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Gene Ellis

Greece's Bogus Debt Deal by Ashoka Mody - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...-sovereign-debt-by-ashoka-mody

greece debt deal project syndicate

shared by Gene Ellis on 12 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • The economist Larry Summers has invoked the analogy of the Vietnam War to describe European decision-making. “At every juncture they made the minimum commitments necessary to avoid imminent disaster – offering optimistic rhetoric, but never taking the steps that even they believed could offer the prospect of decisive victory.”
  • Instead of driblets of relief, a sizeable package, composed of two elements, is the way forward.
  • A simple structure would be to make all debt payable over 40 years, carrying an interest rate of 2%.
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  • The second element of the debt-relief package would be more innovative: If Greece’s economy performs well, the generous extension of maturities can be clawed back or the interest rate raised. A formula for this could be linked to the debt/GDP ratio
  • Why bother? Because the very premise of the current deal and the expectations it sets out are wrong. First, the notion that there is a smooth transition path for the debt/GDP ratio from 200% to 124% is fanciful. Second, even if, by some miracle, Greece did reach the 124% mark by 2020, the claim that its debt will then be “sustainable” is absurd.
  • Make no mistake: policymakers’ track record on forecasting Greek economic performance during the crisis has been an embarrassment. In May 2010, the International Monetary Fund projected – presumably in concurrence with its European partners – that Greece’s annual GDP growth would exceed 1% in 2012. Instead, the Greek economy will shrink by 6%. The unemployment rate, expected to peak this year at 15%, is now above 25% – and is still rising. The debt/GDP ratio was expected to top out at 150%; absent the substantial write-down of privately held debt, which was deemed unnecessary, the ratio would have been close to 250%.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphIn September 2010, four months after the official Greek bailout was put in place, the IMF issued a pamphlet asserting that “default in today’s advanced economies is unnecessary, undesirable, and unlikely.” The conclusion was that official financing would carry Greece past its short-term liquidity problems. Calls for immediate debt restructuring went unheeded. Six months later, after substantial official funds had been used to pay private creditors, the outstanding private debt was substantially restructured.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphSuch were the errors committed over short time horizons.
  • And, again, even if Greece somehow did achieve the 124% milestone, its debt would still not be sustainable.
  • Staying the course, as Summers warns, will lead only to “needless suffering” before that course inevitably collapses, bringing Greece – and much else –­ crashing down.
Gene Ellis

"A Centerless Euro Cannot Hold" by Kenneth Rogoff | Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...a-centerless-euro-cannot-hold

euro hold kenneth project syndicate GDP

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • The bad news is that it has become increasingly clear that, at least for large countries, currency areas will be highly unstable unless they follow national borders.
  • With youth unemployment touching 50% in eurozone countries such as Spain and Greece, is a generation being sacrificed for the sake of a single currency that encompasses too diverse a group of countries to be sustainable?
  • What of Nobel Prize winner Robert Mundell’s famous 1961 conjecture that national and currency borders need not significantly overlap? In his provocative American Economic Review paper “A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas,” Mundell argued that as long as workers could move within a currency region to where the jobs were, the region could afford to forgo the equilibrating mechanism of exchange-rate adjustment.
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  • if intra-eurozone mobility were anything like Mundell’s ideal, today we would not be seeing 25% unemployment in Spain while Germany’s unemployment rate is below 7%.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph
  • Peter Kenen argued in the late 1960’s that without exchange-rate movements as a shock absorber, a currency union requires fiscal transfers as a way to share risk.
  • Europe, of course, has no significant centralized tax authority, so this key automatic stabilizer is essentially absent.
  • Many Germans today rightly feel that any system of fiscal transfers will morph into a permanent feeding tube, much the way that northern Italy has been propping up southern Italy for the last century. Indeed, more than 20 years on, Western Germans still see no end in sight for the bills from German unification.
  • Later, Maurice Obstfeld pointed out that, in addition to fiscal transfers, a currency union needs clearly defined rules for the lender of last resort. Otherwise, bank runs and debt panics will be rampant. Obstfeld had in mind a bailout mechanism for banks, but it is now abundantly clear that one also needs a lender of last resort and a bankruptcy mechanism for states and municipalities.
  • A logical corollary of the criteria set forth by Kenen and Obstfeld, and even of Mundell’s labor-mobility criterion, is that currency unions cannot survive without political legitimacy,
  • European policymakers today often complain that, were it not for the US financial crisis, the eurozone would be doing just fine. Perhaps they are right. But any financial system must be able to withstand shocks, including big ones.
Gene Ellis

"The Euro's Latest Reprieve" by Joseph E. Stiglitz | Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...the-euro-s-latest-reprieve

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Like an inmate on death row, the euro has received another last-minute stay of execution. It will survive a little longer. The markets are celebrating, as they have after each of the four previous “euro crisis” summits – until they come to understand that the fundamental problems have yet to be addressed.
  • Europe’s leaders have finally understood that the bootstrap operation by which Europe lends money to the banks to save the sovereigns, and to the sovereigns to save the banks, will not work.
  • Likewise, they now recognize that bailout loans that give the new lender seniority over other creditors worsen the position of private investors, who will simply demand even higher interest rates.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph
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  • It is deeply troubling that it took Europe’s leaders so long to see something so obvious
  • What is now proposed is recapitalization of the European Investment Bank, part of a growth package of some $150 billion. But politicians are good at repackaging, and, by some accounts, the new money is a small fraction of that amount, and even that will not get into the system immediately. In short: the remedies – far too little and too late – are based on a misdiagnosis of the problem and flawed economics.
  • Eurobonds and a solidarity fund could promote growth and stabilize the interest rates faced by governments in crisis. Lower interest rates, for example, would free up money so that even countries with tight budget constraints could spend more on growth-enhancing investments.
  • Even well-managed banking systems would face problems in an economic downturn of Greek and Spanish magnitude; with the collapse of Spain’s real-estate bubble, its banks are even more at risk.
  • Europe’s leaders did not recognize this rising danger, which could easily be averted by a common guarantee, which would simultaneously correct the market distortion arising from the differential implicit subsidy.
  • The euro was flawed from the outset, but it was clear that the consequences would become apparent only in a crisis.
  • Workers may leave Ireland or Greece not because their productivity there is lower, but because, by leaving, they can escape the debt burden incurred by their parents.
  • Germany worries that, without strict supervision of banks and budgets, it will be left holding the bag for its more profligate neighbors. But that misses the key point: Spain, Ireland, and many other distressed countries ran budget surpluses before the crisis. The down
  • turn caused the deficits, not the other way around.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph
  • If these countries made a mistake, it was only that, like Germany today, they were overly credulous of markets, so they (like the United States and so many others) allowed an asset bubble to grow unchecked.
  • Moreover, Germany is on the hook in either case: if the euro or the economies on the periphery collapse, the costs to Germany will be high.
  • While structural problems have weakened competitiveness and GDP growth in particular countries, they did not bring about the crisis, and addressing them will not resolve it.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph
Gene Ellis

PrudentBear - 0 views

prudentbear.com/...featuredcommentaryview

GEP com nytimes nytimes com global europe GDP crisis syndicate euro

shared by Gene Ellis on 09 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • German exporters were major beneficiaries of this growth. German banks and financial institutions helped finance the growth.
  • Exports have provided the majority of Germany’s growth in recent years. Germany is heavily reliant on a narrowly based industrial sector, focused on investment goods—automobiles, industrial machinery, chemicals, electronics and medical devices. These sectors make up a quarter of its GDP and the bulk of exports.
  • Germany’s service sector is weak with lower productivity than comparable countries. While it argues that Greece should deregulate professions, many professions in Germany remain highly regulated. Trades and professions are regulated by complex technical rules and standards rooted in the medieval guild systems. Foreign entrants frequently find these rules difficult and expensive to navigate.
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  • Despite the international standing of Deutsche Bank, Germany’s banking system is fragile. Several German banks required government support during the financial crisis. Highly fragmented (in part due to heavy government involvement) and with low profitability, German banks, especially the German Länder (state) owned Landsbanks, face problems. They have large exposures to European sovereign debt, real estate and structured securities.
  • Prior to 2005, the Landesbanken were able to borrow cheaply, relying on the guarantee of the state governments. The EU ruled these guarantees amounted to subsidies. Before the abolition of the guarantees, the Landesbanks issued large amounts of state-guaranteed loans which mature by December 2015.
  • While it insists on other countries reducing public debt, German debt levels are high—around 81% of GDP. The Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, has stated that public debt levels will remain above 60% (the level stipulated by European treaties) for many years.
  • Germany’s greatest vulnerability is its financial exposures from the current crisis. German exposure to Europe, especially the troubled peripheral economies, is large.
  • German banks had exposures of around US$500 billion to the debt issues of peripheral nations. While the levels have been reduced, it remains substantial, especially when direct exposures to banks in these countries and indirect exposures via the global financial system are considered. The reduction in risk held by private banks has been offset by the increase in exposure of the German state, which assumed some of this exposure.
  • For example, the exposure of the ECB to Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy is euro 918 billion as of April 2012. This exposure is also rising rapidly, especially driven by capital flight out of these countries.
  • Germany is now caught in a trap. Irrespective of the resolution of the debt crisis, Germany will suffer significant losses on its exposure – it will be the biggest loser.
  • Once the artificial boom ends, voters will discover they were betrayed by Germany’s pro-European political elite. There will be an electoral revolt and, as in the rest of Europe, a strong challenge from radical political forces with unpredictable consequences.
  • In late May 2012, French President Francois Hollande provided a curious argument in support of eurozone bonds: “Is it acceptable that some sovereigns can borrow at 6% and others at zero in the same monetary union?”
  • Political will for integration
  • In the peripheral economies, continued withdrawal of deposits from national banks (a rational choice given currency and confiscation risk) may necessitate either a Europe wide deposit guarantee system or further funding of banks.
  • A credible deposit insurance scheme would have to cover household deposits (say up to euro 100,000), which is around 72% of all deposits, in the peripheral countries. This would entail an insurance scheme for around euro 1.3 trillion of deposits.
  • Given that the Spanish Economy Ministry reports that euro 184 billion in loans to developers are “problematic,” the additional recapitalization needs of Spain’s banks may be as high as euro 200-300 billion in additional funds (20-30% of GDP)
  • A Greek default would result in losses to Germany of up to around euro 90 billion. Germany’s potential losses increase rapidly as more countries default or leave the eurozone.
  • Austerity or default will force many European economies into recession for a prolonged period. German exports will be affected given Europe is around 60% of its market, including around 40% within the eurozone. In case of a break-up of the euro, estimates of German growth range from -1% to below -10%. It is worth remembering that the German economy fell in size by around 5% in 2008, the worst result since the Second World War, mainly on the back of declining exports.
  • For example, Greece owes about euro 400 billion to private bondholders but increasingly to public bodies, such as the IMF and ECB, mainly due to the bailouts. If Greece walks away as some political parties have threatened, then the fallout for the lenders, such as Germany, are potentially calamitous.
  • But the largest single direct German exposure is the Bundesbank’s over euro 700 billion current exposure under the TARGET2 (Trans-European Automated Real-time Gross Settlement Express Transfer System) to other central banks in the Eurozone.
  • by Satyajit Das
Gene Ellis

Eurozone fragmenting too rapidly - The China Post - 0 views

www.chinapost.com.tw/...Eurozone-fragmenting.htm

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Any event that makes a euro exit by Greece — the most heavily indebted member state, which is off track on its second bailout program and in the fifth year of a recession — seems bound to accelerate those flows, despite repeated statements by EU leaders that Greece is a unique case. “If it does occur, a crisis will propagate itself through the TARGET payments system of the European System of Central Banks,” U.S. economist Peter Garber, now a global strategist with Deutsche Bank, wrote in a prophetic 1999 research paper. Either member governments would always be willing to let their national central banks give unlimited credit to each other, in which case a collapse would be impossible, or they might be unwilling to provide boundless credit, “and this will set the parameters for the dynamics of collapse,” Garber warned.
Gene Ellis

Ireland's Debt to Foreign Banks Is Still Unknown - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...24banks.html

ireland debt banks unknown nytimes nytimes com com

shared by Gene Ellis on 11 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Mr. Weber, who is also a member of the European Central Bank’s governing council, said that the statistics reflected Ireland’s status as a financial center: much of what is recorded as claims on Ireland is in fact money funneled through Irish subsidiaries of German banks, and ultimately bound for elsewhere, Mr. Weber said. He said total German exposure was closer to $30 billion.
  • In both cases more than half of the exposure was to Ireland’s private sector, rather than lending to the government or Ireland’s beleaguered banks.
  • Taxpayers will bear the cost, but they may never find out how much. The bad bank, known as FMS Wertmanagement, has no plans to release financial statements, according to Soffin, the German government organization that oversees bank rescues.
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  • In Germany, Hypo Real Estate, a property and public sector lender owned by the government after a bailout, owed its near collapse largely to problems at Depfa, its subsidiary in Dublin. Last month Hypo transferred most of its troubled assets to a so-called bad bank that will slowly wind down the investments.
  • The latest figures from the Bank for International Settlements put total European bank exposure to Portugal and Spain at $853 billion, with Germany, France and Britain the biggest creditors.
  • That worst-case forecast highlights another potential hidden risk. Credit-default swaps are typically sold over the counter by investment banks, with little information available publicly about the financial strength of the sellers. “Only then will we know for sure if the institutions that wrote the credit-default swaps have the liquidity and the financial strength to perform as contracted,” Mr. Weinberg wrote in a note last week.
Gene Ellis

The delicate balance of fixing the eurozone | Martin Wolf's Exchange - 0 views

blogs.ft.com/...balance-of-fixing-the-eurozone

shared by Gene Ellis on 17 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • The euro itself was a leading cause of this crisis by ushering in a remarkably swift convergence in interest rates, which had the effect of directing too much capital into countries that formerly had had to pay high interest rates. This undermined the competitiveness of these countries through inflation and gave rise to huge deficits in their current accounts.
  • The euro is not suffering from a mere confidence crisis that can be resolved by assuaging the markets; it is experiencing a profound balance‐of‐payment crisis that is being prolonged by the expansion of public financial aid.
  • Since autumn 2007, long before the official bail‐out initiatives began, some of the crisis‐hit countries have replaced dwindling private capital imports and capital flight with their money‐printing presses (Target credits).
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  • 5. Export surpluses create no real value if they translate into claims vis‐à‐vis countries which ultimately cannot pay their debts,
  • 6. The ECB Council overstepped its mandate when it transferred to Eurozone national central banks, primarily the Bundesbank, the task of financing the public and private deficits of other countries.
  • 7. Germany’s liability for the bail‐out initiatives does not total 211 billion euros, as often cited, but is actually now close to 600 billion euros if the far larger bailout initiatives of the ECB are included in this figure.
  • 8. The Target credits and the purchase of government bonds by the ECB system transfer the investment risk of private investors and banks to the taxpayers of economically sound countries, posing a threat to the euro because they offer debtor countries incentives to advocate inflationary policies at the ECB Council which would help them defer their obligation to repay their foreign debts.
  • 9. Eurobonds would undermine debt discipline, lead to much higher interest burdens for the German state, and anew induce capital flows in Europe that would exacerbate the external imbalances.
  • ) Target debts are to be settled on an annual basis with interest‐bearing, marketable assets as in the US.
  • g) Countries that are not competitive enough to repay their foreign debts should, in their own interest, leave the Monetary Union.”
  • I also appreciate the fact that the declaration envisages a credit boom in Germany that would ultimately rebalance the eurozone economy. Nevertheless, this rebalancing is likely to prove painfully slow and certainly requires a prolonged period of relatively high inflation in Germany, to offset relatively low inflation in the vulnerable countries. It is far from clear that German public opinion is prepared for such an outcome.
  • More important, I do not believe a currency union that takes for granted the possibility of sovereign defaults and even exit would prove workable. It is a recipe for extreme financial instability, with huge runs on credit to banks, private non-banks and governments built in.
  • mechanisms of financing and adjustment. Permanent transfers from some countries to others, merely to offset a lack of
  • competitiveness (rather than accelerate income convergence), are indeed undesirable. Nevertheless, financing needs to be sufficiently large and generous to give vulnerable countries some chance of managing the adjustment to shocks, without sovereign default, mass private bankruptcies and implosion of financial systems.
  • Gene Ellis on 17 Jul 12
     
    The second major article on Professor Hans-Werner Sinn's attack on the premises of the eurozone. TARGET 2 analysis, plus...
Gene Ellis

Investors Seek Yields in Europe, but Analysts Warn of Risk - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...as-its-economies-languish.html

investors europe analysts

shared by Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Investors Seek Yields in Europe, but Analysts Warn of Risk
  • Once again, foreign investors are piling into the government bonds of Ireland, Spain and Portugal — countries that got into such debt trouble that they required bailouts. Now these countries are able to sell their bonds at lower interest rates than they have seen in years, renewing hope that Europe has turned a corner.
  • Claus Vistesen, the head of research at Variant Perception, a London-based economic research group, sees the ratio of debt to economic output as a continuing threat to a euro zone recovery.“People think growth is coming back,” Mr. Vistesen said, “but at the end of the day, debt is still going up.”
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  • Despite the suddenly easier terms under which Ireland and other recovering euro zone countries can borrow, the fact remains: These countries are still mired in stagnation.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 14
       
      Do the maths here:  1600 a week jobs being lost equals, what, just over 80,000 jobs a year?  1200 jobs a week now being created, that's what, a little over 60,000 a year?  We've had 5-6 years of recession, so how many years to get back to where we were?  And, of course, the population was growing...
  • “Sixteen hundred jobs a week were being lost before we took office; we’re now in a position where 1,200 jobs a week are being created, and our consumer confidence numbers have been steadily growing.”
  • For the euro zone at large, though, a step back often follows each step forward. France and Italy, the bloc’s second- and third-largest economies, are increasingly seen as the latest sick men of the Continent. Even Germany, the bloc’s powerhouse, grew only feebly last year, by 0.4 percent.
  • In Ireland, more than 80 percent of the investment came from abroad, with banks and pension funds making up 37 percent of the offering and fund managers about half.
  • Mr. Kirkegaard cited “the hunt for yield.”
Gene Ellis

EZ crisis and historical trilemmas | vox - 0 views

www.voxeu.org/...risis-and-historical-trilemmas

shared by Gene Ellis on 30 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The big difference in the EZ is that nations cannot go off the euro as they went off the gold standard
  • A major part of Lenin’s analysis, for instance, was devoted to the demonstration that Russia had become a quasi-colony as a result of the large scale capital imports, and that the foreign creditors in effect controlled Russia’s foreign policy.
  • The linkages of these issues can be summarized as a series of impossible trinities or trilemmas.
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  • The move in Europe to monetary union for weaker countries was a credibility enhancing mechanism that would lower borrowing costs. For countries that had strong creditor positions, the attractions of monetary union lay in the depoliticizing of the adjustment process (James 2012). The Eurozone worked quite well as a disciplining mechanism before it entered into effect, but much less well afterwards.
  • Banking expanded after the establishment of the euro (Shin 2012). No adequate provision on a European basis existed for banking supervision and regulation, which like fiscal policy, was left to rather diverse national authorities. An explosion of banking activity occurred simultaneously with the transition to monetary union and may well have been stimulated by the new single money.
  • The implicit national government backstop was really only credible because of the international commitment to the European integration project. It was that commitment that led markets to believe that – in spite of the no bailout provisions of the Maastricht Treaty – there were almost no limits to the amount to which debt levels could accumulate both in the private and the public sector.
  • When the democratic/popular backlash occurs, it takes the form of rejection of international/cross-border political commitment mechanism.
  • Opinion poll data shows a major increase in hostility to the EU in peripheral countries, but with no corresponding unpopularity of the common currency.
Gene Ellis

Eurozone crisis: can the centre hold? | Nouriel Roubini | Business | theguardian.com - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...eurozone-crisis-euro-european

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Several developments helped to restore calm. The European Central Bank (ECB) president, Mario Draghi, vowed to do "whatever it takes" to save the euro, and quickly institutionalised that pledge by establishing the ECB's "outright monetary transactions" programme to buy distressed eurozone members' sovereign bonds.
  • And, even if such adjustment is not occurring as fast as Germany and other core eurozone countries would like, they remain willing to provide financing, and governments committed to adjustment are still in power.
  • For starters, potential growth is still too low in most of the periphery, given ageing populations and low productivity growth, while actual growth – even once the periphery exits the recession, in 2014 – will remain below 1% for the next few years, implying that unemployment rates will remain very high.
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  • levels of private and public debt, domestic and foreign, are still too high, and continue to rise as a share of GDP, owing to slow or negative output growth. This means that the issue of medium-term sustainability remains unresolved.
  • At the same time, the loss of competitiveness has been only partly reversed, with most of the improvement in external balances being cyclical rather than structural.
  • The euro is still too strong, severely limiting the improvement in competitiveness that is needed to boost net exports in the face of weak domestic demand.
  • a continuing credit crunch, as undercapitalised banks deleverage by selling assets and shrinking their loan portfolios.
  • The larger problem, of course, is that progress toward banking, fiscal, economic and political union, all of which are essential to the eurozone's long-term viability, has been too slow.
  • all imply that banks will have to focus on raising capital at the expense of providing the financing needed for economic growth.
  • Moreover the ECB, in contrast to the Bank of England, is unwilling to be creative in pursuing policies that would ameliorate the credit crunch.
  • Meanwhile, austerity fatigue is rising in the eurozone periphery.
  • And bailout fatigue is emerging in the eurozone's core.
  • But the eurozone's political strains may soon reach a breaking point,
Gene Ellis

EUobserver / Former ECB chief blames governments for euro-crisis - 1 views

euobserver.com/122721

shared by Gene Ellis on 27 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Former ECB chief blames governments for euro-crisis
  • But the 71-year-old French banker said he had warned EU governments of growing economic divergences in the euro area as far back as 2005 and that he had criticised member states, notably France and Germany, for ignoring the deficit and debt rules which underpin the common currency.
  • Trichet noted that the ECB intervened on bond markets and bought up Greek debt as early as May 2010, when he was still chief and when the first-ever EU bailout was still being drafted. It interevened again in 2011 to buy Italian and Spanish debt when investors started to bet against the larger euro-states.
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  • "If we wouldn't have bought Spanish and Italian debt - a move which was highly criticised at the time - we would be in a totally different situation now," he added.
  • Turning to Ireland, where the government first used taxpayers’ money to guarnatee all deposits in Irish banks and then had to seek a painful rescue package, Trichet said "nobody advised them to do so."
  • Back in 2010, the IMF said Greece could never repay its debt and should write off some of its private and public liabilities. But the EU, under a deal by the French and German leaders, wanted the private sector to take the hit alone in what it called “private sector involvement [PSI],” putting Trichet in a tough spot.
  • Despite his actions, PSI came back in a vengeance in Cyprus in 2013, when it was renamed a “bail-in,” and when it saw lenders snatch the savings of well-to-do private depositors on top of private bondholders.
Gene Ellis

Dubai, Once a Humble Refueling Stop, Is Crossroad to the Globe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-crossroad-to-the-globe.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Dubai, Once a Humble Refueling Stop, Is Crossroad to the Globe
  • Five years ago, the global credit crisis brought Dubai near bankruptcy. But the city has recovered its drive, helped partly by a $10 billion bailout from neighboring Abu Dhabi, and a return of investors from the Middle East and Eastern Europe
  • Dubai’s success has rattled its rivals, particularly airlines in Europe and the United States, which have complained that traffic was being siphoned from their hubs.
Gene Ellis

Russia puts squeeze on Ukraine, jacks up natural gas prices 40 percent - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

www.csmonitor.com/...-natural-gas-prices-40-percent

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Russia puts squeeze on Ukraine, jacks up natural gas prices 40 percent
  • On Thursday, the International Monetary Fund threw a financial lifeline, agreeing to stump up $14-18 billion as part of a two-year bailout package in exchange for tough economic reforms.
  • Russia's milk union has asked for a ban on Ukrainian dairy products
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  • Russia accounts for 13 percent of Ukraine's iron and steel exports, and the political crisis has already hit shipments from Ukrainian steelmakers this year.
  • Sales of rebar - a steel bar or mesh of steel wires used in reinforced concrete - to the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a bloc of former Soviet states, fell 70 percent to 45,000 tonnes in January compared with the average monthly export figure in the first half of 2013.Russian steelmakers have aggressively lobbied their government to implement measures to defend domestic producers from Ukrainian imports.
  • Tough competition on the international steel market makes the chance of (steelmakers) expanding their export market presence very low," Eavex Capital metals analyst Ivan Dzvinka said in Kiev
  • Manufacturers of train carts and turbo engines, which together account for 2.5 percent of Ukraine's total exports, will be hit particularly hard.
  • "Re-orienting these industries to Europe would be nearly impossible without very heavy investment,
  • "The point of the FTA is not to make it possible for Ukraine to export Soviet-era tractors to Europe. That's not going to happen. But it could eventually lead to Ukraine becoming a producer of Peugeots, Volkswagens, fridges or Nokia telephones," the EUISS's Popescu said.
Gene Ellis

Greece's Request for Loan Extension Is Rejected by Germany - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ut-program-european-union.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 19 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Greece’s Request for Loan Extension Is Rejected by Germany
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