I wonder what kind of blackmail is being laid on by the US
to make the ECB destroy its own currency. Forget about Greece,
the Yanks are going after Italy and Spain.
What kind of blackmail is it? Nuclear? The Black Death, part 2? Europe's Got Talent?
It's just about a proven fact
that Geithner told the ECB to
'f^&&k Europe. Our banks ain't losing a dollar on this one'
For those of you think that there will be an easy end to this debacle
once the Euro goes bankrupt, you might want to think again.
I'm guessing, that since everybody is bankrupt, and blackmailed,
this crap will go on for ever.
Money will not run out. It's just blips on a screen. If somebody holds a gun
to your head and says "the screen says you got money. hand it over" you're
going to keep handing it over.
from michael-hudson.com (from an interview transcript):
The fate of GREECE
So the question is, if Greece can’t pay anyway, why are they even going through the charade? Well, the reason they’re going through the charade is so that the commercial banks can then sell all of the bonds that they do have. They can be reimbursed and sell the bonds to their own commercial banks and to suckers. They’re letting the people, who now are holding the bag, to take the money and run. So what they’re doing is saying, ‘Okay, the commercial banks can sell out to the IMF and the Central Bank and now it’s much harder to default on an inter-governmental debt, if it’s a government of Europe, against the government of Greece, than it is for the commercial banks’. And again, the Greeks can say, ‘Well, we know the game that you’re playing. You are the people that lent the money to us to pay the bank. We didn’t get a penny of it. You in effect paid your own banks; this is your problem. We’re not going to pay you. You don’t like it? Kick us out.’
...
Q:You have written that the bailout of Greek sovereign debt amounts to financial warfare. That is the selling off of the Greek Islands, the Athens Airport, etcetera. How is this stripping of Greek assets accomplished?
A: Essentially, the European Central Bank and the IMF told Greece, ‘Look. You have to run a budget surplus or minimize your deficit in order to meet the criteria that the eurozone members meet. So you’re going to have to balance the budget not by taxing the rich – that’s our constituency – but by selling off your airports and your public domain and counting this as a budget inflow. So you balance your budget not by progressive taxation, which is how America and western Europe got rich, but by selling off the public domain – to foreigners mainly – and the idea is that you’re going to get rich by selling it off because these new buyers are going to operate the water and airports and other things more efficiently, and lower your prices.’
Well, of course, this is pure mythology. When you privatize a basic infrastructure it’s privatized on credit and so the new owners build in their interest charges and financial charges into the cost of doing business, they pay themselves enormous salaries, much higher than the public sector would pay, and they begin to treat their monopoly position as if they can put a toll booth on the roads, a toll booth on the water and sewers, a toll booth anywhere.
U.S. WAR on EUROPE
We’ve placed big bets that these governments are going to pay, there won’t be a debt write-down, so you have to keep Irish labor on the hook, you have to keep the Irish taxpayer on the hook, you have to make Ireland pay.’ Same thing in Greece. It’s said that Geithner again told the Europeans, ‘The American banks have made a big gamble on Greece, the Greek people will be defeated, that the oligarchy will win, that the oligarchy will succeed in pushing them into depression and you’ve got to save American banks from losing on this gamble by destroying yourselves. Destroy Greece, destroy yourselves because otherwise our banks would lose money and we’re not willing to lose a dollar. We’d rather you lose a trillion dollars than us lose one dollar because I represent the American banks, not you.’ So one can say, ‘Shame on Mr. Obama for putting a Treasury secretary that has such a dysfunctional, almost sociopathic, personality and psychology to be willing to do this.’ Europe’s response is to say, ‘Who put Mr. Geithner in power over the European government, impoverishing us? Who put the American Treasury in a position to demand that we go into depression?’ [what are the Europeans going to do about it?]
