Euro and European stock ETFs head south as ECB pulls plug on Greek debt
Feb 4 2015, 16:01 ET | By: Stephen Alpher, SA News Editor
The ECB pulled its waiver which previously had allowed Greek sovereign paper to be used as borrowing collateral despite its sorry credit status. GREK -10.4%, NBG -7.1% in the regular session.
...withdrew a waiver which had allowed the use of Greek government paper as collateral for borrowing
despite its low credit rating.
European markets are closed, but the Stoxx 50 ETF (FEZ -2.1%) - trading in New York - takes a tumble. Others of note: Spain (EWP -2.7%), Italy (EWI -2.6%), France (EWQ -1.8%), Germany (EWG -1.6%), U.K. (EWU -0.9%)
http://seekingalpha.com/news/2272666-euro-and-european-stock-etfs-head-south-as-ecb-pulls-plug-on-greek-debtEarlier
Turkey tumbles as government takes over Bank Asya
Feb 4 2015, 12:38 ET | By: Stephen Alpher, SA News Editor
..(it's)about preventing the lender's failure, while others hurl accusations of political meddling."This operation is very much linked to a personal grudge and it goes down very badly with investor communities
http://seekingalpha.com/symbol/TUR@catch22 A couple of week's ago I posted a couple of reads from Foreign Policy, here is another with a more populist/Keynesian bent.
ARGUMENT
Welcome to the Backlash Era, Europe
From Greece to Spain to France, radical parties are making gains. And the Eurocrats have no one to blame but themselves.BY PHILIPPE LEGRAIN FEBRUARY 3, 2015 Philippe Legrain, who was economic advisor to the president of the European Commission from 2011 to 2014, is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics’
Podemos (the party’s name means “We Can” in Spanish) filled the streets of Madrid on Jan. 31 to protest against austerity, crushing debts, and the country’s corrupt political system — and demand change. The demonstrators don’t represent a fringe group, either. Podemos is leading in the polls, ahead of both the mainstream center-left and center-right parties in elections that will be held by the end of the year.
But the likes of Podemos are also right about important things. At a time when households, companies, and banks are all trying to reduce their debts at once, austerity leads to stagnation and suffering, not “stability,” as eurozone leaders claim. Budget cuts and tax increases have often fallen on the poor and vulnerable, not the politically connected rich. The political class in many countries is corrupt and in the pockets of vested interests, not least the banks.
More broadly, it is neither feasible nor fair for debtors to bear the full costs of the financial crisis. For every reckless borrower there is a reckless lender. In the eurozone’s case, those were primarily German and French banks, which lent vast sums to southern Europe, both directly and via local banks. While the bailouts of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain are portrayed as gestures of EU solidarity, they were in fact covert bailouts of those foreign banks that would otherwise have suffered huge losses on their reckless lending. Southern Europe’s huge debt burden — primarily private in Spain, mostly public in Greece — is stifling the economy and is unpayable in full.
Outside the eurozone, many sensible people of all stripes would agree with it. The tragedy of the eurozone is that the policy establishment in Brussels and national elites are destroying political support for the European project by advancing Germany’s selfish and destructive agenda as a creditor. With luck, they will change course before it is too late. After all, while Syriza and Podemos want to make the eurozone fairer, the far right wants to destroy the EU altogether. Europe urgently needs mainstream alternatives to Merkelism — or it risks a President Le Pen.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/03/welcome-to-the-backlash-era-europe-podemos-syriza-elections/
