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The Guardian: European parliament passes EU-Canada free trade deal amid protests

Lafayette

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European parliament passes EU-Canada free trade deal amid protests

Excerpt:
Controversial Ceta deal aims to eliminate 98% of tariffs on exported goods but critics say it will lead to privatisation of public sector. Ceta isn’t perfect, but Europe’s radical left was wrong to oppose it.

The European parliament has passed the controversial EU-Canada free trade deal, while protesters staged a sit-in at the gates of the building in Strasbourg, France.

The agreement was celebrated by some as a victory for global free trade in the face of growing US protectionism under the government of Donald Trump. The agreement aims to eliminate 98% of tariffs on exported goods, making it the EU’s most comprehensive trade deal to date.
Trade between the two sides amounts to more than 60bn euros (C$83bn) a year, and the EU expects the so-called Ceta deal (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) to boost this by 20% by removing almost all tariffs.

Supporters claim the pact will be worth £1.3bn (C$2.1bn, $1.6bn) a year to Britain alone, in the period before the UK withdraws from the EU.

The EU commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, called it “an important milestone” and said “EU companies and citizens will start to reap the benefits the agreement offers as soon as possible”.

Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of the ALDE liberal group, said: “President Trump has given us another good reason to intensify our links with Canada. While Trump introduces tariffs, we are not only tearing them down but also setting the highest progressive standards.”

The above is good news even if the amount of jobs "created" is just some journalistic fluff.

The EU needs some good news for Europeans to understand that, in the typical "2-years later" wait, the EU is following the US in exiting the worst Great Recession since the GD of the 1930s. The US started meekly creating jobs in 2014.

Let's just hope that the EU is a bit smarter for that sad experience. The EU-countries have to learn that financial profligacy is a stoopid way for politicians to get reelected. It simply puts off "the day of dire reckoning". (Of course, why should they care. By then, most are retired.)

Strangely enough, the Guardian also reports that the US is putting pressure on milady (Mme. Lagarde) at the IMF to renounce a large portion of the Greek debt that it holds. (Which surprises a great many who did not think that Trump could even find the country on a map!)

But since the US gives the IMF one helluva-lotta-muney, it has some weight in the matter. Greece cooked the books (helped by Goldman Sachs) to get into the EU, and guess where the new Treasury Secretary (Steven Mnuchin) spent most of his career running the business?

Vicious little me, huh ... ? :roll:
 
European parliament passes EU-Canada free trade deal amid protests

Excerpt:

The above is good news even if the amount of jobs "created" is just some journalistic fluff.

The EU needs some good news for Europeans to understand that, in the typical "2-years later" wait, the EU is following the US in exiting the worst Great Recession since the GD of the 1930s. The US started meekly creating jobs in 2014.

Let's just hope that the EU is a bit smarter for that sad experience. The EU-countries have to learn that financial profligacy is a stoopid way for politicians to get reelected. It simply puts off "the day of dire reckoning". (Of course, why should they care. By then, most are retired.)

Strangely enough, the Guardian also reports that the US is putting pressure on milady (Mme. Lagarde) at the IMF to renounce a large portion of the Greek debt that it holds. (Which surprises a great many who did not think that Trump could even find the country on a map!)

But since the US gives the IMF one helluva-lotta-muney, it has some weight in the matter. Greece cooked the books (helped by Goldman Sachs) to get into the EU, and guess where the new Treasury Secretary (Steven Mnuchin) spent most of his career running the business?

Vicious little me, huh ... ? :roll:

Nota nene: Your last jibe against Goldman and indirectly against the US should be taken with a little salt. Issing then of the Bundesbank and later a Director of the Ecb pointed out in an interview that the Bundesbank had known that the Greek books were cooked and that they had been forbidden by the Ministry to do. due diligence and thus accepted the consequences we are seeing. Deutschlandfunk reported yesterday that a third of all Greek households live on incomes below Euros 10.000.
 
GREECE AND GOLDMAN-SACHS AS A LESSON IN FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

Your last jibe against Goldman and indirectly against the US should be taken with a little salt. Issing then of the Bundesbank and later a Director of the Ecb pointed out in an interview that the Bundesbank had known that the Greek books were cooked and that they had been forbidden by the Ministry to do. due diligence and thus accepted the consequences we are seeing.

All the powers-that-be knew the books were being cooked.

They let it pass because they thought that "nothing could possibly happen". That was pre-1981, the year Greece was admitted to the EU.

The Great Recession was imported into Europe in 2010, two decades later. And nothing had been done by Greek politicians to rectify the very bad administration of the nation's budget. Nothing, nada, niente, nichts, tipota.

From Wikipedia: Greek government-debt crisis
Excerpt:
Fraudulent statistics
To keep within the monetary union guidelines, the government of Greece for many years simply misreported economic statistics.

At the beginning of 2010, it was discovered Goldman Sachs and other banks helped the Greek government to hide its debts. C. Sardelis, former head of Greece’s Public Debt Management Agency, said that the country did not understand what it was buying. He also said he learned that "other EU countries such as Italy" had made similar deals.

Most notable was a cross currency swap, where billions worth of Greek debts and loans were converted into yen and dollars at a fictitious exchange rate, thus hiding the true extent of Greek loans. Swaps were not registered as debt because Eurostat statistics did not include financial derivatives. A German derivatives dealer commented, "The Maastricht rules can be circumvented quite legally through swaps," and "In previous years, Italy used a similar trick to mask its true debt with the help of a different US bank." These conditions enabled Greece and other governments to spend beyond their means, while ostensibly meeting EU deficit targets.

The European statistics agency, Eurostat, had at regular intervals from 2004-2010, sent 10 delegations to Athens with a view to improving the reliability of Greek statistical figures. In January it issued a report that contained accusations of falsified data and political interference.

From The Nation: How Goldman Sachs Profited From the Greek Debt Crisis
Excerpt: 
The investment bank made millions by helping to hide the true extent of the debt, and in the process almost doubled it.

The crisis was exacerbated years ago by a deal with Goldman Sachs, engineered by Goldman’s ... CEO, Lloyd Blankfein. Blankfein and his Goldman team helped Greece hide the true extent of its debt, and in the process almost doubled it.

In 2001, Greece was looking for ways to disguise its mounting financial troubles. The Maastricht Treaty required all eurozone member states to show improvement in their public finances, but Greece was heading in the wrong direction. Then Goldman Sachs came to the rescue, arranging a secret loan of 2.8 billion euros for Greece, disguised as an off-the-books “cross-currency swap”—a complicated transaction in which Greece’s foreign-currency debt was converted into a domestic-currency obligation using a fictitious market exchange rate.

As a result, about 2 percent of Greece’s debt magically disappeared from its national accounts. Christoforos Sardelis, then head of Greece’s Public Debt Management Agency, later described the deal to Bloomberg Business as “a very sexy story between two sinners.” For its services, Goldman received a whopping 600 million euros ($793 million), according to Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over from Sardelis in 2005. That came to about 12 percent of Goldman’s revenue from its giant trading and principal-investments unit in 2001—which posted record sales that year. The unit was run by Blankfein.

And, at the time, guess who was running GS's International Division. Mario Draghi, the ECB's current boss.

When it comes to money, there is only one singular difference between the US and EU. The management body of any bank in the US is answerable to the Secretary of the Treasury. In the EU, the ECB is answerable to cronies at Berlaymont in Brussels (who are "nominated" and not elected into their positions).

MY POINT: For other "national leaders" in the EU, it would be a highly demonstrative lesson were Greece forced out of the EU, the time to get its financial house in order ...
 
GREECE AND GOLDMAN-SACHS AS A LESSON IN FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT



All the powers-that-be knew the books were being cooked.

They let it pass because they thought that "nothing could possibly happen". That was pre-1981, the year Greece was admitted to the EU.

The Great Recession was imported into Europe in 2010, two decades later. And nothing had been done by Greek politicians to rectify the very bad administration of the nation's budget. Nothing, nada, niente, nichts, tipota.

From Wikipedia: Greek government-debt crisis
Excerpt:

From The Nation: How Goldman Sachs Profited From the Greek Debt Crisis
Excerpt: 

And, at the time, guess who was running GS's International Division. Mario Draghi, the ECB's current boss.

When it comes to money, there is only one singular difference between the US and EU. The management body of any bank in the US is answerable to the Secretary of the Treasury. In the EU, the ECB is answerable to cronies at Berlaymont in Brussels (who are "nominated" and not elected into their positions).

MY POINT: For other "national leaders" in the EU, it would be a highly demonstrative lesson were Greece forced out of the EU, the time to get its financial house in order ...

That last would be a large difference in itself. But it is not the only one. Euroland did not and could not introduce instruments to replace the lost flexibility of floating currencies and interest rates to aim at regional economies. Among other negatives this means a very poor adjustment process and time after external shocks have hit the various economies and demanding responses to the different fallout.
 
Euroland did not and could not introduce instruments to replace the lost flexibility of floating currencies and interest rates to aim at regional economies.

EuroLand was necessary because prior to its inception, any EU country could create massive debt and at any new election the "saviour" could devalue unfairly the country's currency.

That tactic was rightfully called, "National beggar thy neighbor" because such was precisely the injury produced to contend with a dreadful economy clearly self-made nationally.

It was no way to run a combined market-economy (of 28 countries) that required a modicum of self-discipline - which is precisely what the Euro brought to the EU ...
 
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