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Duncan Innes

Ireland bailout: UK taxpayers could face £7bn bill | Business | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...reland-bailout-cost-to-britain

bailout ireland Guardian

shared by Duncan Innes on 15 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • An emergency bailout of Ireland, which is looking increasingly likely today, could cost Britain billions of pounds
Duncan Innes

Ireland is having a Lehmans moment | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...d-bailout-european-debt-crisis

ireland Guardian Economics Lehman Brothers video larry elliot IMF RBS Lloyds Spain peripheral countries

shared by Duncan Innes on 23 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Duncan Innes on 23 Nov 10
     
    Visdeo and Column neatly summing up the Irish crisis and drawing parallels with the Lehman Brothers and the banking crisis
josh mower

BBC News - Could Greece be Europe's Lehman Brothers? - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...business-14818439

bbc.co.uk_mews

shared by josh mower on 16 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Could Greece be Europe's Lehman Brothers?
  • Three years ago today, US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson made a momentous decision - to let the investment bank Lehman Brothers fail. The US government had helped to rescue a string of financial institutions, but markets kept pushing more to the wall. Mr Paulson was running out of time and options. There was no political support in Washington to keep throwing money at the problem. Wall Street would just have to learn to bear the consequences of its own folly. Today, many say that it was the wrong decision. The resulting financial meltdown (the stock market plummeted 43%) forced the authorities to do exactly what they had been trying to avoid - commit trillions of dollars to rescue the financial system.
  • Now fast-forward to the present. The "troika" of lenders to Greece - the European Union, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB) - may soon face a similar moment of reckoning.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The government in Athens has consistently failed to cut its overspending as much as promised, and keeps coming back for more money. The Greeks complain that spending cuts demanded by the troika are killing their economy, which in turn pushes their tax revenues down, stoking the need to borrow yet more.
  • Would they really pull the plug on Greece to make an example of it? Or, with daily protests on the streets of Athens, could Greece itself walk away from the table? And if so, would it trigger another global meltdown?
  • Certainly it would be irrational for Greece to stop playing ball. Cut off from the troika's bailouts, the country cannot borrow. But even if it stopped paying its debts, Greece would still face enormous pain. Last year the government borrowed the equivalent of 10.5% of annual economic output, just to fund general government spending.
  • That overspend would have to stop immediately - far worse austerity than the troika demands. The Greek banks would also collapse, bereft of outside support. Having crossed the Rubicon of unilateral default, many economists believe the Greeks would leave the euro altogether. One reason is the need to devalue its currency to restore competitiveness. "Greece needs to move its exchange rate by at least 30% to have any chance of getting jobs back," says Mr Booth. Another is that the Greek central bank could then fund the government's continued borrowing with freshly-printed drachmas. But inflation would soar, and imports especially would become very expensive
  • That threatened a chain reaction of bankruptcies, which in turn caused a collapse of confidence throughout the financial system.
  • josh mower on 16 Sep 11
     
    If Greece defaults would it lead to another recession?
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