France and Greece Election results!

[LadyWithEDS]

So, what do you think it means for Europe?

except if you look at this Guardian information, you can see the banks were not given £1T:

• they were loaned money
• they were given guarantees

which totalled over £1T, at the peak and now stand at £0.46T

www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/nov/12/bank-bailouts-uk-credit-crunch

you cannot make a loan to a soverign state who is likely to decide not to reply you. a loan or guarantee wont help the NHS.

v high interest getting higher all the time which made their debt worse...because they are a bad risk!

would the person who wants to lend Greece their own money, at a low rate, please stand up?

i agree but they are still a much better credit risk than Greece.

Merkel might be in trouble. www.talktalk.co.uk/news/world/article/merkel-suffers-setback-in-polls/47358/

"The centre-left Social Democrats and Greens - Germany's main opposition parties - won combined support of about 51% in the election in North Rhine-Westphalia state, according to ARD television based on exit polls and early counting. That would be enough to give them a majority in the state legislature, which they narrowly missed in the last regional election two years ago"

JuliaScur your Daily Fail acticle is rom2009 and if may interest you to know that almost all of the bailout money given by the US and UK to their banks, as Loans has been repaid in full,

Shares should be reagarded as long term betelgeuse and should not be judged on a short term.

The left wing parties in Greece are now saying they will not agree to any compromise solution such as reducing the interest rate on EU loans and extending the period under which austerity kicks in.

They know they will be in power if the election is held again and so have no incentive to compromise.

Incidentally, the Der Spiegel magazine is running articles telling the German people just how much liability they are on the hook for if peripheral countries default in the EU. For example, I have read elsewhere that there is a huge hidden debt inside the ECB that has been built up inside the Euro area payment clearing system that is not yet officially recognised. Its technical but its like a big unofficial overdraft being funded by kiting cheques around the clearing system. There are lots of unpaid bills too where Govts are just not paying suppliers.

The general thinking is that Germany was never keen on the Euro so will leave if necessary but hope to keep the EU alive by doing so. My feeling is Greece will leave the Euro in the next year but hope it can hold a gun to the head of Germany and France to be allowed to stay in the EU and keep the subsidies and other aid and development payments it gets from the richer countries.

Betel, the guarantee provided to savers meant either the govt let banks go down, causing contagion and failure of the banking system and paid out to all savers or it proped them up. The choice was between two evils.
where the banking system went wrong was the light touch regulation together with the guarentee to savers. But that was a past mistake and could only be resolved after the initial crisis had been stabilized or run its course.

I was listening to More or Less on Radio 4 yesterday and they analysed the Greek railway and said it was so inefficient that every journey was only half the cost of an individual taxi to your destination.

This is the type of problem that will remain whatever happens regarding the euro. Avoiding a structural overhall of the Greek economy doesn't make anything better. The euro could have been a springboard to better things. Instead its provided a distraction and a scapegoat for those actually responsible for the financial problems of Greexe, which predate the euro, not were caused by it.

Novack no doubt we can have a 'link off', but the fact remains that vast sums were poured into the banking system; it is absurd to say this had less effect than employing Teaching Assistants

Julia what does TA's have to do with this?

The injection of cash to the banking sysem stopped an economic collapse that would have seen ALL cash machiens empited by the monday afternoon and all buinesses shut for about 5 days with the results of those who had not withdrawn cash rioting or robbing in the local supermarkets with banks unable to process visa as no inter bank payments would have taken place and a general stopping of all economic activity in line with what had been seen previously in the economic collapses of argentina etc. Except on a much grander scale since our economy is so closely inked and pivotal with world econonomies and still in the top 8.

The government has been rapaid almost all of the bailout cash as has the US from there bailouts and even the car industry there has repaid there bailouts.

The only factor I can see about TA's is that yes the government needs to reign in the profligate spending and that will include education. But the Blairite idea of 50% going to Uni for any silly course was always a foolish idea. Which lead to the great influx of highly skilled hard working Poles etc whom our economy desperately needed as those who could have learned those skills and done the highly skilled tradesmen jobs were off learngin to be thinkers instead of doers. Lest you forget builders at terminal 5 were enjoying 50 -60k salaries doing tradesmen work whislt new grads with pointless degrees were still unemployed and unemployable.

If we had allowed kids to leave school at 14/15 and go onto apprenticeships or provided technical schools we would have a far better balanced economy.

As for the Greek railway system.. yes it was highly inefficient

@ people in a taxi to any destinatin is cheaper than 1 person by train there. Go figure

Lead story on BBC Lunchtime news is that there are continuing heavy falls on European stock markets, the coalition talks are "teetering on collapse" and there is huge speculation about Greece leaving the Euro. The Euro is at a 4 month low.

In which case, then UK might be more heavily involved in any rescue plan of a bankrupt non-Euro EU member.

Hollande will be sworn in tomorrow.

About 50% of the UK's exports go to Europe.

The price of our goods will go up but we don't export an awful lot of manufactured goods to the EU. Mostly what we export are financial services.

Greece will be out of the Eurozone soon and I think that Portugal will definitely follow. Spain may go, Italy may go, France almost certainly won't.

Novack I mention TAs because they were public sector employees now deemed 'too expensive' and fired in a desperate attempt to justify dismantling State provision of useful services. Many people have bought the 'terrible mess we inherited from Labour' nonsense, no mention of deregulation of the City or bail outs from the Condems

When is Matt going to get a gong? It's been too long already. Love him.