Rick Steves' Greece: Athens & the Peloponnese amazon.com
Bust: Greece, the Euro and the Sovereign Debt Crisis - By Matthew Lynn amazon.com
Greece's 'Odious' Debt: The Looting of the Hellenic Republic by the Euro, the Political Elite and the Investment Community - By Jason Manolopoulos amazon.com
Understanding the Crisis in Greece: From Boom to Bust - By Theodore Pelagidis amazon.com
The Imminent Crisis: Greek Debt and the Collapse of the European Monetary Union amazon.com
Eyewitness Greece - Athens and the Mainland - 352 Pages
Financial markets and economic growth in Greece, 1986-1999 [An article from: Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions & Money]
Athens Demographics:
The population count for Athens was 10,964,020 in 2001. According to eurostat, in 2008 Greece had a total estimated population of 11,262,000. Of this, some 695,979 are estimated to be non-Greek.
June 6, 2010
Where's the debt hiding?
New York Times tries to sort out who is holding the largest pile of debt that may never be repaid from the sovereign nations of europe: Greece, Portugal, etc. Jack Ewing's article more or less is saying no one knows for sure and the banks don't want to confess to how much bad ink is on their books.
“IT’S a $2.6 trillion mystery.
That’s the amount that foreign banks and other financial companies have lent to public and private institutions in Greece, Spain and Portugal, three countries so mired in economic troubles that analysts and investors assume that a significant portion of that mountain of debt may never be repaid.
The problem is, alas, that no one — not investors, not regulators, not even bankers themselves — knows exactly which banks are sitting on the biggest stockpiles of rotting loans within that pile. And doubt, as it always does during economic crises, has made Europe’s already vulnerable financial system occasionally appear to seize up. Early last month, in an indication of just how dangerous the situation had become, European banks — which appear to hold more than half of that $2.6 trillion in debt — nearly stopped lending money to one another.
...“The marketplace knows very little about where the real risks are parked,” says Nicolas Véron, an economist at Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels. “That is exactly the problem. As long as there is no semblance of clarity, trust will not return to the banking system.”
The big problem here is one of information. Without actual true numbers to work with, banks that may be perfectly healthy will be mistaken or thrown in with banks that are hanging by a thread. An absence of true information will allow rumour and misinformation to have more weight with investors and other financial institutions.
"...Analysts at the Royal Bank of Scotland estimate that of the 2.2 trillion euros that European banks and other institutions outside Greece, Spain and Portugal may have lent to those countries, about 567 billion euros is government debt, about 534 billion euros are loans to nonbanking companies in the private sector, and about 1 trillion euros are loans to other banks. While the crisis originated in Greece, much more was borrowed by Spain and its private sector — 1.5 trillion euros, compared with Greece’s 338 billion."
A natural consequence of this hide-and-seek situation is the cost of debt insurance has skyrocketed in europe (Wall Street Journal):
" ...the derivatives market is growing concerned regardless as European debt jitters persist. It now costs $290,000 a year to insure $10 million of Italian government bonds against default for five years, up from $237,000 on Thursday, according to data provider Markit.
The extra interest Italy has to pay investors to buy its bonds instead of Germany's also has jumped. That is painful because Italy tends to visit the market more often to raise cash, having the world's third-biggest bond market, after the U.S. and Japan."
ARCHIVE PAGE - MAY 19 TO MAY 31 2010
ARCHIVE PAGE - MAY 1 TO MAY 18 2010
ARCHIVE PAGE - DEC 2009 - MARCH 2010
