Economics

One article is even from the Huffington Post, which (almost) invariably confuses moral posturing with clear thinking.

Send money to Greece? Have you lost your marbles? Sidney Morning Herald

Cleaning up Greece’s Augean Stable Huffington Post. Note the fourth to last paragraph about potential cooperation between Russia and Greece.

Man who broke the Bank of England, George Soros, ‘at centre of hedge funds plot to cash in on fall of the euro’ London Daily Mail.

BTW, did you know more Americans read the online versions of English newspapers than the English?

David P. Goldman posted this today on First Things’s blog First Thought.  He describes the economic situation in Greece and sketches out some of the social causes and possible outcomes.  In my heart I want what I read here to not be true–but I suspect my hopes are misplaced.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

On Feb. 12, I posted this item at my “Inner Workings” blog at Asia Times and on the Spengler blog at First Things:

Although Greece is an EC member, its finances and political system have the character of a banana republic. EC membership, though, enabled Greece to borrow far more money than any banana republic, such that the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is about triple that of Argentina just before the latter’s bankruptcy in 2000. And because Greece is an EC member, the size and adumbrations of a bankruptcy would be much, much larger than that of any Latin American country.

Earlier I had assumed that we were watching a negotiation: Brussels would shout “Never!,” the Greeks would throw tantrums, and eventually some compromise would be reached and the situation would be stabilized.

Closer examination of the political situation in Greece makes me less optimistic. Greece may be suffering from an inoperable cancer, in the form of a degree of corruption that make a resolution without bankruptcy very difficult to implement.

Here are some comments by a political observer in Athens who has written to me privately: Continue reading →

We warned the Ecumenical Patriarch that endorsing the global warming agenda was reckless. Anyone with eyes to see clearly saw that global warming (since renamed “climate change” — a harbinger that the effort might freeze over) was a political, not scientific, enterprise designed to wrestle control of economies away from nation-states and hand it over to non-elected bureaucracies.

Now more evidence about the massive corruption surrounding global warming has emerged. The American Thinker ran a piece (see: Climategate: CRU Was But the Tip of the Iceberg) that alleges fraud from more research institutions that told us that global warming was a real threat including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). It will take time for the reports to filter into the mainstream, but once they do, you can bet this house will come crashing down like ice breaking from a glacier.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese press office remain uncharacteristically silent about the support the “Green Patriarch” gave global warming activists just a few short months ago. Yet “support” is too mild a term. Pat. Bartholomew in fact threw the full moral weight of his office behind specific policies like the Copenhagen Protocols that were built on the fraudulent science.

It was a huge blunder. It fosters the dry rot that destroys credibility. The eagerness to align the Ecumenical Patriarch with the Progressive wing of American politics reveals that his handlers have a poor understanding of the American political and moral culture. They blew it big time.

Don’t say he wasn’t warned.