Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Germany blinks!



Greek referendum: Germany says it won’t leave Greece in the lurch


German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, appears to back No vote in last-minute intervention on Saturday



John Hooper in Athens

Saturday 4 July 2015 18.49 BST


Investors around the world held their breath on Saturday as 10 million Greeks prepared to vote in a referendum that presents the biggest challenge to the euro since its adoption.

After more than five months of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between Alexis Tsipras’s radical left-led government and Greece’s creditors, and with only hours to go before voting began, one of the most hawkish of the lenders appeared to blink. Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, until now even more of a hardliner than his chancellor Angela Merkel, suddenly turned a more conciliatory face towards Athens.

Having previously insisted that a No vote on the lenders’ last terms would see their country forced out of the euro, Schäuble told the Bild newspaper that the choice before them on Sunday was between holding on to the euro and being “temporarily without it”.

It was far from clear what Schäuble had in mind, but economists have mooted the notion of a period in which Greece might go back to its national currency, the drachma, while its economy recovered.

With pharmacists in Athens reporting that the government had rationed the distribution of drugs, and fears being raised of food shortages within weeks, the finance minister of Europe’s biggest economy said: “It is clear that we will not leave the [Greek] people in the lurch.”

What effect Schäuble’s last-minute intervention may have on the vote is impossible to gauge. But it appears to favour the No camp.

His remarks seemed to endorse the claims of the Greek government, which has called for a No vote, to the effect that a majority in favour of rejection would not lead to the country’s exit from the euro (“Grexit”).

The German minister’s tone was strikingly at odds with that of his charismatic but controversial Greek counterpart, Yanis Varoufakis, who turned up the heat before the ballot by accusing Greece’s creditors of terrorism.

“Why did they force us to close the banks?” he asked in an interview published by the Spanish daily El Mundo. “To instil fear in people. And spreading fear is called terrorism.”

Rallies in support of Greece were held in several European capitals on Saturday. Others were also held in Britain: in London, Liverpool and Edinburgh.



More: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/04/greek-referendum-germany-no-vote

That looks like a Guardian spin on the story. I read about it earlier via several news sources. The original story was more about providing humanitarian aid in the event of an exit. The possibility of a temporary exit was a minor facet.

True!

Theres so much info going around, most of it has got to be wrong.

What struck me tho, was the apparent open door to a come back...lots of boxes ticked with that one, not to mention faces saved.

And Wolfie himself saying it...go figure!

Meanwhile at home:

Tory's Brave New PR World the 21st Century Clearance starts!

IG Sunday Indices are quiet with FTSE showing +15 and DOW +9
Starting to look that the talk of earthquake volatility on Monday will be unfounded

IG also ingreaseing margins on Indices over the weekend

I am looking forward to the first Conservative budget since 1996.

I would never have guessed that!

that IG notice came into force from 16:30 friday due to expected high volatility ...... however, unless all hell breaks loose late tonight, it will be the original damp squib

it will certainly be a very far-reaching budget, and i hope that with hindsight, it will be seen to have been very constructive and well thought out ..... only history will be able to judge, and certainly not fred who will have judged it even before it is announced

for sure, fred and his far left pals will jump up and down, yelling and hollering ...... however, just as with MT's union legislation, right to buy, assorted privatisations and all sorts of other quite radical stuff, it is absolutely certain that when the next labour gov't comes to power, which eventually it will do, it will reverse none of it, just as was the case previously

One policy that looks like coming is where tenants of subsidised council property will have to pay closer to market rates if they are high income earners. I remember the union leader Bob Crow, who died recently. He was on £145k plus benefits living in a council house at minimum rent.

there are a good number of others

==============

meanwhile, sunday market indicators are now firmly south

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11714603/Weve-had-enough-Greece-must-be-told-to-leave-the-euro.html

As the Greek debt standoff approaches its final denouement – oh please let it be so – judgments are becoming easier to make. The most obvious (obvious all along, it might be said) is that the sooner Greece leaves the euro, the better. If a legal way of forcing the Greeks out can be found, it should be used.

In any case, this debilitating charade has carried on quite long enough. For once, the German high command is correct; even if some sort of a compromise could be cobbled together, Greece’s hard-Left Syriza-led government couldn’t be trusted to implement the stipulated reforms, and a few months down the line, we would be back in exactly the same position.

And if Europe did find a way of accommodating the demands of the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, what next for the ever-more fragile political and social stability of this troubled continent – to be held to ransom by the equally deluded populism of Podemos, Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders?

However this weekend’s referendum pans out, there can be no possibility of another bailout as long as the buffoons that pass for a government in Greece remain in power. Greece asks for debt cancellation; let them have it. But the only practical way of achieving such an outcome is to default, leave Europe’s absurdly misconstrued monetary union, and start again.

The working assumption has to be that this is indeed the Tsipras game plan, for, despite his denials, there is no other way of explaining the hokey-pokey of his negotiating tactics. Whatever else he might be, he is not a complete fool, and he must know that his two substantive demands – to end the austerity but to stay in the euro, suckling, like some kind of welfare dependent, from the teat of international hand-outs – are incompatible and will never be acceptable to eurozone partners.

The “democratic mandate” Mr Tsipras cites in support of his stated goals is laughable. Democracy can mean many things, but what it is definitely not is simply voting for some kind of utopian land of milk and honey and expecting others to cough up the means of providing it. If this was democracy, we would all be at it. As it is, the IMF estimates that Greece will need at least another €50bn just to keep things as they are.

In the grand tradition of the revolutionary Left, the Greek premier perpetuates a massive deceit on his people which looks ever more likely to end in utter ruin. Many Greeks say they have nothing more to lose. I say, look at Venezuela, reduced to an economic basket case by years of Left-wing ideology, and think again. Greece’s government offers only a dream; it has no solutions.

Many of Syriza’s supporters believe that the hated Troika is out to overthrow a legitimately elected administration. Shocking, and also true. That’s exactly what this is about – but why should it come as a surprise? International creditors need a government they can deal with, not a bunch of fantasists. If it is delusion the Greeks opt for, good luck to them – but they cannot do it while in a rules-based monetary union.

Greeks are faced with an impossible choice in Sunday’s referendum, assuming it happens. A yes vote is a vote for the euro and years, possibly decades, of austerity; a no vote is a vote for Syriza and economic suicide.

Leaving the euro can be done in two ways. Executed in a planned and orderly fashion by a responsible government, it would offer Greeks hope for the future by restoring lost competitiveness and reversing the current exodus of capital. Yet with Syriza in power, both these supposed benefits are likely to be squandered.

Like many far-Left regimes, this is a government that seems to prefer chaos and universal impoverishment to order and middle-class advancement. Instability is the very lifeblood of such regimes, allowing the snake-oil demagoguery of their leaders to flourish and their clientele to be shoe-horned into key positions. That process has already started in Greece, with conservative-minded officials widely purged and replaced by Syriza supporting apparatchiks.

Once pushed out of the euro, we can be pretty sure how things would go. Deprived of access to the capital markets, the government would soon turn to the central bank printing press for its funding. As inflation takes off, price controls would be imposed, adding to already acute supply shortages. Nobody would want to invest in such an environment, even with a more competitive exchange rate, and therefore much lower asset prices. The repatriation of capital which a devaluation normally triggers, as money withdrawn comes flooding back in search of a bargain, simply wouldn’t occur.

The EU’s responsibility for this almighty mess is not in doubt, but enough is enough. Five years of crisis must be brought to a head, with Greeks exiting the euro, and once they have come to their senses, installing a government with the stomach for painful reform, fiscal retrenchment and monetary discipline.

Without these things, Greece has no chance of future prosperity. Syriza represents little more than the fantasy politics of the student union. It has no place in the real world.

most assuredly greece will NOT exit €
it is also questionable as to whether tsipras and his merry men will remain in control after the referendum, though in reality, it probably does not matter much
as i have written several times, the real deals are done behind closed doors and i'm pretty sure that by subterfuge or otherwise, a massive slab of the debt will be written off, as indeed is blatantly obvious and necessary for greece to survive

NO looks to be the firm call now with indices down lots

I hope you haven't done a Paddy Pantsdown and promised to eat your hat in public, Cyners. Your statement about Greece not exiting the euro may well come back to haunt you.

If it is NO, then chuck them out.

i don't think it will hils, though i would certainly far rather tsipras wasn't leading the band

if the figures you have just posted are correct (a) i'm amazed thge turnout was so low and (b) that "no" was favoured so heavily