D D as in Default Decision.
Greece doesn’t have the money to pay the interest on its debt, send out pension and retirement checks and pay its employees. Raising taxes has just slowed the economy even more and reduced revenues.
The money people are meeting in Luxembourg today to agree to all open their wallets to bail out Greece again. While Germany has said it will, they won’t do it by themselves. It’s put up or shut up day. If the European Central Bank starts bouncing the checks from Greece, probably this group is deciding how to crash the plane into the ground causing the least amount of damage.
So far things are fairly quiet. Asia didn’t have any insight into what is going to happen.
>” Raising taxes has just slowed the economy even more and reduced revenues.”
Art, why all the hate ? President zero says we need to ‘raise revenues’ : ) Raising taxes is so , 1990’s.
Senator Mark Warner used the “Raise revenue” and “Tax reform” terms to raise taxes in Virginia while he was Governor in 2003. He is bitter now he didn’t make it on the ‘Super-Committee’ to provide financial reform to the United States.
We have to raise revenues cause something like 49% don’t pay taxes and they need the free cell phone and wic. Throw in the ‘wall street occupation Marxist’ and trouble is brewing for the workin man.
It should be so easy to see that the loonies on ‘occupied wall street’ are useful idiots. Its almost like common sense has just went out the door. But that bunch ‘occupying wall street’ has been educated by the marxist of the 60’s at college campus(s ) across the county. So we shouldn’t really surprised.
Art you are right , raise taxes, people always pull back. Its just the libs/Dems point to the 90’s that President ‘Clinky’ raised taxes without ill effects. It was just the economy was so strong, when he did it the economy absorbed it, for a while.
parrott
That was about raising taxes in Greece. The VAT in Greece is now 23%. Tax evasion is rampant and the economy is grinding to a halt.
America can help. We just need to borrow some Yuan from China, turn it into real, American printed paper and send it off to Greece. Come on. What could be simpler?
How about a big world war. If we could just divert 40% of GDP into building up the U.S. military, prosperity is just around the corner!
Defense spending in the United States has fluctuated in the last century, rising from one percent of GDP, peaking at 42 percent in World War II, declining from ten percent in the Cold War to five percent today. (Source http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/). We could drop that to three, or say, one percent, and really save ourselves.
Today’s meeting seemed to have failed. People are not stepping up to what they agreed to in July. Bondholders of Greece debt are being told to expect a 50% writeoff.
US 30 year bonds lost another 17 basis points as people continue to hope US Treasuries are a safe haven.
Yeah I was listening to John Galt (in Florida) last night, and he said that the Greece debacle will bring down some American banks that are heavily exposed to European debt.
Food prices are going up fast in Europe too.
Greece is saying they can pay their bills until November, by which time the banks will have figured out how to get the collective governments of the world to bail them out again.
What I would like to know is…. what FDIC insured bank(s) based in the United States would possibly be writing credit default swaps against Greece Debt, knowing there is about a 100% chance they’ll have to pay off the entire face value?
Bank of America would be on my short list of suspects. I could see the US Government leaning on them to protect Goldman Sachs – BofA is becoming the government’s dumping ground for toxic things that even the Federal Reserve won’t bury in the basement.