Battle Lines Drawn For a Eurozone Debt War!
- What the MSM won’t tell you about is the bankster machinations behind the sovereign debt crisis. Private bankster debts have been socialized. The sheeple are made to pay for these debts. The blame is largely thrown on the sheeple. The real culprits are the Illuminist banksters and their paid for politicians. This is about world conquest via fraudulent finance. This is about loan sharks smelling blood, offering more loans/debts at exorbitant interest rates while forcing through ‘privatization’. It is about stealing the national assets of Greece via ‘privatization’ where the Greeks will be forced to sell at pennies to the dollar!
– - The Greeks should default immediately and get out of the Euro. Go back to the drachma and set a favourable exchange rate. It is going to hurt but it will be a lot less than remaining in the Eurozone and lose sovereignty. What the ECB and IMF is proposing is really about saving the banks and not the people.
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Battle lines drawn for a eurozone debt war
By Philip Aldrick , http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
While Molotov cocktails burn on Athens’ streets, more vitriolic battles yet are blazing over Greece’s debt crisis behind the scenes, as financial markets and eurozone politicians fight their ground.
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War has broken out in Greece. But the battleground is not on the streets, where rioters are venting their fury at planned spending cuts and painful social austerity. It’s on stock market floors and in the political corridors from Athens to Berlin and Brussels. The debt-ridden Mediterranean country is fighting for its future while, for the rest of Europe, Greece has become the frontline for the battle to save the euro.
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“I am here by patriotic duty to carry out a real war,” the new Greek finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, said on taking up the post on Friday. “I did it with much thought and not without doubts,” he added. With good reason. It will be the biggest fight of the former defence minister’s life.
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His first sortie comes today, when the eurogroup of finance ministers meets in Brussels with International Monetary Fund (IMF) representatives to agree to release the fifth tranche of the €110bn (£97bn) bail-out package agreed in May last year.
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For Venizelos, it will be an easy introduction. Last week, Olli Rehn, the European Union’s economic commissioner, indicated the decision had already been made to hand over the €12bn of loans.
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In an official statement, he said: “I am confident that Sunday, the eurogroup will be able to decide on the disbursement of the fifth tranche of the loans for Greece in early July.”
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Venizelos’s bigger battles start almost immediately. In a now well-worn analogy, the disbursement to Greece will be little more than “kicking the can down the road” — buying time for a proper solution. But buying time is vital. The crisis is very nearly upon Greece.
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On July 15, the government faces redemption of €2.4bn of short-term treasury bills — with no obvious private buyers to take them. Then, on August 20, €6.6bn of five-year bonds expire. The market is currently charging interest on 5-year Greek debt at 17.8pc — a level that reflects the risk of default but one that is also so high it would inevitably cause one. Greece could simply be unable to refinance, and hence default.
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Contagion is the big fear. French banks have €49bn of exposure to Greek sovereign debt, German banks €30bn, and UK banks €14bn, according to Fathom Consulting’s analysis of Bank for International Settlements’ data. Nasty though a default would be, that alone would be manageable. If it triggers fears of a default in Portugal and Ireland as well, the crisis could rapidly spiral out of control. Spain has a €79bn exposure to Portugal, Germany €38bn, France €24bn, and the UK €22bn. In Ireland’s case, UK banks own €145bn of the country’s sovereign debt and Germany €119bn.
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The biggest fear is that Spain’s banks, already facing major domestic problems, would topple — forcing a state-funded rescue that would drag the whole country into a bail-out. Any threat of default in Spain would be devastating. Germany owns €167bn of Spanish debt, France €131bn and the UK €103bn. By comparison, when Lehman went down, it had debt stock of $610bn (€425bn/£375bn).
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“The key issue for Europe is not the fate of small Greece,” he said. “If Athens were to reject the bail-out terms for good, support for Greece might end and Greece might default. In the event of a Greek default, Europe would likely switch to contagion control, trying to prevent the turmoil from spreading to Spain and Italy.”
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Tim Kirk, a partner at accountants BDO, added: “Like Lehmans, the shock could spread across the entire financial system. The effect will be to drive investors away from government bonds of other countries, especially Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy and there simply isn’t enough money to bail all these countries out.”
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David Dodge, former governor of the Bank of Canada and co-chair of the MMG, said: “You can kick the can down the road in the hope that something is going to come along. Well, something isn’t going to come along in this case . . . The longer you let it go, the greater the chance that another event will come along and create a bigger problem.” For Europe’s taxpayers, though, can-kicking hurts. The less pain creditors take, the more taxpayers bear — be they in Germany, France or the Netherlands. When Greece eventually does default, as expected, a larger portion of the loss will be socialised.
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According to one senior debt specialist, holders of Greek bonds will have already taken write-downs on their positions. Others still have sold the debt at a heavy discount to vulture funds in the secondary market.
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Consequently, every one of those bonds that is bought or accepted as collateral by the Greek central bank or the ECB is effectively awarding private creditors a profit at the expense of taxpayers. It’s not just the German public that will find that hard to stomach.
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