France and Greece Election results!

[LadyWithEDS]

So, what do you think it means for Europe?

Novack, the children didn't tax avoid or retire at 42

claig It's an equity investment, not a loan. Very important distinction. The government owns c. 85% of RBS. They get their money back when they sell the shares, which they can decide to do whenever they want

Agree that the problem with Greece is that the ones that are getting screwed are not the ones that brought the house down

poor Greek children if this is what they are relying on to look out for their interests

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/28/greek-economic-crisis-children-victims

Their parents did and it's the parents fault if they have been profligate to now stop protesting and begging for bail outs and get out and work at whether pay rate then get offered. And they need to inport some German tax collectors to get them paying.

10 children. They brought it on themselves and the children Having a child with no means to support it is bad enough but doing it 9 more times is just lunacy.

Novack, I have never on MN wanted to block another poster, your last post with all it's hardness and lack of empathy towards innocent children, made me very much want that function!

xposts, your last two posts!

'claig It's an equity investment, not a loan'

Ah, OK. Do you jnow what it cost us in hard cash?

About £46bn I think.

And people say that they have repaid us. Is that the case, or is our 46 billion tied up in shares.

Also where did we get the 46 billion from?

The Greeks paying the price in misery aren't the Greeks who avoided tax. Same here. Same in every country

We have 135 billion deficit, so if we didn't have to bail them out, could we have used the 46 billion to cut the deficit?

And on top of that, there was Northern Rock and Lloyds TSB.

£46 billion sitting around for about four years, at a time like this

claig, it just might have something to do with the £325,000,000,000 the state pumped into buying up bank assets, cos really who else would have bought stuff from banks that failed, but were stopped from failing, a few years ago? But we all like to separate those things, Just as we like to combine the question of public spend proportion of GDP, or national deficit levels, with economic health. You wonder if most people are fit for democracy when they're so easily distracted.

The government still owns the shares it bought in RBS, but they are currently worth less than the government paid for them, so it doesn't make sense for the government to sell now as would crystallise a loss

Re the $46bn, they borrowed it.

and I think we are going to give 10 billion to the IMF and there was 7 billion or so to help Ireland and we are spending billions on the high speed rail link and billions on foreign aid. Are we borrowing all these billions to give to banks and others or is it all ours?

'Re the $46bn, they borrowed it.'

Was it from a bank? Did we borrow from banks to bail out and save the world banking system?

There seems to be lots of cuts, except when it comes to bailing out banks. For that, it seems that the tap never runneth dry.

Well we don't have any money (we're in a net debt position ) so in respect of the amounts you specify, we are definitely either

• borrowing this money or
• using money from taxation which could otherwise be used to pay down debt

Either way, it's making our debt position worse. However, a collapse of the Euro would be disastrous, so it may well be the lesser of 2 evils

The usual way a government borrows money is to issue bonds (loan notes/ IOUs basically) which are sold in bond auctions to private and institutional investors. In fact, one of the reasons RBS made a loss this year was because they had to write off around £1bn of Greek government debt.

'they had to write off around £1bn of Greek government debt.'

Oh dear God, does that mean we might have to bail that out too?

Wouldn't it just be cheaper to fire some of these loss makers and pay them a golden goodbye, and if they insist we can also pay for their first class ticket out of the country.

On that note, that is why although it may give a second of fleeting satisfaction for the Greek government to default and get their debt written off (Sust to the bakers etc) it's actually a terrible idea. because a company/person within a country cannot have a better credit rating than it's government.

If the Greek government defaults, no-one will want to lend to them anymore, and if they do it will be at high cost (interest rate). Therefore all greek companies or companies wanting to invest in greece will be screwed if they want to borrow money for sensible investments as they wll have to pay a minimum of the interest rate applied to government debt.

Didn't Argentina default and didn't they recover?

What about the Latin American debt in teh 70s or so, wasn't some of that written off, and some African countries have their debt written off.

No, because it's not going to improve the loan book of RBS to fire the people that are there now. These are mostly old loans, and it's just current events that mean these loans are now worthless. It's just got to work through the system. Then you end up with a good loan book and you can start making money.