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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?
Duncan Innes

Economist.com | Diigo - 0 views

www.diigo.com/...www.economist.com%2Findex.html

economist currency Euro leaving the Euro devalued currency real exchange rates ECB Argeina dollar peg

shared by Duncan Innes on 15 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Duncan Innes on 15 Dec 10
     
    What would happen if either Ireland or Germany left the Euro Zone
Duncan Innes

BBC News - Higher tax rate to hit 750,000 more people, says IFS - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...business-12321524

bbc tax economics marginal tax rate income tax income distribution winners IFS loser tax threshold graph

shared by Duncan Innes on 31 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Duncan Innes on 31 Jan 11
     
    A clear graph on the marginal rates of direct taxation. An article identifying the winners and losers after April 2011 changes
Thanvi Hoque

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | World poverty fight 'in danger' - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...3052918.stm

poverty UN bbc targets criticism

shared by Thanvi Hoque on 16 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • the UNDP says poverty is not inevitable. In the last 30 years, life expectancy in poor countries has risen by eight years, and illiteracy has been halved.
  • countries have recently begun to get poorer.
  • African countries will not vanquish poverty until 2165,
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  • MDGs, agreed by the UN in 2000, aim to halve world poverty by 2015.
  • "only if poor countries pursue wide-ranging
  • Thanvi Hoque on 16 Dec 10
     
    Criticism of UN, trying to eradicate poverty.
Thomas Minney

Poverty Is Poison - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18krugman.html

poverty africa new york times

shared by Thomas Minney on 16 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development
  • That’s not surprising. Growing up in poverty puts you at a disadvantage at every step. I’d bracket those new studies on brain development in early childhood with a study from the National Center for Education Statistics, which tracked a group of students who were in eighth grade in 1988. The study found, roughly speaking, that in modern America parental status trumps ability: students who did very well on a standardized test but came from low-status families were slightly less likely to get through college than students who tested poorly but had well-off parents.None of this is inevitable. Poverty rates are much lower in most European countries than i
  • came into office in 1997 made reducing poverty a priority — and despite some setbacks, its program of income subsidies and other aid has achieved a great deal. Child poverty, in particular, has been cut in half by the measure that corresponds most closely to the U.S. definition. At the moment it’s hard to imagine anything comparable happening in this country. To their credit — and to the credit of John Edwards, who goaded them
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  • dest in scope and far from central to their campaigns.I’m not blaming them for that; if a progressive wins this election, it will be by promising to ease the anxiety of the middle class rather than aiding the poor. And for a variety of reasons, health care, not poverty, should be the first priority of a Democratic administration.
  • he nation turns back to the task it abandoned — that of ending the poverty that still poisons so many American lives.
  • the alleged abuses of welfare queens driving Cadillacs, and the fight against poverty was largely abandoned.In 2006, 17.4 percent of children in America lived below the poverty line, substantially more than in 1969. And even this measure probably unders
  • as always been a form of exile, of being cut off from the larger society. But the distance between the poor and the rest of us is much greater than it was 40 years ago, because most American incomes have risen in real terms while the official poverty line has not. To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child’s brain.
  • failure to make progress in reducing poverty, especially among children, should provoke a lot of soul-searching. Unfortunately, what it often seems to
  • Some of these excuses take the form of assertions that America’s poor really aren’t all that poor — a claim that always has me wondering whether those making it watched an
  • eativity in making excuses.
  • an city. Mainly, however, excuses for poverty involve the assertion that the United States is a land of opportunity, a place where people can start out poor, work hard and become rich.But the fact of the matter is that Horatio Al
  • dren growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels
  • Thomas Minney on 16 Dec 10
     
    The effect of poverty on children and families, and it's multiple and long term consequences.
Duncan Innes

Growth or cuts? Keynes would not back the coalition - especially over jobs | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...conomy-coalition-labour-keynes

cuts growth politics austerity economics Guardian deficit Interest rates inflation osbourne

shared by Duncan Innes on 18 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Conversely, if the jobless total rises by Easter, inflation edges above 4% and consumers save rather than spend, Labour will be able to say that it is the coalition that has messed things up, killing off growth with its ill-timed and harsh austerity programme.
Duncan Innes

BBC News - If we can have a single benefit, why not a single tax? - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...business-11733896

bbc economics tax tax threshold marginal tax rate income tax income distribution National insurance single tax

shared by Duncan Innes on 31 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Duncan Innes on 31 Jan 11
     
    An article looking at simplifying the tax system by combining income tax and NI. Contains a graph for marginal tax rates 2010/2011
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