Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit ratings of nine euro zone countries, stripping France and Austria of their coveted triple-A status but not EU paymaster Germany, in a Black Friday 13th for the troubled single currency area.
More at Zerohedge.
Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit ratings of nine euro zone countries, stripping France and Austria of their coveted triple-A status but not EU paymaster Germany, in a Black Friday 13th for the troubled single currency area.
More at Zerohedge.
Apologies for going OT, but none of the left sidebar for this page loads for me. None at all.
As I mentioned in Reader Tips, the sidebar was displaced to the bottom of the page because Robert’s An SDA Survey: Saturday Night at the Liberal Party Convention entry from last night was missing a closing div markup, so I added one for y’all.
This is all about protecting French and to a lesser extent German Banks. They are in no shape, or not good enough shape to write down the assets, the loans to the insolvent sovereigns.
Mr Market would say let them take their medicine. The counter is that collateral damage is too high (hard to know). The debts cannot be repaid its an accounting question of when you say thats true and wipe out shareholder capital.
The shame of it all is that the managers and the board directors who made concsious decisions not to re capitalize between 2009 and 2010 will leave their positions unscathed, taking their pensions and pre negotiated (regardless of performance) severence packages with them.
Its the lack of acountability that is the real problem here. Countries are made of real assets, land, eduicated workforce, bridges roads machinery, systems of production etc. Those assets will recover. Poining the well through lack of accountability is what will prevent the recovery.
The effect here. The bigger worry is that the Europeans are in such a sad state that I doubt they could defend themselves, even if they had the will.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyggY_R3jU8
The EU is looking real bad. Greece is paying over 400% on its 1 year bonds to attract ivestors to finance what is left of its welfare state. http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/01/greek-1-year-bond-yield-tops-408.html
Europe is all subprime now. The rating agencies were, again, late to the party.
@ RFB
408 % and no buyers. That says everything.
408% huh. Who’s got a link to the investor’s page. I wanna get me some of that action! Hey, I could stand to lose $1k on a bet for $4k. Do they take Paypal?
Is this a great metaphor for Europe or what?”>
Brian M.
“I could stand to lose $1k on a bet for $4k. Do they take Paypal?”
Yep – one born every minute.
Can I sell you some Zimbabwe bonds at 6 trillion% interest?
Borrowing to pay interest on previous borrowing is now going to cost more. This is equivalent to raising the interest rate on a credit card, to someone who paid their last credit card bill using funds borrowed from another credit card.
The EU is bankrupt, and the banks that are so highly leveraged and loaned funds are insolvent.
Smoke and mirrors. Tick tock.
Be nice Scar – it was a joke.
“Borrowing to pay interest on previous borrowing” is sometimes called the Death Spiral.
Despite all the theatre in Europe nothing there has improved.
A slow strangulated death leaves the ultra rich in power and the masses under their boot.
Scary to say but in my opinion we need a good makeover across the board to start over with a clean slate. The only way for that to happen now is by having a major crash and an uprising of the population hopefully to remake western countries in favour of the ideals of the American founders.
Change for the worse is going to happen one way or another. The corrupt banksters and politicians are going to loot and drive our economies into the ground eventually. The only question is who is going to come out on top when the dust settles. In reality having this happen rapidly is much better than years of controlled starvation and subjugation of the western world’s populations.
Abe,
Yes, Italian boat sinks with Germans on board.
Knight 99, hah hah hah. Your comment made me reflect on Good Old Michael Ignatieff and the election. RISE UP HISSS, RISE UP HISSSSS.
Ammo,Gold, Silver…. NOW!
RFB >
Heh heh, yea it’s funny I was thinking about that knob the other day also when I saw the pathetic wreck of his leadership trying to piece something of their jobs together at the recent convention.
Nah, I’m not trying to rally anyone for anything.
The dice were thrown a long time ago and will fall where they may. If anything smart people have been preparing for an economic disaster and some potential for civil unrest for a couple of years now. If you haven’t been your lagging behind a serious number of people who have been paying some attention to where it’s heading.
This is something all Marxists & liberals ought to see
MultiCult Explained
Andrew Klavan on Multiculturalism – a Classic
http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.com/2012/01/multicult-explained.html
socialists running out of other’s money
tell me it ain’t so
According to the article at Zerohedge, S&P wrote, ‘In our view, however, the financial problems facing the eurozone are as much a consequence of rising external imbalances and divergences in competitiveness between the EMU’s core and the so-called “periphery”‘, which implies that a common currency for the whole EU is a really bad idea.
The central banks that run the EU are obviously melting down the economies of th nations who are prone to pull out of the bail out of Greece. Re financing their debts on a higher risk interest figure will get ’em in line fast.