Opšti topik o EU (ex kriza Evrozone)

[Budja]

Cost of Cyprus bailout 'rises to 23bn euros'The cost of the bailout for Cyprus has increased to 23bn euros ($30bn; £19.5bn), according to a draft document prepared by the country's creditors.The original cost of the bailout was put at 17.5bn euros.But the new total, disclosed in a document seen by news agencies, means Cyprus will have to find 13bn euros to secure 10bn euros from the European Union and the IMF.Previously it was thought that Cyprus would have to raise 7.5bn euros.

Skoro duplo skocila cena.Kakva neodgovornost i zajebavanje.

[Prospero]

Europe in Depression?Great Depression was so deep and so long because of “British inability and American unwillingness” to stabilize the system. Among the functions that the great powers failed to perform, a few should ring a bell to European leaders today. Kindleberger singled out their failure to “maintain a market for distress goods” – that is, to keep their domestic markets open to imports from crisis-stricken economies. Illustration by Tim BrintonSurely history is not repeating itself – at least not in the literal sense. European creditor countries today are not tempted by anything like America’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which crippled world trade in 1930. Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Finland remain committed to the European Union’s single market for goods and services (though their national regulators hinder intra-European capital flows).Still, one cannot help but notice similarities with the 1930’s. At the time of the Great Crash, the United States and France were piling up gold as fast as the Weimar Republic was piling up unemployment. Today’s northern European countries are running up record current-account surpluses, just as some southern European countries are experiencing Weimar-level unemployment. For Italy, Europe’s fourth-largest economy, the current slump is proving to be deeper than the one 80 years ago. Meanwhile, huge savings and potential demand for consumer and capital goods remain locked up next door.How did this happen? As Kemal Derviş has pointed out, the cumulated current-account surplus of the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany is now around $500 billion. This dwarfs China’s surplus at its mercantilist peak of the mid-2000’s, when the G-7 (including Germany) regularly scolded the Chinese for fueling global imbalances.More striking still, in the now-rebalancing eurozone, many countries’ current accounts are trending toward balance (and Ireland has recently moved from deficit to a small surplus). One exception is Germany, whose external position strengthened over the last year, with the surplus rising from 6.2% to 7% of GDP – all the more remarkable in the context of a European recession and a slowing domestic economy.Indeed, Germany’s GDP grew by just 0.9% last year, and is forecast to slow further this year, to 0.6%. Slackening growth, declining private and public debt, and super-low interest rates would suggest loosening up a bit and supporting aggregate demand. Instead, a distorted view of what competitiveness really is (mis)leads politicians to consider large external surpluses an unqualified good and a testament to virtue, whatever the consequences abroad.The second exception is France. Over the last year, France’s external deficit deteriorated further, from a 2.4% to 3.5% of GDP. France now faces zero or negative growth in 2013, and seems to have reached the point at which it must reverse course on competitiveness or risk more trouble ahead.Unfortunately, this, too, is reminiscent of the 1930’s. To paraphrase Kindleberger, French inability and German unwillingness to stabilize the system are contributing to an ever more intractable European crisis.In this respect, the debate in Brussels concerning the “right” amount of austerity misses the mark; in the same vein, southern European leaders’ strategy of blaming German Chancellor Angela Merkel for their own tax increases looks increasingly futile. It is not Germany’s fault that Italy and Spain had to tighten their budgets last year. As research by Ray Dalio shows, any country with an average cost of debt far above its nominal GDP growth has little choice but to resort to belt-tightening.For example, in November 2011, interest rates on Italian sovereign bonds were around 8% all along the curve, even as the government faced refinancing needs totaling nearly 30% of GDP over the following year. Because debt monetization was not an option, austerity had to ensue at that point, regardless of what Merkel – or anyone else – had to say.This suggests a collective failure by European leaders to frame the response to the crisis properly. Southern European leaders have wasted time and energy asking Merkel for weaker fiscal medicine. Merkel and her allies have invested just as much political capital in resisting such pressure. And the European Council has become a theater for tired repetition of the same old show, performed mostly for domestic audiences, with little attention devoted to the opportunity – once Italy’s political stalemate has ended and Germany’s upcoming election is over – to re-write the script.Southern countries, still largely in denial, should accept the need for deeper, competiveness-enhancing reforms. Germany and its allies, for their part, should accept that running high external surpluses is damaging the eurozone and themselves, and that it is time for them to put part of their huge excess savings to work to support growth. The failure of leaders in France, Italy, and Spain to raise this issue more effectively has been a clear shortcoming so far.Without a pro-growth, pro-reform deal, southern Europe’s attempts at deleveraging may result in a politically destabilizing depression. As Mark Twain famously observed, “History doesn’t repeat itself. At best, it sometimes rhymes.” In Europe’s case, the poetry could be very dark.Read more at http://www.project-s...fbhLIhk34cH6.99

[Prospero]

Lone Voice of Sanity Successfully SilencedEver since the beginning of the current economic crisis, the government's orthodoxy that cutting expenditure to match tax receipts is the only option has been echoed by all official voices - the Treasury, the National Bank - except one. The CPB, the state agency responsible for analysing the economic impacts of government policy through advanced economic modelling, consistently insisted on pointing out that reducing expenditure doesn't do anyone any good if that reduces GDP more than debt. If contractionary austerity is, well, contractionary - and the CPB's models show it is - maybe it should be left for better economic times.Insiders knew, however, that the secret of the CPB's sucess was fickle. After all, like every government agency there is a limit to its independence, and that limit is the term of appointment of its chief. Coen Teulings, the man who was director of the CPB from 2006 until last April, took responsibility for the unpopular findings of his staff, resisting pressure from the government to downplay the results of the agency's modelling. Now that is term is over, however, he has been replaced by Laura van Geest, someone who comes straight from the heart of orthodoxy: the Treasury Ministry. Following the appointment of former top-Treasury civil servant Klaas Knot to the Presidency of the National Bank last year, this is the second time that an independent agency's conformity to orthodoxy is safeguarded by putting a Treasury staffer in charge.The most surprising thing is how little time it took for this decision to matter. Teulings left on May 1, but Van Geest's appointment doesn't start until August 1. In the interim, however, the mood has already changed. This week, the CPB released a Policy Brief called "Prudent debt level: a tentative calculation", which magically finds that the prudent (maximum) level of debt is in the 61%-86% range. Above that, the authors claim, "the gains of holding a larger buffer to ward off negative shocks [exceed] the cost of transitioning to a lower debt level", the cost of transitioning being evaluated at a 8-year time horizon.While this has the merit of not being prima facie stupid (it doesn't have a Reinhart-Rogoff-style threshold level of debt above which bad things start to happen immediately), it misses one thing: it uses an average/ordinary 8-year time horizon, based on the way the economy has historically worked, which is very much not the same as the current 2013-2021 time horizon. The next 8 years are likely to be decidedly not average, just like the last 6 years weren't. The authors recognise this, to some exent. That is why they make caveats such as this one:In the press release:

Caution is advised in using these debt levels as anchors for policy, as the costs of deviating from these numbers are small in this range while the benefits may be significant.

And in the brief itself:

Caution is advised in using these prudent debt levels to anchor policy. Note for example that, by Table 1, an increase in debt of a 10% from such a prudent level reduces lifetime earnings by just a few percentage points. This is relatively small if the debt increase averts a financial crisis. Also, adverse economic circumstances may lead to temporarily higher debt levels, which can be prudent.[Footnote:] This can be understood by seeing that the cost of debt reduction increase in a recession. Then, the prudent debt level, that at which the gains of debt reduction equal the costs, rises as well.

Result: We end up with a study that is not so much stupid as it is misguided, but that conveniently ends up supporting the orthodox line that the Netherlands should get to work cutting its expenditures in order to reduce its debt down to the 60% of the Stability and Growth Pact. So yes, we're still all doomed.

[Prospero]

http://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2013&mm=06&dd=11&nav_category=78&nav_id=722010Grčka ukida državnu TV i radioIzvor: B92, Beta, TanjugAtina -- Grčka konzervativna vlada saopštila je da će privremeno ukinuti državnu televiziju i radio zbog štednje, uprkos primedbama sindikata i koalicionih partnera.Predstavnik vlade Simos Kedikoglu saopštio je danas šokantnu vest, rekavši da će televizijski i radio signali državne korporacije ERT prestati da od sutra ujutro emituju program."ERT je slučaj izuzetnog nedostaka tranparentnosti i neverovatnog preterivanja. Ovime je tome kraj", rekao je Kedikoglu na konferenciji za novinare, dodajući da je ERT bio "rasipnički raj".Za to vreme, rad oko 2.500 zaposlenih biće privremeno suspendovan sve dok kompanija ponovo ne počne da radi što je pre moguće. Za sada nije jasno koliko dugo će to trajati, javio je AP.Sindikati radnika ERT-a na tri zemaljska televizijska kanala, jednom satelitskom i radio kanalu kažu da će održavati emitovanje programa.Kedikoglu je rekao da će državni elektronski mediji kasnije biti ponovo otvoreni u novom formatu i sa znatno manje zaposlenih, ali nije precizirao koliko.Svi zaposleni, kojih prema lokalnim medijima ima skoro 2.700, dobiće naknade i opet će moći da se prijave za posao kada se ponovo pokrenuprogrami, rekao je Kedikoglu.Sindikat radnika ERT-a saopštio je da će konzervativna vlada, u težnji da ostane na liniji s kreditorima iz EU i MMF-a sprema da žrtvuje javnu televiziji i radio.Sindikat javnog sektora Adedi zatvaranje državnih medija je proglasio državnim udarom.Zaposleni u ERT-u mesecima su organizovali obustave rada protiveći se restrukturiranju javnih emitera što zahtevaju medjunarodni kreditori koji pružju Grčkoj pomoć, ali uz uslov da ona sprovede bolne mere štednje.

[Prospero]

tekst za zanimljivim zaključkom:

ConclusionsThe previous analysis suggests the following:Limits to a bond-buying programme depend on the nature of the economic and financial situation, i.e. the existence of a liquidity trap.In normal times when an increase of the money base leads to proportional increases in the money stock the limit to a bond-buying programme is tight.If the target for the increase in the money stock is 4.5% (as is the case in the Eurozone where a 4.5% target is assumed to lead to at most 2% inflation) this also means that the money base should not increase by more than 4.5% per year. But then during normal times there is very little need for a bond-buying programme.The situation has changed dramatically since the start of the banking crisis.During the crisis period the limits to the amount of money base that can be created without triggering inflationary pressures is much higher because of the existence of a liquidity trap.How much higher depends on the money multiplier. In De Grauwe and Ji (2013) we estimate the size of the multiplier during the crisis period and we conclude that it has collapsed to zero. As a result, there is no limit to the size of the bond-buying programme, i.e. the ECB can buy any amount of government bonds without endangering price stability, as long as the crisis lasts.

[angern]

http://www.danas.rs/...?news_id=269748

[angern]

http://www.tportal.h...lika-vrata.html

[angern]

http://www.forbes.co...-ban-communism/Napunili gaćice..

[Prospero]

Usrali se od slovenačkih vlasti:

Komunizam i jugoslovenstvo ponovo u Sloveniji:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifydoT0v3J8

[Dagmar]

Može li u dve rečenice za potpuno neupućene: jel su to u Sloveniji na vlasti neki kao komunisti i zašto?

[Filipenko]

Pa jes', čim zemlja obeležava dan osvobodilne fronte (kod nas bi recimo moglo narodnooslobodilakče borbe), mora da je komunistička. Jel tebi ovaj protestant iz Maribora liči na komunistu?

[Prospero]

Ma nisu komunisti ali se primaju na to da jesu, ili bar da su nova garnitura sa tim prizvukom.

[Filipenko]

Pa ne, najbolje da jesu komunisti u 2013. godini...

[Dagmar]

A ok, to zato sto se u Sloveniji dosta njih prima na tu estetiku komunizma, jedan od popularnijih slovenackih hobija, a stranke im se primaju na to da su neki neokomunisti, pa svima lepo.

[Filipenko]

Pa to. Foliranti. Za razliku od nas.