ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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The UK is an EU country; it's just not a Eurozone country.
why you got to stress me out arnold? reality, it's a b*tch i guess....
The Swiss probably are knee deep in it and think that the IMF has the brass tacks to make sure Greece pays; the E.U.nichs, not so much.
Britain may be it the same boat as the Swiss. Moreover, they might think that the Germans will let Greece sink, damn the cost. So the only options is the IMF.
All I know, is that my partner is from Athens (the parents still live there) and I am scrambling to give advice to the family to save their assets. Do you have any advice? I think putting all funds into German banks/bonds would be a good idea.
I contend that sovereign debt are often disguised Ponzi schemes.
We just bailed out the banks and put all the debt on the sovereigns who were already straining under massive debt. Then the sovereign debt (public debt) is being sold back to the banks which sometimes cover it with CDS.
Definitely “market structures helped overcome information asymmetries and sustained the development of sovereign debt”, which is being sold to banks and used by them to create liquidity. What a Ponzi scheme and market for lemons. Then you have investments banks helping governments to fudge national accounts. It's true that the recession is uncovering what auditors could not and elite of bureaucrats and bankers did not want.
http://mgiannini.blogspot.com/2010/02/sovereign-debts-markets-for-lemons-and.html
History of AIG-Lehman is repeating itself “occuring first as tragedy, the second time as farce" as "the deciding factor was concern that letting Greece fail risked a “Lehman-style” run on Club Med debt, with systemic spill-over across Europe."
How does a strong euro help Switzerland and UK? Were wouldn't expect currency collapse or anything close to that, just a slightly weaker currency.
Matt, a strong euro helps Switzerland and the UK because it implies that their currencies are low against the Euro and thus the Swiss and the Brits get more money from their exports to euro-countries.
Of course it is possible that a) the euro could weaken against the US dollar, and b) the Swiss franc and the British pound could simultaneously weaken even more against the US dollar, so a weak euro relative to the US dollar needed wreck the British/Swisss advantage. But the thing about currencies is that not all currencies can all be weak against each other. Everyone who sells the euro has to be buying *something* and the US and Japan have their own fiscal problems so at some point as the euro weakens buying Swiss francs or British pounds would likely get more attractive.
This was already pointed out, but it bears repeating, that the UK is a member of the EU.
>>Elsewhere, I read that the UK and Switzerland (two non-EU members) want the IMF to help Greece, but the EU wants to avoid the IMF. Why is that? If Johnson is correct, then the IMF cannot do anything, so the UK and Switzerland are basically saying they do not care what happens to Greece.