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Greece's budget gap last year was worse than feared, the European Union's statistics office revealed on Thursday, triggering a fresh slide of asset prices in Greece and other debt-choked European countries.
The budget figures were announced as tens of thousands of Greek nurses, teachers and other public workers staged a one-day strike to protest against the government's austerity measures.
They demanded that Athens reject any pressure for further spending cuts in crisis talks that it launched this week with the EU and the IMF.
The Greek government posted a budget deficit of 32.34 billion euros or 13.6 percent of gross domestic product in 2009, not the 12.7 percent which it had reported earlier, Eurostat said in a review of countries' deficits throughout the region.
It added that the Greek deficit might be revised again, by between 0.3 and 0.5 percentage points of GDP, because of uncertainty about the quality of Greece's data and accounting procedures
Moore Capital, a leading global macro hedge-fund firm run by Louis Moore Bacon, warned of a "potential breakdown" of the European Monetary Union and criticized plans to bail out Greece, according to a recent investor letter obtained by MarketWatch on Wednesday.
"Perhaps the most interesting area for the foreseeable future is in the potential breakdown of the European Monetary Union," Bacon wrote in the letter, dated April 16
"Instead of punishing the Greeks for their free-rider and fraudulent gaming of the Maastricht rules -- either by ejecting Greece from the Union to propel them to reform and come back at a competitive exchange rate or by forcing them to restructure their debt within the confines of monetary union, either of which would have eventually strengthened and solidified the euro -- the European leaders have decided to reward the prodigal Greeks with a bailout, socializing their ills and taxing once again the prodigious Northern European workers," he said.
The bailout could have "disastrous consequences" for the European Union and Europe
“It is a matter of national need to ask officially” for the activation of the EU-led aid mechanism, Papandreou said in a televised address from the Greek island of Kastelorizo.
Originally posted by Vitchilo
Is it me or yesterday they just reported a 6% PPI?
PPI : inflation in the cost of production
Time for some hyperinflation doom!
Time to raise interest rates... and crash the whole economy. YAY
Or let hyperinflation run it's course and bankrupt most of america! YAY
[edit on 23-4-2010 by Vitchilo]
The Securities and Exchange Commission is the sheriff of the financial industry, looking for crimes such as Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, but a new government report obtained by ABC News has concluded that some senior employees spent hours on the agency's computers looking at sites such as naughty.com, skankwire and youporn as the financial crisis was unfolding.