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The International Monetary Fund will not disburse Greece's next bailout tranche until the country completes a voluntary buy back of its debt, an IMF spokesman said

Who will actually sell the debt at a 70% discount?

Two thirds of the private holders of Greek debt are Greek banks (22 billion euro). These are certainly not going to sell because doing so forces them to realize losses on the debt,

There is a simple and obvious solution, which will then force itself. The official creditors should take really substantial losses on Greek debt.

The only real alternative is Greece leaving the euro

This situation is basically a slow asphyxiation.

But with major U.S. players like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman almost certainly out of reach for national security reasons,

“I have no illusions about how difficult it is to sell non-American products on the American market,” Mr. Enders said. “We should not even dream about trying to sell a product to a U.S. defense customer if it is not really superior to what our American peers are offering.” Analysts tended to agree.

However, as of last week, the country's four biggest banks had committed to sell just 67% of their total portfolio, hoping to hold on to the balance. This amount now is believed to have increased to almost 100% as they receive bonds issued by the European Financial Stability Fund—the euro-zone's temporary rescue fund—in exchange for Greek debt. "Greek banks were under pressure from the European Central Bank to take part in the buyback," said a senior official at one of the Greek banks. "Now the bonds they will use to borrow money from the ECB will be EFSF bonds, which means that the central bank is reducing its exposure to Greece."

But such a pact would be circumscribed to helping countries help themselves.

But government debt is still growing considerably. Doesn't this also increase the risk of inflation? Starbatty: That's what I assume. Inflation would be an elegant means of reducing debt, and many academics are discussing this scenario. But it becomes truly problematic when government bonds eventually lose their status as a safe haven. If China or Japan arrive at this conclusion and sell their bonds, a bubble could burst that is far more dangerous than any other bubble. If that happens, markets will plunge, and interest rates will shoot up.

Likewise, when it comes to assistance, I think we have a clear legal framework, according to which neither any member state nor the entire Union can be held liable for the debt of another member state.

The creditors are in effect shifting the whole burden of adjustment onto the debtor countries and avoiding their own responsibility for the imbalances.

In this context the German word Schuld is revealing: it means both debt and guilt. German public opinion blames the heavily indebted countries for their misfortune.

The present administration, like the last, would like to recapitalise the banks at least partly by attracting private capital. That can hardly be accomplished as long as the value of large chunks of the banks’ assets remains anybody’s guess.

When the entire private sector is bent on shortening its balance sheet and paying down debt, the public sector’s balance sheet must move in the opposite, offsetting direction. When the entire private sector is striving to save, the government must dis-save. The political obstacles to doing these things on a sufficient scale are formidable.

The Swedish policy following the 1992 crisis has been often referred to in recent months. Sweden acted quickly and decisively to close insolvent banks, and to quarantine their bad assets into a special fund.2 Eventually, all the assets, good and bad, ended up in the private banking sector again. The stockholders in the failed banks lost all their equity while the loss to taxpayers of the bad assets was minimal in the end. The operation was necessary to the recovery but what actually got the economy out of a very sharp and deep recession was the 25-30% devaluation of the krona which produced a long period of strong export-led growth.

Fiscal stimulus will not have much effect as long as the financial system is deleveraging.

er self-imposed constitutional balanced budget requirements and are consequently acting as powerful amplifiers of recession with respect to both income and employment.

Almost all American states now suffer und

Mario Boselli, chairman of the Italian Chamber of Fashion, frets that larger emerging economies still account for only 10% of total Italian exports. "This is not enough" to offset the weakness in developed economies, he says.

Both Mr. Boselli and Philip Halpin, an adviser to the Irish Exporters' Association, say the euro would have to fall as low as $1.10 (from about $1.23 currently), to produce a robust export-led recovery.

Ludovic Subran, chief economist at French trade-credit insurer Euler Hermes, warns that might not be enough. Such a depreciation would have little effect in France because high taxes and rigid labor costs reduce the potential benefits, he says.

Any euro-zone economy would benefit from a drop in the euro to the extent that it can redirect more resources to external markets. But the willingness and ability of businesses to do that differs across the region. Nadio Delai, chairman of Italian research and consultancy firm Ermeneia, say a host of smaller, less prestigious Italian shoe and textile companies have started to export to emerging markets, riding the coattails of more famous names.

These thoughts are spurred by the rather weak communique, which followed the meeting earlier last week of eurogroup finance ministers in Brussels,

There is, as yet, no mechanism in place to ensure bond market support to Spain and Italy and nobody, except the ECB, has the funds to keep their governments funded, should they be forced from the market. The ECB has suspended its bond-buying programme so the high-wire act continues, without a safety net.

As far as I am aware, this is the first time in the history of central banking that a sovereign state has been compelled, to the point of national insolvency, and by its own central bank (by our Government's choice, the ECB), to make whole those who foolishly purchased bonds issued by private banks, which had gone bust and been closed down.

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.

By 2020, GE figures, total spending on the Industrial Internet will be $23 billion. Better management of processes and understanding of systems will yield $1.279 trillion in value, the company said.

On a scale of 1 to 5, 29 percent of them scored at Level 1 or below, meaning they could do basic arithmetic but not computations requiring two or more steps.

Similarly, 96 percent of American students’ work fell into the category of “practice,” while Japanese students spent only 41 percent of their time practicing.