07-16-2015, 06:32 AM
Greece will need debt relief far beyond what euro zone partners have been prepared to consider due to the devastation of its economy and banks in the last two weeks, a confidential study by the International Monetary Fund seen by Reuters shows.
IMF report on Greek debt - Business Insider
Another official close to the talks said the adjournment was prompted by a particularly heated exchange - on Greece's ability to service its debts - between European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. In response to Draghi, one participant quoted Schaeuble as saying: "I'm not stupid." The veteran German conservative leads a hardline faction in the talks which warns Greece that it faces ejection from the 19-country euro zone if it does not do much more to earn its third bailout in five years.
'Kindergarten' as weary euro ministers divide over Greece | Reuters
Almost a million people, in a country of just over ten million, worked for the government in 2009. You could insist, as advocates of austerity have, that this was unsustainable, but throwing a third of those employees out of work, cutting remaining public-sector salaries by a third, and drastically reducing pensions, as advocates of austerity did, inevitably suppressed local demand.
Greece Needs the Euro - The New Yorker
The Israeli government’s decision to keep the new shekel constant and to seek free access to American and European markets was the foundation of the entrepreneurial economy that emerged in Israel during the nineties.
Greece Needs the Euro - The New Yorker
I noted last year that the assets of the Standard & Poor’s five hundred largest corporations were eighty-three per cent “tangible” in 1975, and eighty-three per cent “intangible” today. This means that production is now nested in what business managers call an “ecosystem,” which relies on shared science and large regional infrastructures, including stable currencies.