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The euro-zone crisis


Minimoog

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Pa nije baš rekao da Soroš priča gluposti, nego je rekao da je bio velikodušan kad je dao EU tri meseca. U osnovi Stiglitz ima pravo, ali ta 3 meseca koje je Soroš dao, tj. do Septembra su otprilike tačni.
ma šalio sam se ;)al svi bi voleli da jeste :huh: Edited by dekss
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kada kažu "država mora da ulaže u infrastrukturu" jel da da misle na španiju?

The white elephants that dragged Spain into the redBy Pascale HarterBBC News, Spain_61678869_gettyairport.jpgThe terminal building of Ciudad Real International Airport stands dormant after closing in April 2012Europe has already bailed out Spanish banks, now Spain's regions are clamouring for money from central government - and one of the reasons for this is their lavish spending on white elephant building projects, such as the airport at Ciudad Real, south of Madrid.It has one of the longest runways in Europe but today there are no planes, only hawks and falcons gliding in the still heat over the arid yellow landscape of Don Quixote's Castilla La Mancha. Rabbits pop up around the state-of-the-art terminal, built of steel, glass and gleaming white concrete. The airport of Ciudad Real opened in 2008 but it closed in April 2012. The luggage trolleys are now trussed together in the car park gathering dust and cobwebs. It is not the only white elephant to stomp across Spain's landscape. It is merely one of the herd, a monument to the country's burst construction bubble which brought down its banks. When a local construction magnate came up with the idea of an airport in Ciudad Real, money was sloshing around Spain for public works.
Spain's construction boom-The airport at Castellon never opened as its runway was too short to secure a licence-Santiago de Compostela's City of Culture, a campus with museum, library and performance space has cost 400 million euros but remains incomplete-Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences, has brought in tourists, but came in four times over projected budget with some estimates saying it cost over a billion euros
It was the 1990s and every town in every region had a grand project to set itself apart and bring in the visitors. Bilbao was getting its own Guggenheim museum, so why shouldn't Ciudad Real have its own airport?"We had an attack of wealth, we didn't know how but suddenly we were rich," :fantom: says Miguel Angel Bastenier, senior columnist at the left-of-centre daily El Pais. "There was such a frenzy for investing money and people got inebriated." The airport in Ciudad Real was to be a private project, for private profit, but the business people behind it had no problem getting political support. Before their collapse, Spain's local savings banks (the cajas), were different from other banks in one crucial way - local politicians sat on the board. So companies needed political support for large projects to encourage the cajas to invest. Both the main political parties were in favour says Santiago Moreno, a spokesman for the socialist PSOE party which controlled the regional government at the time."Expert studies commissioned by the airport investors said it would create 6,000 jobs and a boom for the economy. There would have been a before and after for Ciudad Real." _61806483_walkway464.jpgThe walkway from the airport to the railway station remains incompleteBut the airport opened its runways to a world in the worst recession for nearly 100 years. Caja Castilla La Mancha became the first of Spain's local savings banks to go under in the crisis, with a rumoured 70% stake in direct and indirect investment in the airport. :isuse: Many more of Spain's cajas have since had to merge or be taken over, exposed to toxic debts. Should they have been speculating on Spain's construction boom? The Bank of Spain has fined two of the politicians who sat on the board of Caja Castilla La Mancha for what it calls "serious violations". "You might think the airport failed because of the crisis, but I am convinced that the shareholders never thought it (the airport) would work. The only profit in this airport was the building of it," says local investigative journalist Carlos Otto.
The only profit in this airport was the building of it”Carlos OttoInvestigative Journalist
The official bankruptcy report for the airport seems to back this up. It says: "The loans taken out were enough to cover the construction phase but no thought was given to the investment needed to make the airport function as a business."Banks approached by the shareholders for further loans said they didn't think the business model for the airport was viable, the report says.It goes on: "The construction itself of the airport provided the first profit for the investors because they signed contracts with their own construction companies." :fantom: "It was never run as a proper business," said a former worker at the airport who wanted to remain anonymous. He hasn't found another job and worries he won't get one in Ciudad Real - where everyone knows everyone - if he speaks out about how the airport was run. "We had races on anything that had wheels," he told us. "We even had races on the floor-polishing machines - we were all so bored. Some people used to go out to pick asparagus or catch rabbits…" :ss1: There was little to do. There were international flights from London Stansted, and within Spain from Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca. But in its last year not even one flight a day landed on the 4.2km runway, designed - ambitiously - to service the new Airbus 380, the world's largest passenger airliner. :twak: Carlos Otto believes the private investors who pushed the airport project assumed the regional government would ensure its profitability by subsidising airlines to fly there. The regional government is now controlled by Spain's Popular Party which accuses its predecessor of wasting millions of euros. It is still not known how much the whole airport venture actually cost. Estimates run from 356 million euros to one billion euros. This lack of transparency is one of the problems that led to Spain's economic crisis according to David Cabo, representative of Civio, a foundation that lobbies for freedom of information. "Public servants are not used to being monitored, their accountability isn't common in Spain. It's terrible because you have many opaque layers of government and each of those control public money." Juan Jose Toribio, an economist with Spain's IESE business school, says that to tackle Spain's problem of white elephant projects you first have to tackle the country's sacred cows - the semi-autonomous regions. "Regional governments enjoy the possibility of spending and inaugurating public works but they don't run the political risk or cost of raising taxes. Someone should be held responsible for this and perhaps we should return to a much more centralised system." :fantom: But even with an absolute majority in parliament, the Popular Party may find centralisation harder to achieve than austerity. At Cruz Prado school in Ciudad Real, daily drop-off resembles a picket line, with parents letting off fire-crackers and shouting through loud-hailers. They are demonstrating against the local government for failing to finish construction of a new canteen and playground. For the last two years the project has remained a wreck of rubble - stalled because the money has run out for the next generation. One of the parents, Milagros Coronado, says she feels angry - and guilty."I shouldn't because it wasn't my decision to build the airport, but I feel guilty for having liked the idea so much. I would like to have an airport, I would like to have everything, but I definitely, definitely need a proper school for my children." <_< From the central square of the village of Ballesteros de Calatrava, you can see the airport. During the building of it, the now-deserted streets here were abuzz with expectation - people thought this huge project would bring jobs and a better life. Carmen Delgado, who lives here, says people were pressured to sell their land, and some of her family's fields were expropriated for the airport. :( "Land is everything for us. If you have land you can have potatoes, tomatoes, animals, olives to make oil... And now? We've been robbed of our way of life, and for what?"
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jos je gori aerodrom u Burgosu ili u Huesci gde prodje godisnje 2800 putnika, a da ne pricamo o duplom autoputu Madrid - Toledo. btw, Spanija ima 52 aeorodroma u odnosu na npr. Nemacku sa 39.mada je simbol megalomanije i sada propasti, Ciudad de la Cultura u Santiago de Composteli.

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meni je zanimljivo ponajviše zbog stvorene mantre da država mora da ulaže u infrastrukturu bez ikakve cost-benefit analize.pošto se zaboavilo na gomile propalih investicija kod nas u zadnjih pola veka, ovo je dobro štivo čisto kao opomena ovdašnjim veljama i mrkama.

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meni je zanimljivo ponajviše zbog stvorene mantre da država mora da ulaže u infrastrukturu bez ikakve cost-benefit analize.pošto se zaboavilo na gomile propalih investicija kod nas u zadnjih pola veka, ovo je dobro štivo čisto kao opomena ovdašnjim veljama i mrkama.
Ovo ima mnogo vise veze sa naglavacke postavljenim sistemom autonomnih oblasti, pregolemim politickim aparatom i odsustva kontrole na centralnom nivou. Svaka cast demokratiji u svakom cosku, al' vec dokazano, najmanje koristi ima drustvo, vec pojedinci najblizi istoj. Edited by Lancia
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Pa nije baš rekao da Soroš priča gluposti, nego je rekao da je bio velikodušan kad je dao EU tri meseca. U osnovi Stiglitz ima pravo, ali ta 3 meseca koje je Soroš dao, tj. do Septembra su otprilike tačni.
ups evilsmile.gifenivej:
Five Myths about the Euro Crisisby C. Fred Bergsten, Peterson Institute for International EconomicsOp-ed in the Washington PostSeptember 7, 2012© Washington Post Europe's financial turmoil and the impact it could have on the rest of the world are the overriding focus of international financial markets. Will the euro survive? Would its failure spark a deep global recession? How would the fallout affect the United States—even the coming presidential election? To understand Europe's prospects, we must debunk several misconceptions that have emerged about the crisis. And we must understand that Europe's troubles may spark a deeper union—fiscal as well as political—that could protect the continent from similar crises in the future.1. The Europeans will never get their act together.The euro area will never be a United States of Europe, and the cacophony of voices on the continent will continue to spook the markets. But given this challenge, the euro area countries have responded to the crisis with impressive speed.To defend against the financial collapse of the weaker members, they have created joint rescue funds approximating $1 trillion. The European Central Bank has lent trillions more, like the Federal Reserve, and has just reaffirmed that it will do as much as necessary to avoid catastrophe. The euro area countries have agreed on firm fiscal rules—with stiff enforcement penalties—to limit future budget deficits. They are moving toward a partial fiscal union, through which the strongest countries will help fund the weaker partners. They are working out a full banking union that will prevent bank runs by providing Europe-wide deposit insurance. The debtor countries are implementing politically difficult budget cutbacks and major structural reforms to promote growth, such as easing firing procedures and thus encouraging hiring as well as greater productivity.The euro area's strong members, Germany in particular, cannot say they will provide unlimited bailouts; that would take the pressure off the debtors. Driven by the markets, however, the euro area seems on track to complete the economic and monetary union that was promised two decades ago and whose absence brought on the current difficulties.2. Greece's departure from the euro area would doom the single currency.If Greece, the weakest link, is forced out of the monetary union, that would actually strengthen the currency. The result would be so chaotic for Greece that the other debtor countries, observing the wreckage, would do whatever it took to avoid the same fate, cutting their deficits even more quickly and accelerating other reforms.Moreover, to avoid the risk of fallout elsewhere in the euro area, the strong Europeans would couple “Grexit” with sharp increases in the size of their financial firewalls and would speed up banking and fiscal integration. By shedding Greece, the euro area could emerge stronger.3. German taxpayers will never bail out Greek (or Spanish or Italian) pensioners.Germany is and will remain the paymaster of Europe, complaining loudly and demanding austerity and reform, but coughing up however much is necessary to hold the euro area together. It has already provided the bulk of the rescue funds and financed most of the debtor countries' deficits through the European Central Bank.There are many reasons for Germany's staying power. First, the entire European integration project of the past six decades, of which the euro is now the decisive symbol, arose from the devastation wreaked by Germany over the previous century. The Germans will not run the risk of destroying Europe again—something with which they could be fairly charged if they pull the plug. Moreover, Germany's export-based economic model rests squarely on the euro: The country runs the world's largest trade surplus, but it enjoys a highly competitive currency against the rest of the world because the exchange rate of the common currency reflects the economies of its weaker neighbors as well as the German powerhouse. And German banks are heavily exposed in the debtor countries, so German taxpayers would have to rescue them if Spain or Italy failed.Smaller creditor countries, such as Finland and the Netherlands, may be reluctant to lend more. But in Germany, every political leader and most voters are fully aware of these political, moral and economic necessities, and pro-euro parties have won every major electionsince the crisis erupted.4. If austerity measures continue, voters will revolt and extremists will take over.One of the most amazing aspects of the euro crisis so far is that the political center has held in every debtor country. Incumbent governments have been rejected in all of them, but radical alternatives from both the left and the right have been rejected even more soundly.Portugal and Ireland have stuck to the austerity commitments required as part of their bailouts, while Spain and Italy have gone beyond, with more spending cuts, higher taxes and major labor-market reforms. Only Greek voters flirted with a rejectionist party, but a bank run quickly forced them to reverse course.The Europeans have now added a crucial growth dimension to their emphasis on austerity, adopting jointly financed infrastructure investments and pro-growth reforms that will further solidify political support.5. The euro crisis will tank the US economy and could even swing the presidential election.No doubt, the downturn in Europe has dampened exports and corporate profits in the United States, weakened employment and investor confidence, and cut perhaps 1 percent off our gross domestic product. Macroeconomic Advisers estimates that a collapse of the euro would produce a renewed recession here over the next year and an unemployment rate above 9 percent at least through 2013.But the world's emerging economies, led by China and India, account for half of the global economy and will continue to expand at about 6 percent annually for the foreseeable future. This is slower than before, but such growth will keep the global economy—including the United States—churning for some time.In addition, the United States derives important benefits from Europe's troubles because the crisis diverts global capital into the dollar, especially Treasury securities, keeping our interest rates low and thus fueling at least a gradual recovery of housing and consumer demand.The likelihood that Europe will continue to muddle through will protect us—and our election—from major economic repercussions.
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Ovo ima mnogo vise veze sa naglavacke postavljenim sistemom autonomnih oblasti, pregolemim politickim aparatom i odsustva kontrole na centralnom nivou.Svaka cast demokratiji u svakom cosku, al' vec dokazano, najmanje koristi ima drustvo, vec pojedinci najblizi istoj.
zvuci kao sfrj? lenji spanci nisu to jos raspickali.
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