How the world sees Greece
Break in talks between Greece and troika to delay bailout tranche Kathimerini Troika representatives are due to leave Athens on Thursday with no final agreement having been reached with the coalition on a range of structural reforms but with the Greek side insisting that the pause in the talks will not lead to complications in ... |
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 Winnipeg Free Press | Troika interrupts Greek bailout review, return later-fin min Reuters ATHENS, March 13 (Reuters) - An inspection team of debt-laden Greece's international lenders has interrupted a review of Athens' progress on Wednesday and will return shortly to complete it, the Greek finance minister said on Wednesday. The so-called ... Eurozone crisis as it happened: UK manufacturing slump raises risk of triple-dip Greek market moves higher LEAD: Gazprom, Greek government discuss gas distributor sale |
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 PennEnergy (press release) | Troika inspectors to return to Greece in 2 weeks Huffington Post ATHENS, Greece — Greece's finance minister says rescue lenders will send inspectors back to Athens in about two weeks after both sides failed to finalize a new round of deficit reduction measures. Yannis Stournaras said the inspectors from the ... Greece postpones reform deal with creditors: finance minister Greece, Troika to Resume Talks After EU Summit Gazprom and Greece talk potential privatization of DEPA |
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Europe's largest economy must try harder. It has far more to lose from a collapse than any other country in the union
'The crisis of the euro is over. Crisis in the euro is strong." Thus a senior French politician. A looming collapse in Cyprus, which eurozone leaders will discuss after the European Union summit dinner in Brussels tomorrow, may yet prove him wrong in a matter of days. My hunch, though, is that he is probably right, at least for a year or two.
Germany and the European Central Bank have done just enough to convince the markets that the eurozone will survive, for now. But many eurozone economies remain on the critical list. Some have made heroic efforts, with results already visible. In Spain, for instance, unit labour costs are already down and exports are at a 30-year high. The pain has been immense, with 50% youth unemployment and house prices falling between 30% and 40%, but somehow people are getting through it. This has had political spin-off effects – literally so, encouraging Catalans to want to spin off from the Spanish state – but in terms of conventional party politics, the centre has held. There has been very little xenophobic rhetoric and virtually no scapegoating of immigrants.
What has happened in Spain is remarkable testimony to the resilience of the European political mainstream, with its almost instinctive commitment to moderation, bound up in a deep-rooted desire to remain part of a larger European project. But for how long, oh Lord, how long? For how many more years can these societies endure such levels of socioeconomic stress before their democratic politics lurch to extremes?
We have seen the danger already with the electoral success of the ultra-nationalist, xenophobic and (for once, the label is justified) neo-fascist Golden Dawn party in Greece. Quite different in kind, but larger in its political impact, is the Italian political impasse, which results from voters being split between the comedian Beppe Grillo's protest movement, Silvio Berlusconi and the left, plus a smaller vote for Mario Monti's "Monti for Italy" grouping, with the votes breaking differently in the two houses of parliament. With a stalemate between the two chambers, reform is stymied in the eurozone's third largest economy.
Some of this was inevitable, but it has been made worse by human error in general and German error in particular. I can entirely understand German voters' initial angry reaction to being asked to bail out other Europeans who had been much less disciplined, hard-working and productive than them, in order to save a currency which the Germans never voted to join. (In bringing down its unit labour costs, Spain is doing, in an involuntary crash course, what Germany started doing a decade ago, on its own initiative.) I would have felt that way myself. I can understand Angela Merkel and her colleagues hanging tough.
But facts are stubborn things. When the facts change, or at least become clearer, policies must be adjusted accordingly. The duty of politicians in a well-functioning liberal democracy is to recognise those facts and then explain them to voters, not to string voters along with waffle and false promises. Here's an example: the so-called fiscal multipliers, that is, the impact on GDP of a cut (or increase) in public spending. In normal times, when most of the countries with which you do business are faring OK, this multiplier may be as low as 0.2 or 0.4 – that is, GDP declines by some 0.2-0.4% for every 1% you cut public spending. But when everyone around is in recession, the effect is dramatically increased.
This was the case in the Great Depression, as the Oxford economic historian Kevin O'Rourke and his collaborators have clearly established. It is the case again today, in our Great Recession, as the economists at the IMF, the EU and other institutions are now acknowledging. In conditions of all-round recession, the fiscal multipliers can soar above one, so a 1% cut in public spending may cause a 1.5% drop in GDP. That significantly alters the calculus of austerity.
Here's another fact, slightly larger and therefore more contestable, but still quite firm: the pain of adjustment has been born mainly by the southern European "periphery", not the north European "core". Yet it took two to create this mess. Blame the feckless borrower in the south but also the shortsighted lender in the north – for instance, in German banks. That leads to another, only slightly more speculative statement. Germany has more to lose than any other country from a collapse of the eurozone. One estimate puts its banks' exposure to Greek, Spanish, Portuguese and Irish debtors alone at about €400bn. The German government's own council of economic advisers last year assessed the maximum potential losses to German creditors in a eurozone breakup at €2.8 trillion, topping the country's €2.65trn annual GDP. Any successor currency, be it an old-new Deutschmark or a north European euro (the Nordo or Neuro), would have a less advantageous exchange rate for German exports.
Not from any Keynesian dogma, not from idealism, not from sentimentality towards fellow Europeans, but in its own enlightened national interest, Germany needs to do more. It should increase its domestic demand, support a strong banking union, and embrace something like its own economic advisers' proposal for a limited mutualisation of eurozone debt – with appropriately stringent conditions. In terms of the political economy of the whole eurozone or, perhaps more accurately, its economy-driven politics, the best moment to do this has passed. That was what we must now call the Monti Moment.
As prime minister, Monti was wrestling manfully to do the right thing in Italy, but also urging Germany to do its part. Having failed to grasp that moment, Germany has one more opening. Whoever emerges as chancellor in the German general election this September, in whatever coalition, needs to go that extra kilometre to save the eurozone properly, making sure that future euro-crises are never again "of" but only "in". What people call "the European elections" are scheduled for June 2014, but the truly decisive elections for Europe are all national – and none more so than Germany's.
It is, of course, pure coincidence that Germany faces this challenge as we approach the 100th anniversary of 1914; but it is a coincidence that also reveals a historic opportunity for constructive European leadership by the continent's central power. Go on, Germany, seize what Fritz Stern once called your historic "second chance", and use it well.
Twitter: @fromTGA
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It is sad that "Progressive Labour" now chooses to blame the immigrant for its problems (Come on, Labour, be brave on immigration for once, 8 March). In this, at least, the world has not changed much. When Enoch Powell made his "rivers of blood" speech, the London dockers marched in support. The Labour party then was too frightened to take on this working-class voice. This cowardice did not help us retain power in 1970.
Another recession and again the foreigner is blamed. Will it work this time? The boom in western economies between 1992 and 2007 was a benevolent outcome of globalisation in which all gained, and in the wake of its collapse, through no fault of immigrants, all have to reckon the cost. Labour may ask if its chancellor did not abandon prudence and marry profligacy after 2005. Did he not borrow at the top of the boom, ostensibly no doubt for investment, but where are the fruits of that investment? Why did the debt-GDP ratio rise before the crisis? Should we not blame the crisis on the Treasury browbeating the Financial Services Authority to go soft on the City? Was it the fault of immigants that Labour did not build any social housing during our years in power? Our open door to EU migration was one of the nobler gestures of New Labour, one that was truly internationalist. Now the times have changed. Ban immigration if you think it will win votes; just don't dress it up as socialism.
Meghnad Desai
Labour, House of Lords
• I deplore Labour's policy decision, announced by Yvette Cooper, to cut immigrant benefits (Cooper takes a lesson from Blair, 8 March); she has finally convinced me to cancel my 17-year Labour party membership. Labour's cynical U-turn smacks of crude political opportunism in the face of rising Ukip popularity and Daily Mail racism. Today the party reached a new rightwing pinnacle. I have always admired Ms Cooper's brave moral stance on issues such as childcare and the gender impact of the economic crisis, but on the BBC's Today programme she showed she is nothing more than a Labour stooge. Is she so caught up in partisan warfare that she is blind to the desperate European and international economic malaise emanating from the neoliberal economic policies, endorsed by Labour, which force educated, skilled migrants to seek jobs in the UK, encourage human trafficking and confine illegal immigrants to slave on sub-minimum wages to clean the houses and care for the elderly relatives of the politicians and privileged elites of this country? This is not the progressive, visionary, independent party I joined. I quit.
Clare Woodford
Manchester
• I am disappointed to note that the whole tone of Yvette Cooper's speech on immigration (Labour's immigration policy takes on concerns about benefit tourism, 8 March) is to copy the Conservatives' appeal to British selfishness. Labour should be about equality – and not an equality that ends at the English Channel. Careful transitional provisions certainly, but not a cynical, vote-catching attitude to Johnny Foreigner. Why no mention of the opportunities for British citizens in new EU member countries? And why no stance on the logical case for excluding students from immigration statistics?
Michael Meadowcroft
Leeds
• I read with interest your feature looking at the impact of eastern European migrants in a part of Southampton I am intimately connected with ('It's like you're not in Britain' – anxiety grows on the streets of Little Poland, 7 March). I was born and raised in the Freemantle neighbourhood, and 50 years on I find myself as an elected ward councillor for the area. A few weeks ago I attended a coffee morning hosted by Alan Whitehead, the local MP, and attended by residents (including many traditional Labour voters). A major area of concern was their sense of a "loss of identity".
While some of this anxiety can be attributed to the recent and rapid growth in the number of east European migrants and a proliferation of Slavic convenience stores, there are other important associated factors. These include: the loss of community pubs and their conversion to "local" convenience stores owned by the large supermarket chains; the conversion of many semi-detached houses and former offices into apartment blocks and houses in multiple occupation; unrelenting car parking and traffic problems related to this housing overdevelopment; and the replacement of traditional stores with takeaways, massage parlours, pawnbrokers and payday loan shops.
I would suggest that the real threat to the way of life of the traditional white working class in Freemantle (which has embraced a rich mix of ethnic groups since the last century, such as the Irish, Scottish, Afrikaners, Maltese, Italians and Greeks) is not from their new Polish, Czech, Bulgar or Vlach compatriots. A common foe exists in the form of unscrupulous landlords, exploitative, low-wage employers and the banks.
Cllr Dave Shields
Labour, Freemantle ward, Southampton
• Jonathan Portes's otherwise excellent debunking of the great migrant myth (The 'benefit tourism' crisis isn't really a crisis at all, 7 March) could, perhaps, be simplified into the kind of language that our monetarily myopic political class can understand. Think of this immigration as a kind of aid deal, in which the more deprived EU countries provide the UK with relatively cheap labour, for whom the costs of initial healthcare (vaccinations, medical checks, childhood illness treatments etc), education and training are all paid for by the donor countries. These trained, qualified and basically healthy young workers then work for the UK, often at below normal wages, before returning to their countries of origin, which then bear the costs of their healthcare and retirement in middle or old age: a much less costly package to the public purse than indigenous labour.
Bryn Jones
Bath
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 The Market Oracle | Greece Gathering Political and Social Storm Threatens Europe and America The Market Oracle Modern-day Greece has experienced an even larger five-year decline than 1920s-1930s Germany did, falling 88% since 2007, and the country has suffered a debt crisis. As a condition for bailouts aimed at helping Greece recover, the European Union has ... |
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Italy, Greece Confirm 7 Foreign Hostages Killed in Nigeria The Jewish Voice Italy and Greece have acknowledged that seven foreign hostages kidnapped in northern Nigeria last month were killed as claimed by Islamist militants. On Sunday, March 10, British Foreign Secretary William Hague called the abduction “an act of ... |
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Greece postpones reform deal with creditors: finance minister GlobalPost Greece on Wednesday postponed a reform deal with its international creditors as a number of issues "remained open" after nearly two weeks of talks, its finance minister said. "Very important progress was achieved on all issues. Because there are a lot ... |
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 BBC News | Euro MPs reject radical CAP farm subsidy reforms BBC News The European Parliament has rejected campaigners' demands to tie the majority of farm subsidies to protection of the environment. It now looks inevitable that farmers will continue to receive most of their 58bn-euro (£50bn) annual subsidies for doing little ... UPDATE 1-European Parliament backs greener, fairer farm policy MEPs reject EU budget deal Euro-MPs reject calls to cut vast Brussels budget and instead demand Britain ... |
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Dublin said the demand for benchmark 10-year bonds meant the time was rapidly approaching when it would no longer have to rely on external financing
Ireland's hopes of becoming the first eurozone country to emerge from a financial crisis bailout received a boost on Wednesday following a successful €5bn (£4.33bn) bond sale that will meet the country's financing needs until well into 2014.
Reinforcing its reputation as the "poster child" of Europe's austerity programme, Dublin said the demand for benchmark 10-year bonds meant the time was rapidly approaching when it would no longer have to rely on external financing to cover its borrowing.
The Irish finance ministry announced that there had been €12bn of bids for the bonds offered in the first sale of 10-year stock since 2010. The yield (interest rate) of 4.15% was half a point below that faced by Italy, which struggled to find buyers for its debt.
"There has been an extraordinary response to it and I don't think you will have heard me use the word extraordinary before," said Michael Noonan, Ireland's finance ministry.
"This brings us within about a billion and a half towards what we need to the end of 2014. That puts us in a very strong position. A lot of ministers visiting various countries for Patrick's day will have a fairly impressive piece of news."
Ireland, along with Greece and Portugal, was bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Union following the financial crisis of 2008. The former "Celtic tiger" was forced to accept draconian terms in return for an €85bnloan to cover the cost of supporting a banking system ravaged by a boom-bust in the housing market.
After complying strictly to the terms of its rescue package, Dublin started to sell small tranches of short-term bonds in 2012 but saw yesterday's sale as a key test of financial market confidence.
The government had already raised €2.5bn from a sale of five year debt in January and a further €1.3bn from selling state-rescued insurer Irish Life last month. Following Wednesday's sale, Dublin has now raised most of the €10bn it has targeted to raise this year.
By contrast, the political uncertainty in Italy since last month's inconclusive election meant bond yields rose in the first auction since the country saw its credit status downgraded by Fitch, the ratings agency to BBB+. At the auction, Italy offered an average yield of 2.48% for its three-year bonds, the highest level since December.
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Greece Warns of More Job Cuts Wealth Daily Greece is not in a position of authority, since it was discovered that it had misled its Eurozone partners as to the true state of its national finances. Euro loans and IMF stimulus packages continue to be the lifeblood of Greece today, and to merely ... |
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Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris, who assaulted two female MPs on a live TV talkshow, can be prosecuted, MPs rule
Greece's parliament has voted to allow the prosecution of a leading neo-Nazi politician for assaulting two female left-wing politicians on a live TV talkshow.
Ilias Kasidiaris, 32, faces charges of attempted grievous bodily harm over last June's incident, in which he repeatedly slapped one woman and threw a glass of water at another before running away. The attack followed an exchange of verbal abuse.
Kasidiaris is the spokesman for Golden Dawn, a far-right anti-immigrant party that rose from the margins of politics to win 18 of parliament's 300 seats later last June.
The party rejects the neo-Nazi label but is fond of Nazi literature and references.
Lawmakers voted 205-3 on Wednesday to strip Kasidiaris of the immunity from prosecution enjoyed by all Greek parliamentarians. No trial date has been set.
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Main Greek bank says Canadian fund may help it recapitalise GlobalPost It recently completed a buyout of third-ranked Greek rival Eurobank. The new National Bank group will have assets of over 170 billion euros ($222 billion) and serve 18 million customers daily. Greek banks last year sustained significant losses in a ... |
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 D Magazine | What To Drink Now: Italy, Spain and Greece D Magazine I am such a fan of old world wines, especially the classic Italian, Spanish and incredibly old (some dating back 5000 years) Greek varieties. Here are a few I have been sampling lately while helping create the wine list for the soon to open Battuto ... |
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Periodic table a bit wonky, but pope's men strive to explain how smoke, signalling progress on pontiff vote, gets its colour
As the Sistine Chapel chimney spewed out clouds of very black smoke on Tuesday night, Federico Lombardi, the Vatican's spokesman, received a phone call from a journalist.
How had the cardinal electors managed to get the smoke quite that black, the reporter wanted to know, when in previous conclaves it had often been a confusing shade of grey?
Chemistry, Lombardi joked, was not his strong point. But valiantly, on Wednesday, the Jesuit priest nonetheless embarked on a detailed description of smoke-making at the Sistine Chapel's two stoves.
It was not easy. Lombardi, deftly able to navigate the obscurest of Vatican minutiae, showed signs of acute unease when it came to the periodic table.
His English-speaking assistant, Fr Tom Rosica, experienced even greater difficulty when it came to translating the names of the various chemicals from Italian to English – though, as he said, he had only been presented with them minutes before.
Apologetically, he explained: "I don't study this stuff; I study the bible."
The system they were outlining was not straightforward. There are two stoves in the Sistine Chapel, one that has been used in conclaves since 1939, and one, introduced in 2005, which has an electronic smoke-producing device in it.
The ballot papers are burned in the first, while the device in the second activates a cartridge holding five lots of chemical mixture that are loaded gradually over the course of seven minutes. This is designed to make the smoke either clearly black or clearly white.
For the black smoke the mixture is potassium perchlorate, anthracene and sulphur, the Vatican confirmed. For the white version it is potassium chlorate, lactose and a pine resin known as Greek pitch. The two stoves join in one pipe that connects them to the chimney.
At the end of his explanation Lombardi received a round of applause from the press corps.
"It used to be that a theology qualification was useful to cover the Vatican," tweeted Michael Kelly, editor of the publication The Irish Catholic. "Now I'm wishing I did chemistry."
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A series of letters between a man at war and a woman on the Russian homefront provide the narrative for a literary masterpiece that interweaves the fantastical with the all too real
Mikhail Shishkin is arguably Russia's greatest living novelist and the only writer so far to win all three major Russian book prizes. He recently refused to take part in an official delegation to an American book fair on the grounds that he did not want to represent a country where "power has been seized by a corrupt, criminal regime". The kind of contemporary literature in Russia that wins awards often favours postmodern style over plot and Shishkin's work is no exception, but his writing is richly textured and innovative and his themes are universal: love and death, pain and happiness, war and peace. This partly explains why the UK publishers have called his latest novel The Light and the Dark. The Russian title, Pismovnik, is less Tolstoyan and means something like "Letter-book".
The Light and the Dark, translated by Andrew Bromfield, is, superficially, a series of letters between a man and a woman. The man, Vovka, Volodya or Volodenka, is fighting a distant, brutal war; the woman, Sasha or Sashenka, writes from the home front. Her engaging tales of childhood, love and work give the novel what narrative drive it has, a series of poignant snapshots of life in a Soviet city that are anything but random.
Vovka's letters also recall the past, but often he is mired in the unignorable present, involving soldiers of many nationalities marching through drought, disease and bloodshed in northern China. One of Shishkin's recurrent themes is the endlessness of conflict: "There will always be war for tomorrow." The letters, variously tender and brutal, are subtly interlinked through shared imagery and allusions.
Sasha's life involves the trams and aerodromes of the later 20th century, but Vovka's gruesome military accounts suggest the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Towards the end, he rephrases Hamlet – "The time will be back in joint when we meet again and I put my head on your knees" – and she refers to scientific discoveries about the unstable nature of time, "heaped up like thick porridge". Their impossible separation becomes a metaphor for human loneliness, but also for interconnectedness.
Shishkin's writing is both philosophically ambitious and sensually specific, evoking the rain on a dacha roof, the smell of blossoming lime trees, or the stink of human corpses. Vovka (invoking Gogol) wants to cut off his nose and send it home, while Sasha divides herself into an embattled first person, who stands at the tram stop with her eyes shut, and her stronger sister, who sees the "furry hoarfrost" and the "rasping sparks".
These alternative perspectives are threaded through the narrative; both sets of letters converge on the legends of Prester John, the mythical, eastern king. His fantastical kingdom of "mute cicadas and imperishable people" was part of the medieval tradition of a mirror in which the whole world was reflected. Shishkin's novels are an extension of this tradition; The Light and the Dark, like his previous novel Maidenhair, is about everything.
Maidenhair (Open Letter, £12.99) appeared late last year in Marian Schwartz's translation. The protagonist, like the author, is an interpreter for the Swiss immigration authorities. (Shishkin moved to Zurich in 1995, but currently lives in Berlin.) Maidenhair opens with a reference to Xenophon, which the interpreter is reading during his breaks, and then plunges into a series of interviews with asylum seekers, often from Chechnya, recounting horrors. "I lived in an orphanage since I was 10. Our director raped me."
Both questions and answers morph into a series of evocative monologues, interspersed with letters to the interpreter's son and extracts from the diaries of a Russian singer. Maidenhair is another great novel in which the interlocking narratives fuse and fragment. In one story, a prisoner scratches a boat on the wall until one day he steps into it and sails away, leaving the cell empty. Art can change and restore reality: "A question mark or exclamation point has the power to turn a sentence around, or a destiny."
Pages without paragraphs catalogue the minutiae of personal recollections, the details of life that mean nothing and everything. The "maidenhair" of the title is a fern that grows wild among the Roman ruins the interpreter visits with his wife. This delicate, green weed "grew here before your Eternal city and will grow here after".
The interpreter's teacher tells him: "You're mixing everything up … The ancient Greeks are one [thing], the Chechens another", but in Shishkin's tale, they become aspects of shared human experience, in which "whoever can be happy right now, should". Shishkin says he was influenced by Chekhov's sense of humanity and learned from Tolstoy "not to be afraid of being naive".
Both novels attempt to represent multifaceted reality, and there is sometimes an unbearable intensity as the metaphors sprout and writhe. The breathlessness of Maidenhair becomes, in The Light and the Dark, a more measured brilliance; the urgency of Shishkin's mission is undimmed. "Unless life is transformed into words, there will be nothing."
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Bethlehem's Mayflower restaurant carries on traditional of Greek yogurt Allentown Morning Call Her mother, Rani Staurinos, was making homemade Greek yogurt in her home kitchen many years before it became a buzzword among healthy eaters and triggered an avalanche of Greek yogurts in supermarket dairy cases. She began making it for ... |
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 New York Daily News | Pinkberry Banks on Serving Greek Yogurt to Fuel Fresh Growth Wall Street Journal Pinkberry Inc., the Los Angeles-based chain that led the way for a new, tart form of frozen yogurt when it opened in 2005, is hoping to capitalize on America's latest snacking trend: Greek yogurt. Pinkberry, which now has 225 stores worldwide, will ... Greek yogurt comes to Pinkberry Pinkberry Raises the Yogurt Bar With Introduction of Fresh, Not Frozen, Greek ... |
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 Orange UK News | The unluckiest player in the world: Greek striker's shot hits the woodwork ... Mirror.co.uk An Egeas Plomariou centre-forward will be ruing his luck as his goal-bound shot hit the woodwork not once or twice, but an astonishing FOUR times in a match played on the Greek island of Lesvos. Through on goal on the right-hand side of the box, the ... Woodwork Hit Four Times With One Shot During Greek Football Match (VIDEO) |
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