I would say no, not after the back$liding in Greece:
"Tough times cast doubt on euro’s survival" by David McHugh, Associated Press January 20, 2015
FRANKFURT — Europe’s struggle with economic stagnation is raising questions about whether its prized project — the shared euro currency — can bounce back or even just survive.
Fundamental gaps left at the euro’s creation in 1999 are haunting policy makers. The euro’s missing pieces have come into sharper focus as the European Central Bank prepares to decide Thursday whether more monetary stimulus is needed to ward off crippling deflation and as Greece faces a Sunday election that could conceivably lead to its leaving the 19-nation eurozone.
And richer countries’ reluctance to share taxpayer money with poorer ones is still blocking change.
Fixing the euro will be a matter of years, and that is only if the political will can be mustered.
The alternative to change, economists say, is that voters may turn their backs on an idea that promised prosperity but did not deliver.
No less a figure than Mario Draghi, who heads the central bank, said in a recent article that it is clear ‘‘our monetary union is still incomplete.’’
No less a figure, huh?
And at a conference in Brussels Monday, Pierre Moscovici, the European Union’s commissioner for economic and financial affairs, said the current state — no growth, high unemployment — is unsustainable.
‘‘If nothing changes in five years, the European project will be rejected,’’ Moscovici said.
I don't think you have that long.
Or, as Draghi argued, countries ‘‘have to be better off inside than they would be outside.’’
Economists often note the lack of a central budget. One central bank, the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank, must devise one monetary policy for 19 countries, each of which has its own budget and a different way of running its economy. When one member is hit with a disaster, there is no automatic central spending to soften the blow.
A shared budget ‘‘is the most important missing component and also explains why the eurozone is so fragile,’’ said Paul De Grauwe, a professor at the London School of Economics and author of ‘‘The Economics of Monetary Union.’’
“And a fiscal union you can only have within a political union, because you need some supranational institution that is capable of directly taxing and spending,’’ he said.
Another money-grab coming out of a "cri$i$!"
In contrast, the United States has a large federal budget that means rich states constantly send money to poorer ones without most people giving it a thought.
Look at that fal$e narrative. We know where all the tax money is going, $hitter.
When Florida’s real estate boom collapsed, the state government did not have to take over the busted banks. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation did. Meanwhile, federal money kept going to Florida residents to pay their Social Security pensions, their unemployment insurance, and their Medicare old-age health insurance.
Yup, that federal government bailing out the banks and looking out for you, America! Thank God this $hit-shoveling slop is covered in snow today.
Not so in Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. When those governments faced bills running into the billions — for jobless workers, collapsed banks, pensions, and health costs — they were bailed out by other European Union nations. But they had to agree to painful budget cuts and tax increases that sank their economies even deeper into recession.
That pressure to cut back is one factor keeping European growth slow and unemployment high — 11.5 percent overall and 26 percent in shell-shocked Greece. There, the left-wing Syriza party, which is leading ahead of Sunday’s vote, has said it plans to reject the bailout conditions, a step that could lead to Greece’s running out of money and leaving the eurozone.
The troubled countries lack the safety cushion that comes from having their own currency, which would fall in value and make them cheaper places to do business. Instead, they have to cut labor costs.
The eurozone has added safeguards since the crisis started in 2009, particularly a bailout fund to lend to troubled countries and common banking oversight to keep failing banks from busting government finances. Rules limiting deficits were toughened and countries’ budgets, labor costs, and trade balances subjected to common review.
Yet eurozone growth was only 0.2 percent in the third quarter last year, and inflation was minus 0.2 percent. Inflation that low is a sign not just of lower oil prices but of weak demand that some fear could persist for years — or even decades, as it has in Japan.
Still, calls for sharing some spending or financial risk — such as by ramping up common spending on infrastructure, or borrowing collectively through so-called Eurobonds — are still facing a firm ‘‘no’’ from Germany and several other countries, such as Finland and the Netherlands.
So what can be done?
Draghi argues that since US-style budget transfers between richer and poorer ‘‘are not foreseen,’’ it’s time for countries to make up for that by deciding their economic policies together, to the point of sharing sovereignty. Members need to push each other harder for basic reforms such as clearing away excessive bureaucracy that holds back economies such as those in Italy and France.
In other words, give more to the globalist bankers.
How has that worked out so far?
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Turn those printing pre$$es on!
"Europe adopts a Fed-style plan to lift economy" by David Jolly and Jack Ewing, New York Times January 23, 2015
FRANKFURT — The European Central Bank said Thursday that it would begin buying hundreds of billions of euros’ worth of government bonds in an aggressive — though some say belated — attempt to prevent the eurozone from becoming trapped in long-term economic stagnation.
The bank’s president, Mario Draghi, said it would begin buying bonds worth 60 billion euros, or about $69.7 billion, a month — more than the 50 billion euros a month many analysts had been expecting.
The long-awaited program, known as quantitative easing, is meant to spur growth in the listless eurozone economy and to raise inflation to healthier levels.
And make the wealthy even richer:
"The typical US household saw its net worth actually decline 1.2 percent from 2010 to 2013....
Incomes for the highest-earning 1 percent of Americans soared 31 percent from 2009 through 2012....
And after
30 years of skyrocketing income inequality, the top 1 percent now
control a bigger share of wealth than they have since FDR, [and] not
only are the rich getting richer — they’re getting taxed less, too."
I'm sure that will save the euro.
Top central bank officials had signaled that quantitative easing was in the offing. But before Thursday, there were many questions about how large the program would be and whether it would be enough to reverse a two-year decline in inflation.
In contrast to the stronger recoveries of the United States and Britain, the bloc’s gross domestic product has still not regained its levels from before the onset of the financial crisis in 2007. Demand and credit demand remain feeble, and the unemployment rate has not gone below 11 percent since early 2012.
Meaning Europe's Grand Depression never ended and is now getting worse.
The policy announced Thursday comes more than six years after the US Federal Reserve undertook its first quantitative easing program, in 2008.
And you $aw the results of that.
Indeed, the ECB actually raised interest rates in 2011....
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It may be the end of this blog soon after this next in$ult:
"Europe may get some US-style stimulus" by Steven Syre, Globe Columnist January 20, 2015
Money makes the world go round.
This is an important idea to keep in mind as you watch financial markets bounce up and down in January. You’re going to hear a lot about that theme — or at least one complicated version of it — later this week.
The action won’t be taking place in America. It will come out of a meeting of European central bankers on Thursday.
Those bankers are looking at a serious threat: deflation, or the possibility of prices for goods and services actually going down. Cheaper prices sound like a good thing — and sometimes that’s true — but a broad decline usually leads nervous people to spend less of their money and drags economies into damaging recessions. The best known example of damage caused by deflation is the Great Depression. In effect, there isn’t enough money going around.
How much more can they print and then loan at interest?
The solution that’s up for discussion: Counteract the process by creating more money and injecting it into the economy. Central bankers can do this by making new euros out of thin air and using them to purchase lots of bonds.
What a sound and stable foundation for an economy!
Then they would let the cash they spend work its way through to the economy. This is what bankers mean when they talk about quantitative easing. (I promise, it’s the last time you will read those words here.)
Yeah, failed policies that are $cams don't go over well.
The process may sound familiar because the Federal Reserve did the same thing for several years to revive the American economy. At its peak, the Fed was buying $1 trillion of bonds a year. It just stopped last October.
It’s debatable just how much this strategy helps. But the US economy is clearly in the midst of a real recovery, at long last, and other countries that have tried it recently — Great Britain and Japan — appear to have gotten some benefit. Europe, which has generally resisted, is watching its economy go back into the tank.
We aren't going to debate that here, and we are clearly in the mid$t of a recovery for the 1%. That's it.
The strategy “has helped economies avoid deflation,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insights in Lexington. “That’s certainly a conclusion I come to again and again.”
European central bankers have had trouble taking similar action because they represent a group of countries, not a single nation, and rarely share unanimous opinions about anything. Deflation itself poses a greater risk in some European countries than in others.
But the European Central Bank has clearly signaled that it will agree on some bond-buying plan when its 25-member governing council meets this week. The real question: How much?
***************
Falling prices are normally seen as signs of a sick economy under any circumstances. But the plunge in oil prices and the reasons behind those declines make any explanation more complicated now. Economists these days actually talk about good deflation and bad deflation — declining oil prices are usually evidence of slack demand from weak economies that are producing less and don’t need as much energy. But the fracking energy technology revolution is creating new oil supplies that most people like me never saw coming. Demand for oil may be slowing in some important countries, like China, but plunging prices appear to be driven mostly by new supplies.
BUT really, is there anything left to say in the mid$t of this ma$$ive $hit $hovel in service to banks?
Falling energy prices have given a jolt to financial markets, especially to the stocks of oil companies. But the savings at the pump is cash that will almost certainly be spent elsewhere in the economy. Cheaper oil should also make the price of many products you buy in a store more affordable, over time.
This is what economists call good deflation — lower prices that don’t reflect weakness and should stimulate the economy when savings are spent elsewhere.
We are not getting that. We simply have no more money.
“That’s not a bad thing,” said Eric Stein, the co-head of Global Income at Eaton Vance Corp. in Boston. “Good deflation is a supply shock, all of a sudden there’s more oil in the world. If it’s just because there’s more supply, this general market should trade pretty well.”
I'm tired of the $upremaci$m, too.
Money really does make the world go around.
Well, maybe, but the Globe didn't a $pin today because of whether, fart-mi$ter.
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Also see: The Fed Goes Global
Until the day the world dumps the dollar. Then the American people will be in a world of hurt and ready to lynch any and all involved. And they will, if history is any guide.
NDU:
"New Greek leader’s cabinet signals willingness to confront EU" by Jim Yardley, New York Times January 28, 2015
ATHENS — From the makeup of his Cabinet to an early warning sent to the European Union over Russia policy, Greece’s new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, Tuesday signaled a sharp shift in direction as he unveiled the first government led from the far left in Greece’s modern history.
The demonizing and name-calling framing has begun, and I hope this guy has some trustworthy bodyguards.
Two days after he ousted Greece’s conservative government in an emphatic election victory, Tsipras, 40, assembled a new, streamlined Cabinet dominated by members of his radical-left Syriza party.
His most closely watched selection was his new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, an economist and avid blogger who has described Europe’s austerity policies as “fiscal waterboarding.”
European leaders began to send their congratulations Tuesday, after a mostly chilly initial response to the victory by Syriza, which is demanding a renegotiation of the tough terms of Europe’s $273 billion bailout of Greece.
Tsipras quickly demonstrated that Europe must not treat Greece as a junior partner.
Political analysts in Athens interpreted Tsipras’ early warning shots as clever political positioning, given that his government will soon open negotiations with the country’s European creditors over the punishing bailout provisions.
“He’s maneuvering all the time,” said Stelios Kouloglou, a political commentator. “But he has a main direction.”
That direction is forcing Europe to ease the bailout’s tough, belt-tightening conditions.
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That's the end of today's coverage.
