Blog Archives
Can The Eurozone Weather the Financial Storm?
By Ryan Matthew Dernick
As the Eurozone continues to teeter at the edge of the precipice of an artificialized debt cliff, one can only wonder if the 100billion dollar

The Eurozone now has 4 of its EU countries financially hemorrhaging.
bailout that Spain just received actually will help them. Spain now joins Greece, Ireland and Portugal as the fourth EU country to ask for a bailout. So far, the EU and IMF have doled out over 500 billion euros to shore up debt-stricken member states.
Will the systemic present state of the Eurozone improve? So far it doesn’t seem promising, because June is the fifth consecutive month activity across the 17-nation bloc has declined, dragging down heavyweights Germany and France and likely increasing calls for the European Central Bank to take action to support the economy. Collapsing banks are not the worry in Germany but inflation of currency could hit Angela Merkel’s country moving German’s to invest in real estate.

17 Member States of the European Union that use the euro as their currency are Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia and Finland
In Europe’s most economically stricken countries, people are taking their money out of their banks as a way to protect their savings from the continent’s growing financial turmoil. Concerned that their savings could be devalued by a Bank Holiday, or that banks are on the verge of collapse and that governments cannot make good on deposit insurance, people in Greece, Spain and beyond are taking their money out of the Banks by the billions.
The looming fears of Greece exiting from the euro zone relaxed after pro-bailout parties loyal to the banks took weekend elections, though risks are increasing with Spain, the euro zone’s fourth-largest economy, will need a full blown international rescue.
An unfolding two-and-a-half year old crisis has slowed the global economy, and world leaders meeting in Mexico pressed on the euro zone to move towards a fiscal and banking union to fix the crisis that now threatens to overtake Spain.
In Europe, the United States and elsewhere we need to break the walls of ignorance and liberate “We the People” from a selfishly myopic selected few. Is it the purported Too Big to Go to Jail or is it Too Big to Fail? Similar to the ratcheting up of proposed austerity measures through bailouts in the Eurozone.
Lets not forget Jon Corzine White House Economic Adviser, former Governor of New Jersey and CEO of once M.F. Global a sub investment banking company of Jamie Dimon‘s JP Morgan. Corzine lost 1.4 billion dollars of peoples money from their segregated accounts late last year then Dimon lost almost 3 billion recently this year when the credit markets were supposedly stable. Both were met with questioning but nothing resulted from any questioning.
It would be economically prudent to reinstate The Glass Steagall Act here in the U.S., which was put in place by Franklin Delano Roosevelt after the last Great Depression in the early 20th Century to stop banks from insider trading via derivatives but was then reversed by the Clinton Administration in 1999 prior to the 2008 onset of the present recession. Is this irony or another global corporate takeover? This is not a partisan issue, or a national issue but a global issue that traverses any and all political ideologies. There needs to be more transparency on behalf of the international banking community and actual consequences for malfeasant banking practices.
Greece In The Grips of Economic Depression
By: Ryan Matthew Dernick
The suicide rate in Greece jumped 40% year-on-year in first five months of 2011. Dually the number of young people without a job outnumbered those with one.
This past Wednesday a 77-year-old man took his own life in the busy Syntagma Square in central Athens, the scene of several violent clashes between anti-austerity protesters and the police in recent months. Nearly one thousand people gathered for another rally Thursday in Syntagma Square, which was largely peaceful apart from a few scuffles between small groups of protesters, Athens police said.
Retired pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas shot himself with a handgun amid the morning rush hour, in what was apparently a protest over the financial crisis gripping the nation.

Apostolos Polyzonis 55 businessman set himself on fire outside his bank last year after falling into financial woes.
This is not just regional to Greece but Geo-economically systemic as many other European Countries own Greek Debt like Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom. Elsewhere in the world Australia, Canada, Chile, India, Japan, United States, Chinese Taipei, Singapore also own Greeks toxic debts sold through derivatives or credit default swaps by the IMF World Bank along with JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.
With ever-growing unemployment, scarcer and fewer jobs available an Economic Depression has now thoroughly entrenched the Grecian people.
Economist Max Keiser of the “Keiser Report” met with Steve Forbes of Forbes Magazine last June 2011 in an International Chamber of Commerce meeting while in Greece. Steve Forbes reportedly said to Keiser, “this is an amazing opportunity we are going to buy the airport and other properties for pennies on dollar.”
Greece’s economy is estimated to have shrunk by a about a fifth since 2008, when it plunged into its deepest and longest post-war recession. About 600,000 jobs, more than one in ten, have been destroyed in the process. A record 1,033,507 people were without work in December, 41 percent more than in the same month last year. The number in work dropped to a record low of 3,899,319, down 7.9 percent year-on-year.
“Despite some emergency government measures to boost employment in early 2012, it is hard to see how the upward unemployment trend can be stabilized in the first half of the year,” said Nikos Magginas, an economist at National Bank of Greece.
Pressured by its international backers under the terms of a planned European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout, the country’s second since 2010, Greece last month slashed its minimum monthly wage by about a fifth to about 580 euros ($760), gross, to encourage job growth.