. Leaked documents have indicated that as in Greece, creditors known collectively as "the troika," will demand the government drastically pares back the public sector as part of savings worth €1bn between 2012 and 2015.
"The bailout deal includes unpleasant measures," said Stefanou refusing to elaborate on what the policies would be. "We negotiated very hard … to achieve the best conditions because from the moment a country goes into a Stability Mechanism things become very difficult and very hard. We tried as a government to avoid the Mechanism, but unfortunately with the expiry of the deadline set by the European Central Bank for the recapitalisation of the banks we had to resort to the Mechanism."
Within hours of the announcement, the government got a taste of the backlash life under the bailout will almost certainly bring, with the mass-market daily Politis running the headline "We have a memorandum and God help us."
Describing the measures that are likely to be meted out as tantamount to a "massacre," powerful trade unions instantly vowed to put up a fight in a country where workers' rights are held up as being even more sacred than in Greece.
"Whatever happens for us collective agreements and the right of collective negotiations in matters regarding workers' rights cannot be written off," said Babis Kyritsis, general secretary of the Pancyprian Federation of Labour, an umbrella organization of unions. "In no circumstances will we abandon them."
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 Economic Times | Wall Street ends higher in short session, led by techs CNBC.com NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose for a fifth day during a holiday-shortened, thinly traded session on Friday as investors picked up recently beaten-down shares of large technology companies. Market participants were also encouraged by signs of progress ... How the Dow Jones industrial average and other major stock averages fared ... U.S. Stocks Post Strong Black-Friday Gains U.S. stocks rally, posting strong weekly gains |
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Greece's NBG shareholders approve Eurobank offer Reuters A merger would need approval from the Bank of Greece and the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund (HFSF), the bank support fund that has started to recapitalise the country's viable banks. Once the share exchange is completed, NBG shareholders will own 75 ... |
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Another summit collapses, with Herman Van Rompuy and José Manuel Barroso the biggest losers
The collapse of another EU summit, unusually quickly within less than 24 hours, marks a month of serial failure for Europe's leaders.
Another summit in another three weeks already has diplomats, officials, and onlookers groaning in anticipation. Can this lot ever agree on anything?
As well as barely even beginning to negotiate a €1trn, seven-year budget on Thursday night and Friday, they also failed to settle the Greek debt crisis, and declined to agree the terms of another bailout, this time for Cyprus.
By Friday afternoon they could not even agree on whether to continue talking or whether to call the whole thing off and come back after Christmas. The Poles said the talks would go on late into the night and into the weekend. The Dutch said there was no point.
Angela Merkel, the key mediator, appeared not to relish the prospect of a marathon session doomed to failure. Before abandoning the effort, she rescued David Cameron from isolation – not because she was backing Britain but because she identified the German interest in trying to hold Europe together and in avoiding a much messier outcome.
Despite the failure and the signals sent of an EU at war with itself, there were winners. Cameron was accused of demagogy in his anti-European rhetoric and he directed plenty of cheap shots at Brussels, overpaid and underworked eurocrats, and rival leaders allegedly seeking to paint him into a corner.
But the British prime minister oozed schadenfreude with the result, received strong support from the Germans, the Dutch and the Scandinavians and looked pleased with the stalemate, portraying himself as the scourge of bloated Brussels, the guardian of the British and the European taxpayer.
The two big leaders, Merkel and François Hollande of France, on opposite sides of the cuts-versus-spending split, were also victors. Neither in Paris nor Berlin is the EU budget the toxic issue that it is for Cameron at Westminster. They both emerged as winners because they can live with the delay, with the French in particular in no rush to fix a budget for a period that is 14 months away.
The big losers were the organisers of the summit, Herman Van Rompuy, the European council president, and José Manuel Barroso, head of the European commission, accused of presiding over a disorganised, shambolic meeting that barely got off the ground.
These budget sessions are traditionally the most difficult and bad-tempered in what has become a non-stop season of EU summitry – the last summit was last month, the next one is next month. In 2005, the last time they tried to fix spending for the seven-year period, it took two attempts six months apart before Tony Blair conceded elements of the British rebate, opening the way to a settlement brokered by Merkel in one of her first acts as German chancellor.
Given that background, there is little surprise in the deadlock. But the context – three years of euro crisis and the tensions and resentment generated by austerity – is much more negative than seven years ago.
And if there was an air of austerity at the cold cuts supper on Thursday evening, it was back to the old routine at lunch on Friday as the leaders quaffed some 20-year-old Grand Cru Chateau Angelus, retailing at around €150 a bottle.
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 Haaretz | Markets unfazed by Greek cliffhanger Financial Times If cliffhangers are needed to keep financial markets on edge, Greece is doing its best to help. A deal on releasing €44bn in long-overdue international aid was shelved this week after eurozone finance ministers fell out again over how to reduce the ... Greek tragedy: Where did it all go wrong for the cradle of democracy? Protesting Greek municipal workers occupy town halls |
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Economic Times | Wall Street rises on Greece deal hopes, retailers gain CNBC.com NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street rose on Friday on signs of progress in talks about releasing aid to Greece and as investors bid up retail shares on hopes consumers will scoop up bargains on Black Friday, which heralds the start of the holiday shopping ... Futures Rise Amid Greece Optimism; Research In Motion (RIMM) Jumps US STOCKS SNAPSHOT-Wall Street up on Greece hopes, retail in focus |
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 Examiner.com | Greece says lenders closer to debt viability compromise Reuters India ATHENS (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund has relaxed its debt-cutting target for Greece and only a 10 billion euro ($13 billion) gap remains to be filled for a vital aid installment to be paid, Greece's finance minister said on Friday. But ... FOREX-Greece optimism, German data push euro higher Greece 'Closer Than Thought' to Debt Deal Greece makes Eurozone pay to avoid bankruptcy |
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Greek NBG Shareholders Approve Eurobank Merger Plan Wall Street Journal ATHENS--Shareholders at Greece's largest lender, National Bank of Greece SA (NBG), on Friday approved a friendly takeover bid for cross-town rival Eurobank Ergasias SA (EUROB.AT), aimed at forming a bank that would dominate Greece's domestic ... |
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 Livemint | European shares post best week of 2012 Reuters Fri Nov 23, 2012 12:49pm EST. * FTSEurofirst 300 up 0.6 pct, post biggest weekly gain of 2012. * Euro STOXX 50 up 0.9, faces technical hurdle. * German data, optimism on Greek aid deal lift sentiment. * EDF up 4.6 pct in high volume after dividend ... Global shares, euro rally on Greek hopes, German data GLOBAL MARKETS: Euro Spikes on German Data, Stocks Steady Euro Rises Versus Dollar, Set for Weekly Gain on Greek Optimism |
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