A reminder that four men are in court. You are encouraged to show your support.
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Last April (2012) saw thousands of Irish people protest outside the Labour party conference in Galway. Today, Nessa Childers and other Labour party members met in Dublin. Rejected in Meath East and came in fifth behind the newly formed Direct Democracy Ireland. Whilst Gilmore, Rabbitte and Quinn’s pensions are safe, the Labour party are worried about being wiped out at the local and general election.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
An interesting piece concerning troubled PTSB, which is state owned.
16:24, 3 April 2013 by Bloomberg News
Permanent TSB faces “acute challenges that need to be addressed to assure its viability,” according to the International Monetary Fund.
The government decided last year to split the Dublin-based bank into a consumer lender, an asset-management unit to run down so-called uneconomic loans, and another unit for its British-based mortgages.
“PTSB as an integrated legal entity is only expected to break even in the medium term,” the IMF said in a staff report on Ireland’s bailout program, published today. “Recognising this situation, PTSB’s restructuring plan submitted to the European Commission is based on the separation of the asset management unit, which holds low-yielding and non-performing asset.”
It hasn’t been possible to “implement this approach at manageable funding cost to date,” said the IMF, part of Ireland’s so-called bailout troika.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Comment: Thought and Action stated before that not all bankers are banksters but speak to the person at the customer service desk of your local bank and they will go white with fear when asked about certain topics about banking. Others will stare at you with a blank face. The reality is that banks and bankers have blood on their hands.
The stark reality is that people must fight. Many will keel over. Sadly many people have killed themselves. This is never the moral thing to do. It is a David v Goliath battle but many are fighting the banks. It is important to remember a person is not alone. Support is available.
The “help” the banks are offering is in reality smoke and mirrors. Your ‘friendly’ and ‘caring’ bank manager knows the swindle of modern banking, they know the menace of banking, and these bankers have entire nations and people enslaved in debt. The politicians are the glove puppets of the Usurers.
See article below
Campaigner accuses banks of adding to suicide crisis
A man who lost two brothers to suicide has accused banks of contributing to the suicide crisis.
Suicide prevention campaigner Pat Buckley, a co-founder of the Let’s Get Together Foundation in Midleton, Co Cork, made his comments as he staged a graphic dawn protest on Cork’s St Patrick’s Bridge yesterday.
He said lending institutions “have blood on their hands” for putting pressure on people crippled by debt and already struggling to cope with the recession.
“People just can’t cope anymore,” said Mr Buckley. “The lending institutions in this country are pressuring people struggling under huge debts.
“Family members are struggling with mortgages and debt. That’s what’s killing people now. And the Government isn’t doing enough to help.”
Mr Buckley has lost two brothers to suicide. Mark took his own life in Jun 2002 aged 30, and James took his life in Sept 2003 aged 22. They are buried side by side in Midleton.
Moved by their deaths, Mr Buckley helped set up the Let’s Get Together Foundation — a voluntary suicide support group that has helped fund counselling for hundreds of people.
However, he said he has seen little or no improvement in national suicide rates. “It’s actually getting worse,” said Mr Buckley. “We reckon it’s now nearly four people a day who take their own lives.
“And we think the suicide figures are way above what is reported. My actions today were borne out of sheer frustration at the lack of an adequate State response to the problem. We really need to get people talking about it to normalise it and to find a solution.”
He was joined by Galway man Colm Farrell, who completed the 32 County Suicide Awareness Walk last week after almost four months on the road.
“I walked through villages and towns in every county and met a lot of families affected by suicide,” said Mr Farrell.
“I heard their stories and they told me that nothing is being done in this country about the problem.”
Meanwhile, Mad Pride Ireland has launched an independent fellowship based on the 12-step approach used by Alcoholics Anonymous to try to deal with the suicide crisis.
Suicide Anonymous Ireland will host its first meeting at the SMA community centre in Wilton, Cork City, at 8pm on Friday.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
An article from the Daily Telegraph.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Daily Telegraph March 28, 2013
It is not a bail-out. There is no debt relief for the state of Cyprus. The Diktat will push the island’s debt ratio to 120pc in short order, with a high risk of an economic death spiral, a la Grecque.
Capital controls have shattered the monetary unity of EMU. A Cypriot euro is no longer a core euro. We wait to hear the first stories of shops across Europe refusing to accept euro notes issued by Cyprus, with a G in the serial number.
The curbs are draconian. There will be a forced rollover of debt. Cheques may not be cashed. Basic cross-border trade is severely curtailed. Credit card use abroad will be limited to €5,000 (£4,200) a month. “We wonder how such capital controls could eventually be lifted with no obvious cure of the underlying problem,” said Credit Suisse.
The complicity of EU authorities in the original plan to violate insured bank savings – halted only by the revolt of the Cypriot parliament – leaves the suspicion that they will steal anybody’s money if leaders of the creditor states think it is in their immediate interest to do so. Monetary union has become a danger to property.
One can only smile at the denunciations of Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem for letting slip that the Cypriot package is a template for future EMU rescues, with further haircuts for “uninsured deposit holders”.
That is not the script. Cyprus is supposed to be a special case. Yet the “Dijssel Bomb” merely confirms that the creditor powers – the people who run EMU at the moment – will impose just such a policy on the rest of Club Med if push ever comes to shove. At the same time, the German bloc is lying to its own people about the real costs of holding the euro together. The accord pretends to shield the taxpayers of EMU creditor states from future losses. By seizing €5.8bn from savings accounts, it has reduced the headline figure on the EU-IMF Troika rescue to €10bn.
This is legerdemain. They have simply switched the cost of the new credit line for Cyprus to the European Central Bank. The ECB will have to offset the slow-motion bank run in Cyprus with its Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA), and this is likely to be a big chunk of the remaining €68bn in deposits after what has happened over the past two weeks.
Much of this will show up on the balance sheet of the Bundesbank and its peers through the ECB’s Target2 payment nexus. The money will leak out of Cyprus unless the Troika tries to encircle the island with razor wire.
“In saving €5.8bn in bail-out money, the other euro area countries will likely be on the hook for four to five times more in contingent liabilities. But, of course, the former represents real money that gives politicians a headache; the latter is monopoly central bank money,” said Marchel Alexandrovich, from Jefferies.
Chancellor Angela Merkel will do anything before the elections in September to disguise the true cost of the EMU project. It has been clear since August 2012 that she is willing let the ECB carry out bail-outs by stealth, as the lesser of evils. Such action is invisible to the German public. It does not require a vote in the Bundestag. It circumvents democracy.
Mrs Merkel can get away with this, provided Cyprus does not leave EMU and default on the Bundesbank’s Target2 claims, yet that may well happen.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 20pc fall in real GDP,” said Nobel economist Paul Krugman. “Cyprus should leave the euro. Staying in means an incredibly severe depression.”
“Nobody knows what is going to happen. The economy could go into a free fall,” said Dimitris Drakopoulos, from Nomura.
The country has just lost its core industry, a banking system with assets equal to eight times GDP, and has little to replace it with. Cyprus cannot hope to claw its way back to viability with a tourist boom because EMU membership has made it shockingly expensive. Turkey, Croatia or Egypt are all much cheaper. Manufacturing is just 7pc of GDP. The IMF says the labour cost index has risen even faster than in Greece, Spain or Italy since the late 1990s.
What saved Iceland from mass unemployment after its banks blew up – or saved Sweden and Finland in the early 1990s – was a currency devaluation that brought industries back from the dead. Iceland’s krona has fallen low enough to make it worthwhile growing tomatoes for sale in greenhouses near the Arctic Circle.
If Cyprus tries to claw back competitiveness with an “internal devaluation”, it will drive unemployment to Greek levels (27pc) and cause the economy to contract so fast that the debt ratio explodes.
The IMF’s Christine Lagarde has given her blessing to the Troika deal, claiming that the package will restore Cyprus to full health, with public debt below 100pc of GDP by 2020.
Yet the Fund has already been through this charade in Greece, and her own staff discredited the doctrine behind EMU crisis measures. It has shown that the “fiscal multiplier” is three times higher than thought for the Club Med bloc. Austerity beyond the therapeutic dose is self-defeating.
Some in Nicosia cling to the hope that Cyprus can carry on as a financial gateway for Russians and Kazakhs, as if nothing has happened. RBS says the Russians will pull what remains of their money out of Cyprus “as soon as the capital controls are lifted”.
The willingness of the Cypriot authorities last week to seize money from anybody in any bank in Cyprus – even healthy banks – was an act of state madness. We will find out over time whether this epic blunder has destroyed confidence in the country as a financial centre, or whether parts of the financial and legal services sector can rebound.
Yet surely there is no going back to the old model, even though the final package restricts the losses to the two banks that are actually in trouble. Savers above €100,000 at Laiki will lose 80pc of their money, if they get anything back. Those at the Bank of Cyprus will lose 40pc.
Thousands of small firms trying to hang on face seizure of their operating funds. One Cypriot told me that the €400,000 trading account of his father at Laiki had just been frozen, leaving him unable to pay an Egyptian firm for a consignment of shoes.
The Cyprus debacle has taught us yet again that EMU has gone off the rails, is a danger to stability, and should be dismantled before it destroys Europe’s post-War order.
Whether it marks a watershed moment in the crisis is another matter. Italy, Spain, France and Portugal have their own crises, moving to their own rhythm.
The denouement will arrive when the democracies of southern Europe conclude that recovery is a false promise and that the only way to end mass unemployment is to break free of EMU’s contractionary regime.
It will be decided by Italy, not Cyprus.
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