Greece

You had to know this day was coming once someone had the brilliant and "progressive" idea of tying all the nations of the world together economically so that they would stop declaring war against each other, didn't you?

I would also have to say that Europe, and therefore the world market, isn't out of the woods yet.

G-20 fails to find agreement on Europe plan
Berlusconi asks IMF to monitor its deficit-reduction efforts

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/g-20-f ... 2011-11-04

FRANKFURT (MarketWatch) — Leaders of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing economies failed Friday to come up with a plan to enhance the euro zone’s response to its sovereign debt woes, undercutting equity markets and sending Italian bond yields soaring to new euro-era highs.

At the conclusion of the two-day summit in Cannes, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said G-20 leaders agreed to continue work on a plan to shore up the International Monetary Fund’s resources at their next meeting in February. But there was no plan for the IMF to immediately increase its role in supporting Europe’s beleaguered economies.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the meeting failed to produce an agreement on how to boost the European Financial Stability Facility, with G-20 countries showing little interest in moving to fund it. The meeting did produce an agreement by beleaguered Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to submit Italy’s efforts to cut its deficit and implement economic reforms to IMF surveillance.

“Ultimately, we are left with the same questions as we had last Friday: Is there enough money in the kitty [for Europe to contain the debt crisis]? What is the conditionality attached to support? And how will the economies and politicians react as they try to meet them?” said Karen Ward, economist at HSBC.

It's not clear what impact our President had on this summit...though I thought I heard his main objective was to urge European leaders to step up their economies. Looks like, instead, this can will get kicked down the road a bit. I guess time will tell, but February seems like an aweful long ways off in this volatile market.

Maybe doing nothing IS the answer.

After the Soviet Union fell, a bunch of Eastern European countries, tired of the tyranny declared independence from Estonia to Macedonia. It might be time that Greece and other countries of southern Europe decide to shake themselves free of the French/German dual monarchy and leave the Euro zone.

I can't tell if I'm watching a version of the movie Titanic here or not.

There seems to be little agreement on where Europe's economy is going. There also seems to be little agreement on what the impact of Europe failing will have on the world economy.

I was listening to George Soros in an interview about this a few days ago and he thought that the whole Euro Zone project was flawed because, while they have a central bank, there is no unified treasury to back it up. He claimed the EU was destined for failure from the beginning.

greece has the option of simply pulling out of the EU and going back to its own currency and monetary policies. the EU has been around since the 50's and was specifically created to gather industrialized european nations towards acommon goal of economics. greece is not the problem it is the EU?

The EU is a problem specifically because of countries like Greece. When Euro's bacame all the rage, lenders were giving an across the board credit score to any country in the EU. Greece and Germany should NOT have had the same credit rating. Of course, I'm simply parroting what I heard in that interview. I not an expert by any means and I suppose Soros could have been wrong, but I tend to listen to guys who make that much money. They're typically not ignorant.