The New Normal which marked low to negative economic growth,high unemployment in developed countries of the West began after the Lehman Crash in 2008. It has led to a new paradigm in employment and jobs, with informal jobs showing exponential growth. As people laid off from their previous organizations fail to find new jobs for […]
Greece Referendum is set to become the hottest media topic related to the European Debt Crisis in the coming months.In a totally surprising move Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou called a referendum and a parliamentary confidence vote on 31st October just a week after the European leaders had agreed on a package to .Papandreou’s personal and government popularity have plunged amid fresh austerity measures that sparked a wave of social unrest.The PM is calling this vote probably to bolster his government as it loses support of the masses
According to reports coming from Europe where the summit of major European leaders took place to resolve the growing debt crisis,a deal has been reached on Greek debt.The Euro 350 billion debt which dwarfs the size of the negatively growing Greek economy has been a major source of instability in the last 2 years.The private holders of the Greek government bonds have agreed to take a 50% writeoff on their holdings.This means that if they hold Euro 100 of bonds they have become Euro 50 now as the rest has been written off as bad debt.Not that it was not apparent as Greek CDS and Greek bonds were touching all times lows in the secondary market.In fact the only buyers of Greece bonds were the European Central Bank and the Greek banks.The capital markets had been going up in the last month in the hope of some sort of resolution.The deal does not look like a win win as there will be some big losers in this deal (though they were already losing for some time).Nicolas Sarkozy announced the deal which would be voluntary in nature so that the CDS would not be invoked.Here are the winners and losers from this deal
China has repeatedly cropped up in the news for cyberattacks on various governments as well as large multinational companies.While the Chinese government has denied responsibility for these cyberattacks,the evidence continues to grow as large reputed organization have blamed hacking on Chinese origin IP addresses.Note South Korea,USA and India have blamed China for cyberattacks on government computers.Growing cyberwarfare from China has made India start a cyberattack centre of its own reflecting the serious growing nature of these attacks.The recent Stuxnet virus attack on nuclear plants of Iran has been also been blamed on a Chinese attack on India gone wrong.Note cyberattacks are not considered of very serious nature in today’s geopolitics and has deniability.This has probably made China to continue with cyberwarfare on countries considered hostile to its interests.
Greece has a totally confused Green Policy just likes it General Economic Policy.The Parliament had taken a go at simplifying the bureaucratic mess by eliminating permits and approvals for small plants below 500 KW.However 6 months have passed without much progress.Greece needs to do a comprehensive overhaul of the Green Subsidies.The Solar and Wind Costs have fallen greatly in the interim so it needs to reduce the FITs to normalize the returns.Otherwise it might repeat a Spanish/Czech Renewable Energy Boom and Bust.
The recent recovery in Euro from 1.2 to 1.3 USD and the strength of the stock markets would make you think that the Greek Contagion is behind us.However that is far from the truth as most parts of Europe continues to see a distressed banking sector and deteriorating public finances.Hungary which has been under a […]