How the world sees Greece
THE rental car man scoffs when we ask for a GPS to come with our weary Ford Mondeo. You don’t need it in the Greek Peloponnese, he tells us, it’s easy. What he really means is, this GPS is a total cow to use and, do you know how many Greek places share ...
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Source: newyork.cbslocal.com - Sunday, March 15, 2015 http://media.newyork.cbslocal.com/CBSNY_20150315111120050AA.mp4 NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – From a dream to a reality, one woman has cooked up an international idea with local results that will have any foodie salivating. “The League of Kitchens is an immersive culinary adventure where people go into the homes of immigrants, who are amazing home cooks, and they do intimate cooking workshops with the instructor,” Lisa Gross, founder of The League of Kitchens, told CBS2’s Diane Macedo. Gross explained that she had the idea to start The League of Kitchens after she missed the opportunity to learn family recipes from her Korean grandmother. She “would always shoo me out of the kitchen and really would say: ‘Go study. Studying is more important,'” Gross said. “So I never learned to cook Korean food from her, and then when I got older and fell in love with cooking and wanted to cook Korean food, she had passed away. “And I tried to teach myself from cookbooks, from the Internet, but just nothing tasted like when she made it. So I had this wish and I thought, ‘Well, if not with her, I wish there was another Korean grandmother I could learn to cook with.'” The League of Kitchens has eight instructors from Trinidad, Argentina, Korea, Greece, Lebanon, India, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The 5 1/2-hour workshops are for four to six people and conclude with a celebratory dinner. To watch the full interview, click on the video above. For more infoAll Related
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But the Greek crisis has put the ECB in an uncomfortable position. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras complains that the ECB has a noose around Greece's ...
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Yesterday, Alexandros Papadatos (Αλέξανδρος Παπαδάτος) became the first deaf wrestler to win gold at the Greek national championships in the ...
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Two hundred years ago Germany’s great poet and statesman performed a U-turn that some would like to see Angela Merkel copyOn a quiet street in central Athens stands the bronze, modernist facade of the Goethe Institut, which has been teaching German and spreading enlightenment about German culture since 1952. Last week, the Greek government threatened to seize the building, together with holiday homes and other German assets. Greece is claiming €341bn (£240bn) in second world war reparations from Germany – and if the government does not confiscate the Goethe Institut, there are numerous people in Athens ready to do it “from below”.With Germany on the brink of vetoing any further debt forgiveness for Greece, the logic of angering Berlin more does not look obvious. To the uninitiated, the two countries’ animosity towards each other can seem inexplicable. Yet fascination with Greece is deep in the German psyche. And the way out of the standoff may lie in the example of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself: Germany’s great poet and statesman underwent his own U-turn on the issue of Greece, under the pressure of geopolitical events very similar to today’s. Continue reading...
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Negotiations between Greece and its lenders finally got off to a start last week, but their outcome is uncertain although both sides have vowed to do their best to clinch a deal by the end of April. The road ahead will be rocky as the government seeks a compromise in the context of a political solution with some technocratic backing. However, the deterioration in underlying economic conditions could make even this compromise difficult to reach unless the lenders and Germany in particular are willing to make concessions.
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Besides cash, the Greek economy is also running low on human resources as senior executives from the private sector are now seeking employment abroad. The trend has grown all out of proportion, hurting the very human capital that is vital for the country to emerge from the economic crisis.
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If the Greek government continues to question the validity of the bailout programme is has signed, it risks a Grexit, the chairman of the German Council of Economic Experts, Christoph Schmidt, told a Greek newspaper in ...
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Residents of Greece's second-largest city on Sunday placed flowers on train tracks and inside old cattle wagons in solemn remembrance of nearly 50,000 local Jews who were transported to Nazi death camps during World War II.
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ATHENS: The Greek state is not facing a cash shortage, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras insisted Sunday as his government braced for another week of ...
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"The break below 1.0630 opened the way to further downside for EUR USD. The Euro outlook remains bearish but due to the recent rapid fall there is ...
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The story of the Greek crisis is often painted as either one of the reckless borrower gambling with other people's money, or the victim of an inflexible European project that squeezes its weaker members for the benefit of the stronger. There may be some truth to both of these narratives, but to get a fuller understanding of the causes of Greece's current problems you have to look further back at the country's own history. What you find is a sorry tale of nihilistic political populism, a wilful suspension of disbelief by international partners and a series of unfortunate accidents that helped turn a promising post-war recovery into a nightmare for its citizens. And it all started with the price of oil. Click here to see how the Greek economy suffered its dramatic fall from grace Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Research reveals why women cheat, and it's not what you think
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ATHENS, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Greece does not face any liquidity issues, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras reassured on Sunday following a new ...
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If BBC3 is sold to the free-market fundamentalists we’ll lose the very idea of public broadcasting within a decadeWhen so-called Islamic State destroyed historic sites in Iraq, I was wary of making judgments of other cultures, and gave these exuberant young men the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps shattering the statues was mere high spirits, like when Greeks trample wedding crockery? Or perhaps it was the fault of MI5?Of course, we also sacrifice our heritage to ideology. Say goodbye to Paolozzi’s Tottenham Court Road murals, trashed by terrorists of Transport for London; to Oxford’s ancient Port Meadow horizon, occluded by death-cult developers; and perhaps to the BBC, the greatest cultural achievement of any 20th-century democracy, soon to be poleaxed by free-market fundamentalists as pernicious as the statue-smashers of so-called Islamic State. Continue reading...
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“The Greek government has done nothing for a year to recover supposedly untaxed assets of Greek citizens in Switzerland. There is an invitation ...
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From Bruegel to Nabokov and The Silence of the Lambs, butterflies have flitted through our imaginations and into our culture. Patrick Barkham pins up the choice specimens – and finds out why new film The Duke of Burgundy is awash with themSignifying sunshine, beauty and freedom, butterflies are ubiquitous in our culture, ever-present on greeting cards and used to sell everything from oven chips to SUVs. For artists, novelists and film-makers, however, butterflies and moths have often taken on darker meanings. In John Fowles’s The Collector, the protagonist (played by Terence Stamp in the film adaptation) is a butterfly obsessive who decides to collect young women. In The Silence of the Lambs, a sinister-looking moth (actually the death’s-head hawkmoth) is a serial killer’s signature. And in The Duke of Burgundy, a new film by Peter Strickland, the story of an S&M relationship is told through butterflies and moths. How have these insects come to symbolise sexual deviancy?Artists have been seeing the human spirit in lepidoptera for centuries. The earliest-known depictions are of the eyed hawkmoth and the peacock butterfly in Pyrenees cave paintings. According to Peter Marren, author of new book Rainbow Dust: Three Centuries of Delight in British Butterflies, they appear on Minoan artefacts from Crete around 4,000 years ago, but it was the ancient Greeks who really shaped their use in culture, by explicitly linking them to the human soul. The Greek word for a butterfly and a soul is the same: psyche. Continue reading...
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THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) — Residents of Greece's second-largest city on Sunday placed flowers on train tracks and inside old cattle wagons in solemn remembrance of nearly 50,000 local Jews who were transported to Nazi death camps during World War II.
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Greek sports, in particular football, have suffered from hooligan violence for years, but the problem seems to have intensified in recent months.
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Greece's maverick Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said on Sunday he regretted a celebrity shoot for Paris Match that drew widespread ridicule on ...
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The Greek state is not facing a cash shortage, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras insisted Sunday as his government braced for another week of pressing ...
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Greece is currently in the midst of tough negotiations with its international creditors, after years of high unemployment and austerity measures ...
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Greece's modern wine industry is well respected and a far cry from palate-destroying retsinas and roadside reds – although they are still available.
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Germany is getting a pay rise. And this is great news for Europe. That, at least, is the argument in the latest note from analysts at ABN-Amro. They point out that wage growth in Germany is already well above the eurozone average, with incomes per hour worked rising by 1% quarter-on-quarter in the last three months of 2014. German unemployment has hit historically low levels not seen since the 1980s meaning competition for workers is helping to drive up wages. Negotiated salaries are now rising at the fastest pace in two decades: The figures suggest German wages are running substantially ahead of the eurozone's average of 1.3% year-on-year and that gap is only likely to grow. This is important because higher wages mean that workers can afford to spend more, providing a boost to the economy. Even more significantly from a European perspective, it might also mean that German demand for imports from struggling Southern European countries also increases helping to reduce the region's gaping economic imbalances. Indeed the entire story of the German economic miracle and Southern Europe's decline over the past few years cannot be understood without reference to what's happened to wages. Although Germany has been seen as a powerhouse economy over recent years, driving forward even as many of its eurozone peers were falling away, in the late 1990s and the early 2000s the country was frequently referred to as "the sick man of Europe". Growth averaged a meagre 1.2% between 1998 and 2005, while unemployment climbed into double figures over the period. In short, if you were to grade its performance Germany might have got a 'C' at best. One of its major successes over this period, however, was the implementation of a co-determination model of corporate governance. The basic idea is to allow workers to participate in the management of the companies that they work for. To provide a tangible example, one-third of board members at German companies with between 500 and 2000 staff are employee representatives. This model of cooperation extended to relations between the state and major labour unions. As an LSE paper from 2009 describes: The metalworking sector (IG Metall in Germany and GMT in Austria), leads negotiations, setting wage increases equal to the increase in the national aggregate labour productivity rate. All other sectoral unions then shadow these increases, using them as a target, but rarely reaching them unless their sectoral productivity levels permit it. And here's what this has meant in practice — German wages failed to track productivity gains as closely as its peers. That is, it became more competitive by holding down wages even as workers were producing more output at lower costs. This dynamic gave a big boost to German industry competitiveness, and in particular to the country's export industry at the cost of its competitors both outside of Europe but also within the monetary union. As an AEA paper from last year put it (emphasis added): Germany's gains in competitiveness with regard to France, Italy, and Spain cannot be due to gains in competitiveness with regard to France, Italy, and Spain cannot be due to currency depreciation (and in fact the euro appreciated relative to the currency of most trading partners), because these countries all share the euro, and so it must have arisen because German wages grew at a slower pace than productivity relative to these other eurozone countries. Much of this wage restraint reflected the enormous cost of reunifying West and East Germany. Conservative estimates suggests that in the decade from 1993-2003 West Germany spent around €900 billion in net transfers, or around 50% of one year of GDP over that period. Integration on this scale represented a huge burden on the German state, but it also came with both an influx of new, low cost workers from the former Communist east and opportunities to expand supply chains eastwards as well. This left German unions unable and unwilling (for patriotic reasons) to bargain for significantly higher wages over that period. Moreover, as Frances Coppola hints at in her latest post, the influx of this cheap labour from the east both helped those countries that were able to take advantage of them but structurally impaired those that could not (such as Greece). The result is what we see above. Germany underwent a period of painful adjustment in order to pay for reunification, but has emerged stronger and more competitive than many of its European peers. Which is fine in a world of flexible exchange rates, where countries can adjust their competitiveness through a weakening or strengthening of their currencies relative to their trading partners. Of course, those within Europe's single currency had no such pressure valve. Instead Southern Europe has relied on so-called "internal devaluation" whereby wages are forced downwards through spending cuts and unemployment pushed the other way. All of this while German workers were still not getting the rewards in their wage packets that their improved productivity so richly deserved. The pressure of this has finally begun to take its toll, it seems. Again from the LSE paper: After pursuing a policy of high wage moderation for nearly ten years, with little to show for it in private consumption growth, Germany’s pilots (VC), hospital doctors (Marburger Bund – MB) and train drivers unions (Deutsche Lokfurher – GDL) exited Germany’s main union federation, the DGB, and with it the pattern bargaining wage coordination system in order to negotiate higher wage increases. Growing wage militancy from ver.di, DGB’s large white-collar services sector union (of whom MB and GDL used to belong), suggests that these three cases of union decoupling may not be exceptions to the rule, and further de-couplings could be looming on the horizon. The risk of fractures within the German union system has clearly prompted action. Germany's largest trade union, IG Metall, struck a deal for a 3.4% pay rise starting from April (after having asked for 5.5%) indicating both the increased bargaining position of German workers and the growing willingness of its unions to push to higher settlements. If this is replicated across the country's labour market it would be welcome news not only for German workers but for countries across the eurozone. Three cheers for German workers!Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Research Reveals Why Men Cheat, And It's Not What You Think
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Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan appeared on Bloomberg TV Friday to talk about the oil market. Specifically, he zeroed in on the problem going on in the US market: basically, production hasn't dropped like people expected it to, and it's largely illegal to export American crude, so all of the excess oil is building up in storage. Because of those things, Greenspan thinks that the price of WTI crude, the US benchmark for oil prices, is going to keep going lower. Here's what Greenspan said: If you look at the data, as you just pointed out, our major domestic facility is in Cushing, Oklahoma, which is delivery point for West Texas Intermediate crude contracts. We are at the point now where, at the current rate of fill, we’re going to run out of room in Cushing by next month. And then the question is -- where does the crude go? Because everyone's forecast as to what was going to happen when prices collapsed was a sharp curtailment in shale oil production. That has not happened. The weekly figures, which are produced by the Energy Inter-Nation (sic) Agency through March the 6, show a continued rise in domestic crude production and it has got no place to go, because we can’t legally export the way we would for most products. We can do a little exporting and Canada, but essentially, we’re bottling up a huge amount of crude oil in the United States. So that the West Texas Intermediate price is running $10 a barrel on the Brent crude, which is the global price. And that basically means that we are creating great abnormalities in the system. And unless and until we find a way to get out of this dilemma, prices will continue to ease because there’s no place for that oil to go except for into the markets. And spot crudes are especially vulnerable because of so-called contango is a very high level, and that implies that there’s a very, very significant set of pressures on the spot price. So, the US either needs to produce less or figure out a way to export oil.SEE ALSO: Greece's finance minister is showing off his fancy Athens house in a glossy French magazine Join the conversation about this story »
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“The Lesson” (Bulgarian: Urok), a 2014 Bulgarian-Greek film directed by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov, has won four awards at the 19th Sofia ...
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Israeli archeologists have discovered a 2,000-year-old bronze mask of the Greek god Pan. The mask was unearthed at the Susita national park on the ...
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Athens (dpa) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel should present an economic growth plan for Europe, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said ...
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The trio of inspectors, or troika, includes the European Commission and International Monetary Fund and monitors countries such as Greece and ...
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Some 2,000 Greek Jews on Sunday (Mar 15) commemorated the 72nd anniversary of the first forced deportations to Auschwitz from Thessaloniki.
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The beauty of the Greek island Mykonos with its distinctive food and décor blending with the equally distinct environment of downtown Henderson.
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A resident in the city of Ioannina finds the body of missing Vangelis Yakoumaki in the Lake Pamvotis near his school. The 20 year-old Greek student ...
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In other talks that same day, European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker told Tsipras the dispute over Greece's bailout was taking too long.
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Paris/Athens (dpa) - Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said he regrets a photo spread published by a French magazine that sparked a firestorm ...
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(AP) — The University of Oklahoma Sigma Alpha Epsilon house is not alone in causing racial strife on college campuses across America. The school ...
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The event was hosted by Eden Zimak and Kalandria Robinson, two campus life representatives who are also involved in Greek Life. “Especially since ...
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Describing the story of the two siblings, which illustrates the development of medical tourism in Greece, was Dr Anastasios Vekris, a plastic surgeon ...
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel should present an economic growth plan for Europe, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said Sunday, calling ...
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Are investors, who have been pumping record amounts of money into European sharemarkets, ignoring the growing risk of an accidental Greek exit ...
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Looking for a last minute bargain? Take a look at these late deals to Europe and beyond, departing late March, from London and Manchester.
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Greece's finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis has said he regretted a celebrity shoot for Paris Match that drew widespread ridicule on social media.
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Due to its on-the-ground economic situation, as well as its debt troubles, Greece has attracted a lot of attention from contrarian investors looking for ...
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The war vocabulary between Greece and Germany has a new expression: "Grexident." The new terminus technicus suggests an accidental series of ...
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Greece is on the brink again. An interim deal signed on February 20 in Brussels which extended Greece's financial bailout in exchange for the ...
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Greece's flamboyant finance minister has incensed some of his eurozone counterparts by his provocative grandstanding (as they see it) and the ...
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Greece and Germany stand to lose out from the European Central Bank's (ECB) quantitative easing programme, according to analysts. Greece has not ...
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Alexandroupolis, located in north-eastern Greece, has twinned with the Russian city of Evpatoria on the Crimean peninsula. Adviser to the Mayor of ...
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ROCHESTER – Williamsville South found out the hard way just how good Section V's Greece Athena is at the New York State Public High School ...
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By Paul TaylorBRUSSELS (Reuters) - Once depicted as a "Blue Banana" stretching from Manchester to Milan, Europe's industrial heartland has moved eastwards just as its political center of gravity has shifted to Germany.The term was coined in 1989 - the year the Berlin Wall fell - to describe French geographer Roger Brunet's work identifying a manufacturing megacity, visible from space at night as a band of light curving from England to Italy via the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany and Switzerland.Brunet was worried that France, a highly centralized economy dominated by Paris, was falling off the map.He developed the concept to urge the government to invest in infrastructure to connect the Paris-Lyon-Marseille axis to the highly urbanized European backbone of around 110 million people.A quarter of a century later, the continent's industrial geography has morphed. A more fitting image might be a golden soccer ball centered on southern Germany and reaching into Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria and Romania."We have seen a huge relocation and concentration into a central European manufacturing core," says Michael Landesmann, scientific director of the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies.Former-communist countries that joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007 have become the extended production line of German industry, no longer just supplying raw materials and components but assembling cars and some industrial machinery.Manufacturing employment has declined everywhere in Europe as a share of the workforce but most sharply in Britain, France and Belgium, with the post-2008 economic crisis accelerating a trend driven by the globalization of supply chains.The shift in the balance of trade inside the now 28-member EU in the decade since its eastward enlargement began offers a striking illustration.The golden football region - Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania - increased its share of intra-EU trade by a total of 5.3 percentage points between 2004 and 2013, the latest year for which final data is published. The biggest gains accrued to Germany with 2.2 percentage points.Over the same period, the Atlantic Arc region englobing Britain, France, Ireland, Spain and Portugal lost a cumulative 4.4 percentage points in intra-EU market share, led downwards by Spain and the UK. Italy also lost 1.7 percentage points.How much this all matters is open to debate. To some extent, industrial jobs have been replaced by the growth of business services, especially in Britain, which has just overtaken France as the EU's second biggest economic power.Manufacturing jobs in advanced economies have become increasingly highly skilled, while those parts of production for which high skill levels are not needed have been shifted to regions with lower labor costs.In the knowledge economy, location may become increasingly irrelevant and industrial plants may wither in Europe as coal mines and steel mills largely did in the late 20th century.Yet Germany has built out its economic dominance of Europe by maintaining the largest manufacturing base.More worryingly, Landesmann says, Europe's southern periphery has become largely disconnected industrially from the core since the euro zone debt crisis forced Greece, Spain and Portugal to seek bailouts for their governments or banks."The periphery and lower income regions are not linked to cross-border production networks. That is not easily reversible and it's not just an exchange rate issue," he said.Economists assume too blithely that such trends will balance themselves out over time, Landesmann said, arguing that the loss of manufacturing capacity on Europe's southern fringes calls for policy action to build up peripheral countries' export capacity.Not everyone is quite so gloomy.Latest figures from Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, show exports from Spain, Portugal and Ireland are rising again. Ireland was the fastest growing economy in the euro zone last year with 4.8 percent growth, and Spain grew 2 percent, finally starting to turn the tide of mass unemployment.U.S. auto giants Ford and General Motors have just made major investments to increase car production in Spain. Ironically, Spain has increased its share of Europe's industrial gross value added even as it has lost manufacturing jobs due to big gains in productivity.These shifting patterns pose conundrums for EU policymakers and the European Investment Bank as they consider how to target a planned 315 billion euro strategic investment fund intended to attract private capital into long-term infrastructure projects.Should the priority be to counter the growing north-south economic divide, reindustrialize the rust belt and the olive oil belt, focus on reducing dependence on fossil fuels such as imported Russian gas, or promote research and development in the industrial heartland?While acknowledging that trying to reverse the tide of industrial concentration would be futile, Vincent Aussilloux and Arno Amabile of the French government's policy planning agency France-Strategie, argue in a forthcoming paper that the EU needs to target strategic investment at the most depressed regions.They also advocate a specific fund for the euro zone to provide loans and subsidies to develop research, small business and vocational training in the poorest peripheral areas."This is also a political imperative so that Europe is once again identified with positive, future-oriented projects and not just with enforcing budget austerity," they say, warning that the widening industrial gap could otherwise cause a political explosion.(Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Tom Heneghan)Join the conversation about this story »
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The model of Cyprus might be the best solution for Greece in order to force the government’s implementation of the structural reforms it has already agreed to with the country’s creditors. This is what the German magazine Der Spiegel estimates, citing information from the Chancellery. “Transmission risk — triggered after a Greek exit from the Eurozone — is very small and definitely limited,” the German magazine underlines, adding that both the member states with a large debt and the Eurozone itself are in a much better position than in 2012. Both the (European Stability Mechanism) ESM, and European Central Bank’s (ECB) QE program have shielded the euro area and there are many to who believe that Greece’s exit from the economic and monetary Union will make the Eurozone more homogeneous and stable than it is today. German Chancellor Angel Merkel is now convinced that a ‘Graccident’ (a Greek exit from the Eurozone by accident), is no longer a risk. Her advisers are now examining the Cypriot crisis, which two years ago found itself close to the Eurozone exit. At that time, the ECB threatened to discontinue the emergency funding assistance to local banks because the country’s Parliament refused to accept the proposed measures and the banks had to impose control over deposits withdrawals and transfers. Finally, the Cypriot government was forced to accept the creditor’s proposed program and this is what Merkel and her advisers see as a guide for Greece too. According to the article, Greece might need a “warning shot” in order to implement the program.
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Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras referred to the risk of the rise of the extreme right and populist forces in Europe if the European Union leaders do not respect the democracy, during his meeting with the president of the European Left and secretary of the French Communist Party Pierre Laurent. “I believe that the EU leaders should decide if they will respect democracy or will take the risk of the rise of the ultra-right forces in Europe” he said and made a special reference to France. “France’s example is very serious, very crucial. You have the rise of Mrs. Lepen’s party and of other extreme right forces. So, if we want to support Europe, we must respect democracy in Europe. That’s the message” said Tsipras to Laurent. The premier discussed with the president of the European Left the current geopolitical condition and the developments in the European Union. (source: ana-mpa)
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