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.
July 27, 2010
Poison medicine
Nick Skrekas at his blog at Wall Street Journal rains on the ATEBank idea for creating a kind fo super bank to spur growth in Greece:
"The chairman of state-controlled ATEBank — now the subject of a takeover bid by a private rival — is one of them. He thinks better than falling into private hands, the government should beef up ATEBank and create a publicly-owned mega lender that would hold sway over Greece’s finance sector. Greece’s Socialist government, elected last October, thinks that may not be such a bad idea. In fact, it promised to do just that during its pre-election campaign.
If there’s one thing the Greek crisis has shown, it is that politicians are not much good at running state budgets, so does anyone expect they can run a banking champion more effectively? Does the country need more of the poisonous medicine that got it into this fix?"
And what was that medicine?
"While no one would advocate a fire sale of the state’s holdings in banks, there is no rationale other than blind ideology that would suggest Greece requires an amalgamated large public bank entity.
...Local banks cannot and should no longer be a tool for social policy because all that means is that they are being forced to make loans that will fail since there is no solid basis for the lending–-and the tax payer again will have to bail them out. The country can longer afford politically favored financing of certain sectors, certain government leaning businesses or entrepreneurial mates."
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