"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Death By A Thousand Cuts

EXTRACT: Plainly, the European banking/financial system is unravelling - decaying before our very eyes. There is even a chance that the EFSF will never even get to use its (utterly inadequate) €440 billion war chest - after the Slovakian parliament on October 11 voted against the bill to boost the powers and size of the bailout fund. Naturally, rejection of the proposal also triggered the collapse of the fragile four-party coalition which had ruled Slovakia since July last year. Slovakia has a population of 5.5 million, its GDP representing a mere 0.5% of the European Union’s, and was being asked to fork out €7.7 billion towards the EFSF pot - an amount equal to roughly 12% of its total annual economic output.
Of course, just like in Ireland, there will almost certainly be another vote - and the pressure will be on to vote ‘correctly’ this time. In all likelihood, by one means or another, the Slovakian parliament will eventually consent to the new mega-EFSF. But it is by no means a complete certainty and any further delay in ratifying the new EFSF mechanism could prove to be disastrous. The clock is ticking against the euro zone project. Greece is not going to magically go away and a ‘disorderly’ default by the Greek government could deliver an absolutely devastating blow to European banks, causing lending to freeze up.
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Posted by at 2:28 pm

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