Greece

[Brendan]

No, I like to think he's South African.

[????]

Whta? St George?

[Brendan]

George Street. The one in Glasgow?

[silverfox]

Time this thread was moved to the lounge?

[SteveT]

It's all ok now that Greece has had a carpark full of euro's promised by the Financial Fuhrer of Schicklegruberland.

[vinceayre]

AlParsons Wrote:

--This mess is just

> beginning. We are not going to get out of it

> without a great deal of inflation and, following

> that, an even worse recession/depression than we

> have just experienced.

Without a decent bout of inflation we are all done for as the debt is ?800 billion and the public sector pension deficit is ?750 billion and growing by the day at an exponential rate. Inflation is the only way out now. Glad to see the Euro is crashing as that gives us some protection for the time being, sadly though this means the pound will crash in about nine months time once the markets have finished with the Greek economy they will start on the Portuguese and then the Spanish. Once that's done its our turn.

If you want some boring financial info on this check out the spread for credit default swaps on national debt. This market is pretty much unregulated so you get the true picture of what the worlds financial markets think of the risk in lending European States money.

The CDS market is the one that will blow open the world economy not the debt market. This is the reason AIG have so far borrowed $100billion off the US Treasury because they are effectively a hedge fund insuring tens of $trillions of world corporate bonds. If they went bust ( and they wont be allowed to) thousands of the worlds top company's would not be able to get insurance for their debt and would call it in creating an absolute catastrophic spiral of bankruptcies.

[SteveT]

Each time they bail a country out, it becomes harder to bail out the next one.

At some point they will be unable to bail out anyone.

[Huguenot]

Britain won't need bailing out if the incoming government presents a sensible plan to cut spending that means money markets don't cut HMG's AAA credit rating.

As I've said before, I don't object to cuts in spending, I only wish the parties would be more honest about its providence, rather than bullshitting about 'waste'.

[????]

Britain hopefully wont't need bailing out because its debt obligations are more long term, its credit rating remains strong so interest payments are low, and its tax collection is pretty efficient and, depsite the moaners, it has an economy based on firmer foundations than olive oil, tourism and registering a few ships.

However, similar to Greece, Britain does now have a way too big Public Sector payroll built on debt over the last few years and largely done so out of political expediency. This will need to be trimmed significantly, which will be painful and the false expectations set up by Gordon's spending spree based on 'no more boom and bust' and - swallow this hard Guardian readers- massive tax revenues largely off the back of those awful bankers will now be shattered, painfully. We're back to Mr Micawber.

Edited 'cos even I don't like a split infinitive

[SteveT]

Huguenot wrote:- HMG's AAA credit rating.

I spoke to a fellow Russian passenger on a London bound flight involved in finance like the city boys we have here and he said we had a 'B' rating, although this was some years ago I did not realize our rating had improved.