Actually German banks are not that safe. Deutsche Bank is still very heavily over leveraged and its current leverage ratio (45 times capital) is higher than Lehmans (33 times capital) when it failed. Yes it will accelerate the bank runs. Though this has been a trial for expelling a country from the Eurozone.

I agree with you. Though how many ex pats might return is a new problem.

British forces are to be compensated

but who gets paid in cash these days
the only way to get paid is by transfer to a bank account
without a bank account chances are 'no job'

the 'Banksters' have us over a barrel
and they still continue to get HUGE bonuses

and are able to rob are accounts at will with the permission of 'so called' Govt. ...

I still think that there are more ingredients required for some countries. There are other things that have helped ease the situation for many countries this time around, such as open borders. That has allowed Ireland and others to export their unemployment elsewhere. There are now more Irish in the UK though most have gone elsewhere this time. Though overtime this might cause problems in the countries where they have moved to. Look at the rise of UKIP here.

the Govt. are stealing, robbing, taking, by force of law, peoples savings/earnings which has tax paid already
this is by dictate of the EU (mainly Germany) for their bailout

i do not welcome, by any means, this control of working people by the 4th Reich ...

The way the Cypriot government is treating its populace is suicidal. I cannot see how any of them can survive the next election. The problem for Cyprus were there five years ago but as Greece collapsed it dragged down Cyprus. What I think will happen there will be a new party that wins the next election in 2016.

Presumably, what will happen is that (much like Greece) an anti-Eu party will win the election and the country will then be blackmailed by the EU central banks into not allowing them to govern and they will be replaced by pro-EU technocrats. You can have a vote in the EU, just as long as you vote the way they want you to.

+1 to that and then some ...

That has already happened in Greece when the EU told the Greeks how to vote, after the first vote had a large anti austerity party win lots of support.

That's a matter of perspective. Given your condition I suppose you can be excused for taking such an extremely short term view. But revolutions aren't caused by the stresses of a single economic cycle. And as for the signs, well, the signs are nonsense. You can't have revolutions without without the revolutionary factors that make them possible. And those are more complex than you are supposing. Unemployment is too low nearly everywhere in the developed world, median ages are much too high in every case, and even Italy isn't corrupt enough for revolution to take hold. Obviously Greece can descend into chaos at the drop of a hat, but it's stretching things to describe that country as 'developed', they have only ever qualified on the grounds of some very old sculpture.


That's silly hyperbole, think about what "dismantle" actually means. That is what would have to be happening. Slow erosions of purchasing power aren't the same thing.

"Panic" was a good choice of word though. You'll note that panic is an irrational response. Communism was much more appealing then than it is now anyway, as it looked like quite a successful economic model at the time and most people weren't aware of things like gulags and food shortages that have subsequently smudged its reputation a little. America was in no danger of communist revolution or commies winning the presidency or any of that stuff even during the Depression. Some other stuff that happened in those days by the way was malnourished and consumptive children dying in the streets of Brooklyn. If that wasn't any kind of portent of revolution (and it really wasn't) then declining home ownership rates are not a sign of anything much at all.


During the last 4 years UK households have reduced their debt to income ratio by 25%, household spending is 65% of GDP. GDP would automatically grow by 2.7% next year if UK households dropped their savings rate to 4% (and household debt would still fall). So gaining political credit for an amazing turnaround in the UK economy is really just a matter of being in right chair on the right day (which has already worked for all sorts of idiots in the past, Gordon Brown, Hugo Chavez, Hitler - they all claimed credit for economic successes that were handed to them by providential timing).


You are wildly overstating again. Sure those parties are all iffy by modern standards, but they would all have been fairly mainstream by 30s standards. Nobody believes in Eugenics anymore, virtually everybody back then was antisemitic, almost all of Europe used to believe that white skin conferred moral and intellectual superiority by right. Democracy was new and unstable by default in much of Europe, authoritarian government was standard in most places. Fascism was much less revolutionary in 30s Europe than it would be today, it had much broader appeal at the ballot box than it does now.

Some people are discussing some stuff, and "openly" no less. And there are anti-semites abroad in Eastern Europe.... this is all terribly shocking. Perhaps you should tell and East European Gypsy about the time when Hungary wasn't a bit of a racist place, they might have missed that.


What happened in North Africa was demographics (very low median age), corruption (decades of endemic cronyism, rent seeking bureaucrats, etc, not the crappy corruption you get in the West), economies that came to depend on subsidised goods (especially fuel) which actually support the middle classes not the poor, and unresponsive dictatorships that lost the ability to comprehend the frustrations of the citizens - I know you don't like the Tories very much, but I hope we aren't about to start comparing them to Ghadaffi because that would be quite disrespectful to the memory of some people who got tortured to death in dank cells.

What they have discovered since their revolutions is that democracy has certain needs that haven't been met yet such as independent institutions, civilian control of the military and so on. If they develop those things they will be fine, f not they will have coups and revolutions again. We have those institutional things, which is why we won't have those other things.




Capital flight is normal, in fact guaranteed, for troubled economies, who would find it surprising? The ECB is one of Europe's less crappy institutions; if the banks are within the Eurozone, they are within its jurisdiction. If they qualify for refinancing then they will get it. Cash economy? That's just silly hyperbole.

That doesn't make sense. If they are anti EU and the EU says "in that case we don't like you" then that's just everybody being honest all round. They can't be blackmailed with threats of expulsion from the Euro if their democratic mandate is to leave the Euro.

If the anti EU party don't mean it of course, and if their election platform is to turn round to the Germans and say give us lots of money on terms we will dictate, otherwise we will default and fcuck you up, then it's not the Germans doing the blackmailing is it?

I didn't notice anyone winning a mandate to walk out of the Euro in the last Greek election. So presumably either the anti-Eu party didn't win, or else the Greeks must have voted for somebody who didn't have very realistic policy objective. Which was it?

I would expect an anti EU party to be somewhat naive about what is needed to actually leave the EU anyway. It may be easier for larger nations, but I expect the smaller ones will find it harder. There will be a lot of legal and economic stuff to unpick, undo and bring back "in house" - not to mention decoupling the currency from the EU system (and in the cases of Euro nations creating, establishing a new currency). To me this sounds like a pretty expensive and fairly complex task. I doubt very much that if UKIP won a general election that we would be out of the EU the next day.

There's a significant difference between 'being in the EU' and 'having the Euro as a currency'. You seem to have conflated the two somewhat.

I doubt size has much to do with it. Leaving the EU will be very hard for countries that adopted the Euro compared to the few that haven't.
Not that small countires would want to leave the EU itself. Unless they could stay in the free trade zone, it would hurt their economies.

Don't know why Cyprus didn't just crash out the Euro?

This is theft plain and simple.

A guy on the news today said there won't be a run on the Cyprus banks on Tuesday when they re-open - all together now - Oh yes there will !

Be interesting to see what people do in other troubled countries - will there be a run on the banks in those countries?