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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 7:02 pm 
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doone wrote:
Yay...just booked our flight to Greece last night. I hope they stop the strikes before we get there.

Great timing.

:arrow:

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 7:17 pm 
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doone wrote:
Yay...just booked our flight to Greece last night. I hope they stop the strikes before we get there.


You're from Canada where everyone is always on strike....use your credit card for that exchange rate at $1.36


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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 7:20 pm 
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Doug RR wrote:
use your credit card for that exchange rate at $1.36

Now that's a great idea.

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 7:21 pm 
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Doug RR wrote:
doone wrote:
Yay...just booked our flight to Greece last night. I hope they stop the strikes before we get there.


You're from Canada where everyone is always on strike....use your credit card for that exchange rate at $1.36
They aren't picketing, they're waiting in line for publically funded medical care.


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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 8:04 pm 
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thodoks wrote:
Doug RR wrote:
use your credit card for that exchange rate at $1.36

Now that's a great idea.

:lol:

Doone, where are you arriving in Greece? make sure you get your passport stamped everywhere you go...make sure to purchase a transit log


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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 8:05 pm 
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tyler wrote:
Doug RR wrote:
doone wrote:
Yay...just booked our flight to Greece last night. I hope they stop the strikes before we get there.


You're from Canada where everyone is always on strike....use your credit card for that exchange rate at $1.36
They aren't picketing, they're waiting in line for publically funded medical care.

I didn't know Canada had a reputation for strikes. :?

we're not going until June, when we hope the Greeks will have resigned themselves to the inevitable.

what's a transit log?

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Sat Mar 06, 2010 12:00 pm 
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Interesting that in international media this seems like a thing between Greece and Germany. That's definitely not the case in German newspapers and other media.

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Sat Mar 06, 2010 4:07 pm 
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Well the Germans are the ones being rather vocal baout it. Strange Sarkozy hasn't stuck his oar in. That cunt gets in everyones business.

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Sat Mar 06, 2010 5:19 pm 
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dimejinky99 wrote:
Well the Germans are the ones being rather vocal baout it. Strange Sarkozy hasn't stuck his oar in. That cunt gets in everyones business.

Image

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 8:21 pm 
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Quote:
Greece debt: EU agrees bailout deal
Exclusive: Germany plays pivotal role in potential eurozone rescue package for Greek debts

The eurozone has agreed a multibillion-euro bailout for Greece as part of a package to shore up the single currency after weeks of crisis, the Guardian has learnt.

Senior sources in Brussels said that Berlin had bowed to the bailout agreement despite huge resistance in Germany and that the finance ministers of the "eurozone" – the 16 member states including Greece who use the euro – are to finalise the rescue package on Monday. The single currency's rulebook will also be rewritten to enforce greater fiscal discipline among members.

The member states have agreed on "co-ordinated bilateral contributions" in the form of loans or loan guarantees to Greece if Athens finds itself unable to refinance its soaring debt and requests help from the EU, a senior European commission official said.

Other sources said the aid could rise to €25bn (£22.6bn), although it is estimated in European capitals that Greece could need up to €55bn by the end of the year.

Germany, the EU's traditional paymaster, but the most reluctant to come to the rescue of a fiscal delinquent in the current crisis, has played the pivotal role in organising the rescue package, the sources added.

"There have been quite intensive preparations under the eurogroup. We have the ways and means to do it," said the senior official, asking not to be named because of the subject's sensitivity.

"It will be a co-ordinated approach of bilateral contributions [between EU governments] … A bilateral contribution can be a loan or a loan guarantee. The guarantees will facilitate the kind of funds potentially needed in this context."

The rules governing the operation of the single currency proscribe a bailout for a country on the brink of insolvency. Berlin, in particular, has been worried that any bailout of Greece could be challenged in its constitutional court.

The senior official said the agreement – which will not involve any contribution from the UK taxpayer – had been tailored to respect the bailout ban and avoid a supreme court challenge in Germany.

Alongside the financial relief package for Greece, the European commission is rushing through tougher rules for the eurozone, using powers conferred by the recently enacted Lisbon treaty to try to establish a system of rigorous "budgetary surveillance" of all 16 participating countries. The aim is a new regime of "reinforced economic policy co-ordination" in the EU.

"This is the essential lesson that has to be learned from the Greek case," Olli Rehn of Finland, the new commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, told the Guardian (and four other European papers).

"The Greek case is a potential turning point for the eurozone," said Rehn in the interview. "If Greece fails and we fail, this will do serious and maybe permanent damage to the credibility of the European Union. The euro is not only a monetary arrangement, but a core political project of the European Union … In that sense, we are at a crossroads."

While ready to bail out the Greeks if only on terms of "rigorous conditionality", European leaders are hoping that the rescue will not be needed, that the draconian package of austerity measures announced by Prime Minister George Papandreou will be enough to calm the markets and stabilise the euro.

EU leaders are to rule next week on whether Papandreou is doing enough to slash the 12.7% budget deficit by four percentage points this year, part of his ambition to cut the deficit by 10 points over three years.

Rehn said he would unveil new proposals next month, enshrining a new single currency regime of "rigorous surveillance of national budgets" and that Eurostat, the EU's statistical agency, would need to be given formidable new auditing powers over the books of eurozone member states, a demand that may be resisted by EU governments.

"That's the hard core of our proposal. [The surveillance] should be automatic," said Rehn. "We have an immediate corrective instrument for the Greek case, plus another framework to prevent new Greek crises."

Inside the commission, officials are confident that Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, supports the tough new regime being plotted. Schäuble, who uses a wheelchair and is currently in hospital, and will not attend key meetings in Brussels on Monday and Tuesday.

Schäuble enjoys a longstanding reputation as a European integrationist and is said to have played a central role in shaping the Greek bailout plans despite widespread hostility to any such moves in Germany.

Over the past week, he has sparked a major debate by calling for a European Monetary Fund to underpin the currency, and yesterday stoked more controversy by proposing that serial sinners in the eurozone could be expelled from the single currency club.

The EMF concept is for the long-term and a new rule enabling expulsion from the euro club would require the Lisbon treaty to be re-opened, a nightmare for most after labouring over it for almost nine years.

While senior figures in Brussels believe that Chancellor Angela Merkel and Schäuble are intensely serious about establishing an EMF, they also suspect they are using the idea to assuage hostile public opinion in Germany and "prepare a short-term fire brigade operation for Greece".

kick the can, kick the can

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 2:34 am 
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Congratulations German citizens, you are now guaranteeing Greek government worker benefits!

Riots in Berlin in 3, 2, 1...

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 4:12 pm 
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/busin ... nsion.html

Quote:
Patchwork Pension Plan Adds to Greek Debt Woes
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

ATHENS — Vasia Veremi may be only 28, but as a hairdresser in Athens, she is keenly aware that, under a current law that treats her job as hazardous to her health, she has the right to retire with a full pension at age 50.

“I use a hundred different chemicals every day — dyes, ammonia, you name it,” she said. “You think there’s no risk in that?”

“People should be able to retire at a decent age,” Ms. Veremi added. “We are not made to live 150 years.”

Perhaps not, but it is still difficult to explain to outsiders why the Greek government has identified at least 580 job categories deemed to be hazardous enough to merit retiring early — at age 50 for women and 55 for men.

Greece’s patchwork system of early retirement has contributed to the out-of-control state spending that has led to Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. Its pension promises will grow sharply in coming years, and investors can see the country has not set aside enough to cover those costs, making it harder for Greece to borrow at a reasonable rate.

As a consequence of decades of bargains struck between strong unions and weak governments, Greece has promised early retirement to about 700,000 employees, or 14 percent of its work force, giving it an average retirement age of 61, one of the lowest in Europe.

The law includes dangerous jobs like coal mining and bomb disposal. But it also covers radio and television presenters, who are thought to be at risk from the bacteria on their microphones, and musicians playing wind instruments, who must contend with gastric reflux as they puff and blow.

And Greece may be an early indicator of troubles to come. Bigger countries like Germany, France, Spain and Italy have relied for decades on a munificent state financed by a range of stiff taxes to keep the political peace. Now, governments are being pressed to re-examine their commitments to generous pensions over extended retirements because the downturn has suddenly pushed at least part of these hidden costs to the surface.

The situation in the United States is different but also painful. The government will face its own fiscal reckoning, analysts say, as 78 million baby boomers begin drawing on Social Security and Medicare programs to support them in retirement. Without some combination of higher taxes, benefit reductions or an increase in the retirement age, both programs will run short of money to make their promised payments within the next few decades. And many American states are woefully behind on funding their pension obligations for public employees.


In Europe, the conflict has already erupted on the streets, with workers demanding that generous retirement policies be kept while governments press to pare pensions and raise retirement ages because taxpayers cannot bear any additional weight and creditors will no longer finance excessive borrowing.

The problem goes well beyond how to keep up payments and deal with budget deficits resulting from the financial crisis. Because of generous promises, unfunded pension liabilities in Europe far outweigh the stated debt that governments owe creditors, which have caught Greece and several other weak European nations in a borrowing vise.

According to research by Jagadeesh Gokhale, an economist at the Cato Institute in Washington, bringing Greece’s pension obligations onto its balance sheet would show that the government’s debt is in reality equal to 875 percent of its gross domestic product, which is the broadest measure of a nation’s economic output. That would be the highest debt level among the 16 nations that use the euro, and far above Greece’s official debt level of 113 percent.


Other countries have obscured their total obligations as well. In France, where the official debt level is 76 percent of economic output, total debt rises to 549 percent once all of its current pension promises are taken into account. And in Germany, the current debt level of 69 percent would soar to 418 percent.

Mr. Gokhale, like many other economists, says he believes that this is a more appropriate way to assess a country’s debt level because it underscores the extent to which the cost of providing for rapidly aging populations, if left unchanged, will add to already troubling debt burdens.

“You have to look ahead and see how pension expenditures are rising in comparison to the revenues needed to finance them,” he said. “It’s not just Greece; all major European countries are facing pension shortfalls. It is a very difficult challenge because it involves selling pain to current voters.”

He estimates that to fully finance future pension obligations, the average European country would need to set aside 8 percent of its economic output each year, a practical impossibility given that raising already high taxes so much would impose a crushing economic burden.

Mr. Gokhale has done a similar calculation for the United States and estimates that the truest measure of federal government debt, incorporating Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other obligations, is $79 trillion, or about 500 percent of the nation’s output. Currently, its public debt is equal to about 60 percent of its domestic output.

Many of these liabilities will not be coming due for decades. But as most developed countries experience having fewer workers to cover pensions and health care bills for the elderly, their ability to borrow more is rapidly approaching its limits.

In its 2009 annual report on Greece, the International Monetary Fund warned that the government’s excessive pension and health payments to the elderly would result in a debt level of 800 percent of its output by 2050 if left unchecked, similar to the figures Mr. Gokhale calculated. That is a theoretical number, of course: international creditors, who are already balking at lending Greece more money, would require changes in government programs well before Athens borrowed that much.

“The pension crisis is the biggest single test of Greece’s willingness to tackle longstanding reform,” said Kevin Featherstone, an expert on the Greek political economy at the London School of Economics. “Any meaningful reform must lead to reduced benefits for workers — the government needs to show that it can overcome union pressure.”

Greece has proposed raising its average retirement age to 63, and that may be just a beginning.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has met with union leaders and broached the prospect of raising the normal retirement age from 60. Spain has gone further, proposing to raise the retirement age to 67, from 65. In the face of union opposition, however, the government is wavering.

Pensions have become a divisive topic not just among workers and governments, but among governments within Europe. Germany, which has taken politically difficult steps to increase its retirement age to 67 while reducing benefits, is serving as the most stubborn taskmaster on fiscal matters for Greece.

Greece’s pension problem far outweighs the finagling with its accounts that it relied upon in the early 1990s to get its official deficit figures low enough to qualify to join the euro club. A recent report by the European Commission found that the amount Greece spends on pensions and health care for its aging population, if left unchecked, would soar to about 37 percent of its economic output by 2060 from just over 20 percent today, making it the highest level in Europe.

“Projected pension expenditures are expected to double,” said Manos Matsaganis, a professor at the University of Athens and author of numerous papers on Greece’s pension system. “That is unsustainable.” Still, the millions who have come to rely on these payouts will not give up their pensions easily. “Nobody thinks they have to be the one to sacrifice,” Mr. Matsaganis said.

That’s certainly true of Christos Bourdakis, a retired government accountant. Sitting in a dusty union hall in Athens, he is in no mood to offer any concession on his pension, regardless of the severity of the crisis.

He is a full-throated proponent of a system that pays him a yearly gross pension of 30,000 euros, or $41,000, more than he was making when he retired 13 years ago at the age of 60. He has even written a book in defense of it, “The Guide to Granting Civil Service Pensions in Greece.”

“We have to protect our standard of living,” Mr. Bourdakis said. “The pensioners should not have to pay for the crisis created by the bankers.”

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 5:42 pm 
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Yep. The old are damning us all. It's disgusting.

By the way thodoks, there's the reason you should vote.

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 5:46 pm 
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TV commentators can retire early from bacteria on their microphones?? :roll:

Now that is good work Berlin!


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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 6:28 pm 
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Quote:
The law includes dangerous jobs like coal mining and bomb disposal. But it also covers radio and television presenters, who are thought to be at risk from the bacteria on their microphones, and musicians playing wind instruments, who must contend with gastric reflux as they puff and blow.

:lol:

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 11:31 pm 
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dkfan9 wrote:
Quote:
The law includes dangerous jobs like coal mining and bomb disposal. But it also covers radio and television presenters, who are thought to be at risk from the bacteria on their microphones, and musicians playing wind instruments, who must contend with gastric reflux as they puff and blow.

:lol:


Playing the flute is a bitch! :lol:


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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Sun Mar 14, 2010 3:24 pm 
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German finance minister unaware of Greek bailout plan:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=10091357

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 7:44 pm 
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Unless you are retiring to go do further work retireing from working at less than 75 is a freaking waste. WHat are you going to do watch your stories and price is right? Knit?

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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 8:06 pm 
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Electromatic wrote:
Unless you are retiring to go do further work retireing from working at less than 75 is a freaking waste. WHat are you going to do watch your stories and price is right? Knit?
Are you insane? I plan on travelling the world for at least 3 months every year. Surf, hike or bike daily. Play guitar, hang with grand kids, have good scotch with lunch. You know, do all the stuff I can't do now because I'm working. If you've planned and saved properly, why would you want to keep working? I like my job but let's be serious.


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 Post subject: Re: Greece Financial Bailout
PostPosted: Mon Mar 15, 2010 8:08 pm 
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tyler wrote:
Electromatic wrote:
Unless you are retiring to go do further work retireing from working at less than 75 is a freaking waste. WHat are you going to do watch your stories and price is right? Knit?
Are you insane? I plan on travelling the world for at least 3 months every year. Surf, hike or bike daily. Play guitar, hang with grand kids, have good scotch with lunch. You know, do all the stuff I can't do now because I'm working. If you've planned and saved properly, why would you want to keep working? I like my job but let's be serious.


Does "planned and saved properly" equate to getting a government job with sweet pension provisions?


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