Greece Gets Snowed Under by New York

It’s a snow day here in New York City, with a foot and a half of the white stuff muffling the traffic noise and frosting the trees in my uptown neighborhood. Downtown on Wall Street there’s snow too, but a slightly different story: Greece is being buried by traders. They have been betting big money that the Aegean nation, familiar to many people as a warm vacation spot, can’t make good on its massive debt load. The short money has been so big that Greece was forced to postpone a bond offering scheduled for this week.

Since Greece is part of the EU, the traders have also attacked the euro, sending it from a high of $1.51 (when I was traveling in Europe, natch) to a more recent $1.35. There’s even talk of parity with the dollar. If you are planning a vacation to Corfu, this is good news. But if you do business planning in an industry that buys and sells in Europe this is a nightmare, particularly for manufacturers, who have benefitted from a stronger euro. The Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI this morning noted that a modest recovery is underway. It is predicting that non-high-tech industries will increase output by 3.3% in 2010 and by 4.8% in 2011. For high-tech manufacturing, the numbers are even better: 14.6% growth in 2010 followed by “robust” 17.8% growth in 2011. That’s encouraging, but across the country the folks whose job it is to forecast the range of the euro and its effect on sales, or on imported raw material costs, are creating some snow, too. They are feeding their forecasts into the shredder.

Small Dairies Go Under as Milk Prices Sink Again

PLAINFIELD, Vt. — The MacLaren brothers are third-generation dairy farmers, but they will likely be the last in their family.

After working all their lives on the hillside farm in Vermont that their grandfather bought in 1939, rising to milk cows at 3 a.m., even in blizzards and sub-zero temperatures, they decided to call it quits, auctioning off their roughly 200 cows and equipment ranging from stalls and hoof trimmers to tractors and steel pails.

The Term “Pink Collar” Is Silly And Outdated — Let’s Retire It

You can’t throw a stone around the internet today (if that’s even possible?) without running into the New York Times’ new study on so-called “pink-collar jobs.” The report found that over the last decade more and more men have flocked to traditionally female-dominated career fields like nursing and teaching. Fascinatingly, the study disproves the commonly held belief that this transition is the result of the recession, proving that men’s migration into the pink isn’t out of some alleged desperation. Men want those jobs.

parakori

True happiness is only an illusion when you compromise yourself to achieve it.

http://japan-russia.jimdo.com/usd-love/
waltwriston

How very strange I posted almost exactly the same thing in the thread “It’s Alive! The dollar, that is.” Just last night, and the whole analysis of that critique was totally wrong, and now I come to this one and find I was totally on the mark!

Of course, the news that banks were betting against Greece was just released the other day, but it’s always my contention that every dislocation, every distortion in the global economy are caused by the global banksters!

They make Al Capone look like Mike Wallace lol!
ps56penn62pr64

Debt-based currencies, like those of Greece and the US, are vulnerable to naked short selling, because almost all of the currency used in these countries is created by privately owned, for-profit banking corporations as commodities to be traded in the open market. Therefore, both the currencies’ values and quantities are beyond the control of national governments.

Fractional-reserve banking systems create these currencies as loans, loans that must be repaid with interest. Since the banking system creates only the principal of the loans and since no one creates money to pay the interest, the borrowers always owe the banking system more money than exist. Under these inevitable circumstances, fulfilling the terms of the loan contracts is impossible.

The solution to the financial crisis in Greece is simple: Greece should exercise its inherent sovereign authority to issue a national currency, then substitute that currency for outstanding national bonds. National currency and national bonds are both forms of money, the difference is that bond bear interest whereas currency is debt and interest free.

In my opinion, privately owned fractional-reserve banking systems are the cause of the current economic crisis and the gravest threat to the economic health of the world.
waltwriston

Yeah I know all about fractional banking, but we’ve now entered a new paradigm: Synthetic structured finance!
dean000999

great article, greece holidays, it really highlights the issues that we are facing in the current economic climate. where abouts did you travel in Europe?

thanks for the article