Fatboy sez: What. Me Worry?
2013-02-21
Stay Schemin
Las Vegas (CNN) -- A shooting and a fiery crash left three people dead in the neon heart of the Las Vegas Strip on Thursday, and police scrambled to find out who triggered the carnage.
The bloodshed closed the Strip for about a block and a half around some of its biggest draws, leaving tourists gaping at a wrecked Maserati, a burned-out taxi and four other vehicles.
One of those killed was Kenneth Cherry Jr. -- a rapper also known as Kenny Clutch
http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/21/us/nevada-las-vegas-deaths/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
Markets Govern
There is a strong perception that countries that introduced austerity programs in the Eurozone were somehow forced to do so by the financial markets.
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Note the two extremes. Greece was confronted with extremely high spreads in 2011 and applied the most severe austerity measures amounting to more than 10% of GDP per capita. Germany did not face any pressure from spreads and did not do any austerity
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There can be little doubt. Financial markets exerted different degrees of pressure on countries. By raising the spreads they forced some countries to engage in severe austerity programs.
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We observe two interesting phenomena in Figure 3. First, while the spreads declined, the debt-to-GDP ratio continued to increase in all countries after the ECB announcement. Second, the change in the debt-to-GDP ratio is a poor predictor of the declines in the spreads. Thus the decline in the spreads observed since the ECB announcement appears to be unrelated to the changes of the debt-to-GDP ratios. If anything, the fundamentalist school of thinking would have predicted that as the debt-to-GDP ratios increased in all countries, spreads should have increased rather than decline.
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How well did this panic-induced austerity work?
http://www.voxeu.org/article/panic-driven-austerity-eurozone-and-its-implications
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Note the two extremes. Greece was confronted with extremely high spreads in 2011 and applied the most severe austerity measures amounting to more than 10% of GDP per capita. Germany did not face any pressure from spreads and did not do any austerity
/
There can be little doubt. Financial markets exerted different degrees of pressure on countries. By raising the spreads they forced some countries to engage in severe austerity programs.
/
We observe two interesting phenomena in Figure 3. First, while the spreads declined, the debt-to-GDP ratio continued to increase in all countries after the ECB announcement. Second, the change in the debt-to-GDP ratio is a poor predictor of the declines in the spreads. Thus the decline in the spreads observed since the ECB announcement appears to be unrelated to the changes of the debt-to-GDP ratios. If anything, the fundamentalist school of thinking would have predicted that as the debt-to-GDP ratios increased in all countries, spreads should have increased rather than decline.
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How well did this panic-induced austerity work?
http://www.voxeu.org/article/panic-driven-austerity-eurozone-and-its-implications
2013-02-20
Enraged by more coming pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions, an estimated 60,000 people converged on the center of Athens on Feb. 21 during a 24-hour general strike that shut down services.
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Beating drums and chanting “Robbers, robbers!” demonstrators marched to Parliament
http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013/02/20/strikes-to-shut-down-greece/#!lightbox/0/
Herr Schäuble Sprechen
...[w]arned Italians against voting for Silvio Berlusconi in general elections scheduled for Feb. 24 and 25. "Silvio Berlusconi may be an effective campaign strategist," the magazine quotes Schäuble as saying. "But my advice to the Italians is not to make the same mistake again by re-electing him."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/top-german-politicians-warn-italians-against-voting-for-berlusconi-a-884265.html
The German government has warned Silvio Berlusconi not to target Berlin in the run-up to elections early next year after the former Italian prime minister attacked the "German-centric" economic policies of his successor Mario Monti.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100303559/Berlusconi_Warned_Not_to_Target_Germany
It is unclear whether 76-year-old Berlusconi, a scandal-ridden media tycoon and four times prime minister, will win enough support to wield influence, but even the possibility of a comeback is a nightmare for German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/19/us-italy-vote-germany-idUSBRE91I0UD20130219
The comments are not surprising. In almost every campaign speech, Berlusconi rails against Germany. "Should we continue to allow Germany to dictate policies that ruin Italy?" he calls out. "Nooooo!" scream his followers. On Monday he told industrial leaders in Monza, a city north of Milan, that Chancellor Angela Merkel is "an East German bureaucrat, who grew up with its centralized economy." It would, however, be crazy to impose the rules of austerity on a country that isn't growing, he added.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/silvio-berlusconi-followers-loyal-as-ever-ahead-of-italian-elections-a-884532.html
Silvio responds:
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| Merkel is an unfuckable lard-arse |
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/italy/110915/berlusconi-calls-merkel-unfuckable-lard-arse
2013-02-17
BEIRUT
“[A]t one point he turned and said ‘This is my face, can you remember my face? We don’t care; you can’t do anything.’ That’s when I thought they were going to kill me.”
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“Then they said they were going to give me a gift to help me relax,” and they pressed a piece of hashish into his hand and dropped him off
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2013/Feb-18/206855-spate-of-robberies-in-fake-taxis-unnerves-commuters.ashx#axzz2LDYANyka
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“Then they said they were going to give me a gift to help me relax,” and they pressed a piece of hashish into his hand and dropped him off
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-News/2013/Feb-18/206855-spate-of-robberies-in-fake-taxis-unnerves-commuters.ashx#axzz2LDYANyka