And the U.S. should learn to look over their northern border to see how a banking system can be kept healthy.

I have to point out that France is in line to become a major casualty of the Greek problem. France's banks happen to hold a boat load of Greek debt. Sad to say, it looks like they took out credit default swaps with some friends in other parts of Europe.... England for example. For this reason, I foresee a huge amount of wrangling as the Banksters and Actuarysters attempt to manipulate public sentiment into propping up Greece at any cost.

Unfortunately, the problems in the EU will also weigh on the rest of the world economy. This is a good time to have a weak currency. The U.S. dollar is weak at present but ongoing difficulties should drive down the Euro against the dollar. The end result will move pain from Europe into the U.S. in a domino effect.

DarJones

In Dotcom Bubble 2.0 news, another much-hyped IPO today, of Pandora Media (P): IPO priced at $16 (up from the originally announced $12), stock opened at $20, briefly spiked as high as $26, and then...well, we`ll let the daily price chart below speak for itself. But before you look at the price chart, enjoy this bullish sell-side spin, which twists "closed barely above IPO price and anyone who bought at open and didn't immediately sell is now down a nice chunk of change" into "Pandora stock climbed today" (I guess that is in fact true, at least for the roughly 5 minutes between the opening bell at 9:30 am and the "oh, crap, I think I bought at the top" phase which set in at 9:35 a.m.):

[url=http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_18279981?nclick_check=1]Biz Break: IPO 'explosion' for Silicon Valley home sales? Plus: Pandora's debut[/url]
[quote]Speaking of big IPOs, Pandora stock climbed today in its New York Stock Exchange debut after the shares priced late Tuesday at $16 a share. That was up from last week's expected range of $10 to $12 a share, which itself was bumped up from an earlier expected range of $7 to $9.
[b]
"There's pent-up demand for high-growth, exciting business models," money manager Scott Billeadeau of Fifth Third Asset Management in Minneapolis told Bloomberg News.
[/b]
Pandora's stock is trading under a coveted single-letter ticker symbol -- "P" -- on the NYSE. The stock climbed as high as $26 soon after trading began, but pulled lower to close at $17.42, up $1.42, or 8.9 percent, from the IPO price.

Pandora sold 6 million shares to the public, and selling investors sold 8.7 million shares. According to a Bay Area News Group report, the IPO raised nearly $235 million for Pandora and its investors. The IPO underwriters have the option of selling an additional 2.2 million shares from the company within 30 days.

The Oakland Internet radio service streams music to computers, smartphones and other devices. Its technology sends music based on subscribers' favorite songs, artists or genres.[/quote]

And of course the grand-daddy of DB 2.0 IPOs just was announced, Facebook, hyped to have an initial valuation as high as $100 Bln, which puts it in the category of TJS, short for "that's just silly". Some MSFM taking head made the point a few nights ago - in classic "this time is different" fashion - that the current crop of dotBubble IPOs differ from the v1.0 ones in that v2.0 have lots of private venture funding, which makes their valuations "more reliable" or some such nonsense. Sounds to me more like the big VC and hedge-fund money is furiously trying to cash out ahead of phase 2 of the global financial crisis.

And to round things out in our review of DB 2.0 news, SJ Mercury News tech columnist Chris O'Brien has some rather skeptical notes about the also-coming Groupon IPO. His piece in fact describes the "large amounts of private funding" as a warning signal, especially if much of that funding has allowed insiders to cash out early via "private placements" of their shares of the company:

[url=http://www.mercurynews.com/chris-obrien/ci_18242843] O`Brien: Groupon`s insider stock sales raise a red flag about IPO[/url]
[quote]Groupon`s IPO remains one of the hottest topics in Silicon Valley startup circles more than a week after the company filed its papers. What`s amazing to me is how negative the buzz has been.

The Chicago-based company basically invented -- or at least perfected -- the white-hot daily deal concept and has enjoyed a meteoric rise. But its filing revealed a number of troubling weaknesses, most glaringly its lack of profits.
[b]
There was one aspect of the IPO filing that I found especially disturbing: The large amounts of stock that executives and investors have already cashed out. Insiders have pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars that Groupon desperately needs to keep operating.
[/b]
This represents a bright red flag.

"This whole deal smells," said Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Information and director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. "The company does not have a proven business model that will take them to long-term profitability, insiders are already reaping millions, and the price is out of proportion with reality.

My concern is that this blows up and kills the opportunities for many, more worthy, companies in Silicon Valley that want to go public."

Groupon is in a quiet period after filing for the IPO, and so can`t discuss these issues. However, in the filing the company notes that its lack of profits is due in part to investments it`s making to expand the company.

In addition, co-founder Eric Lefkofsky responded to this criticism a day after the IPO filing in an interview with Bloomberg News in which he boasted, "Groupon is going to be wildly profitable." That, however, has raised another controversy over whether Lefkofsky violated the quiet period rules and whether Groupon will have to refile its IPO papers.

To be sure, Groupon is certainly not the only tech startup in which insiders have sold private stock before the company goes public.

This trend began as many of the hottest startups -- Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, Yelp -- delayed their IPOs as long as possible.

The founders are clearly focused on building their companies for the long term. And they want to avoid the short-term pressures of being a public company. Good for them, although this has created a great deal of frustration for some in the valley who want these companies to rev up the IPO market.

But this creates grumbling among hardworking founders and employees who are eager to see their stock options turned into cash. So, many of these companies have struck deals with private investors to allow employees and executives to sell stock to reduce the internal pressure to go public. Again, the instinct is good.

Last week while moderating a panel on startups, I asked Glenn Solomon of GGV Capital about the impact of these sales. He said venture capitalists increasingly like them because it reduces some of the emotional pressure, especially on founders, surrounding high-stakes decisions like whether to sell a company or raise more money. By cashing out some stock and having a little money for a down payment on a house, or to buy a car, founders don`t have to worry that they might lose everything should they make the wrong decision.

That makes sense, but only if those sales are kept to reasonable levels.

In the case of Groupon, I don`t think that`s the case.

For one thing, Groupon is less than 2 years old. So while employees and founders have no doubt been working hard to build the company, they haven`t been at it nearly as long as say, LinkedIn, which recently went public after waiting more than eight years.

Worse, unlike many other high-flying Web companies, Groupon turns out to be very unprofitable, and growing more so. In the most recent quarter, the company lost $117 million on $644 million in revenue. With only $208 million in cash on hand, the company urgently needs the $750 million it hopes to raise in the IPO.

The company shouldn`t be so desperate. In January, Groupon announced that it had raised $950 million in venture capital.

But of that money, $810 million went into the pockets of insiders such as CEO Andrew Mason ($10 million), Lefkofsky ($60 million) and early-stage venture backer NEA ($70 million) and Accel Partners ($19 million). As with Groupon, the venture firms also are subject to the restrictions of the quiet period and thus cannot comment.

Again, no one would begrudge the founders taking a little money off the table, as Solomon suggests. But using the company`s momentum to raise and then pocket such large amounts of money -- money the company itself needs -- looks reckless.

And a problematical Groupon IPO could result in a backlash from investors that would kill the momentum finally building around tech IPOs.[/quote]

And now back to the promised pictorial illustration of that whole "Pandora stock climbed today" thing - see if you can spot the climb, and no cheating by running time backwards and parsing the chart the wrong way:

Greecefire: Athens Riots, Papandreou Likely Done
 

[Last spam of the day, I promise - We've been furiously busy @work the past week up through yesterday's code checkin deadline, so I'm doing a bit of econ-catchup]

Mish has an update on the deteriorating situation in Greece:

[url=http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/06/riots-images-from-greece-prime-minister.html ] Riots Images from Greece; Prime Minister to Reshuffle Greek Cabinet, Seek Vote of Confidence on New Government; Papandreou's Days Numbered[/url]

When I viewed the above post's subheading "Papandreou to reshuffle the Deck", the first phrase that popped into my head was “Reshuffling the Deck Chairs On the Titanic”.

It seems rather apt, actually.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;263874][Last spam of the day, I promise - We've been furiously busy @work the past week up through yesterday's code checkin deadline, so I'm doing a bit of econ-catchup]
<snip>
[/QUOTE]
I look forward to your posts, and have been wondering what happened to them.....

[QUOTE=ewmayer;263874][Last spam of the day, I promise - We've been furiously busy @work the past week up through yesterday's code checkin deadline, so I'm doing a bit of econ-catchup]

Mish has an update on the deteriorating situation in Greece:

[url=http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/06/riots-images-from-greece-prime-minister.html ] Riots Images from Greece; Prime Minister to Reshuffle Greek Cabinet, Seek Vote of Confidence on New Government; Papandreou's Days Numbered[/url]

When I viewed the above post's subheading "Papandreou to reshuffle the Deck", the first phrase that popped into my head was “Reshuffling the Deck Chairs On the Titanic”.

It seems rather apt, actually.[/QUOTE]

[url]http://www.cnbc.com/id/43378973?__source=otbrn%7Coutbrainext%7C&par=otbrn&__source=otbrn%7Coutbrainext20110616092515%7C&par=otbrn[/url]

[Reply to Bob`s post about Bond Guru Bill Miller saying "U.S. worse off fiscally than Greece]:

Well, the comparison is not completely fair, because if one adds future promises to the other countries` liabilities they similalrly balloon ... but yeah, we are just as fooked long-term, only have a little more time-until-TSHTF due to having our own currency we can debase, and none of the large holders of U.S. debt wanting to admit reality because that would "spook the bond markets" and render their holdings of said debt instantly worth a lot less. (Those writedowns are inevitable, but no one involved in managing such assets wants it to happen on their watch.)

------------------------------

Mish has the latest on Greece:

[url]http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/06/imf-ready-and-willing-to-throw-away.html[/url]

And another rough day for the much-ballyhooed Pandora IPO - Like the mythical Pandora, buyers of P shares are left only with hope that their investment will someday pay off. Looks like the life of the "Pandora IPO craze" was all of 5 minutes (open of trading yesterday), and I suspect most of that trading was all strictly HFT-algo-vs-HFT-algo anyway:

[QUOTE=ewmayer;263953]And another rough day for the much-ballyhooed Pandora IPO - Like the mythical Pandora, buyers of P shares are left only with hope that their investment will someday pay off. Looks like the life of the "Pandora IPO craze" was all of 5 minutes (open of trading yesterday), and I suspect most of that trading was all strictly HFT-algo-vs-HFT-algo anyway:[/QUOTE]Is it possible that some P-buyers thought they were investing in, or purchasing tickets for, the sequel to [i]Avatar[/i]?

This post will be more in the realm of speculation than I would normally delve.

Greece is a socialist economy with a huge problem. It is needs to borrow roughly $300 Billion over the next 2 years to pay off old debts and cover an ongoing deficit running in the tens of billions per year. The problem is that an entitlement population does not want to give up any of the perks they have enjoyed over the last several years. The inherent risk is that Greece will default on debts that by one count total about $400 Billion ([I]I think this number is a bit high[/I]).

Now lets try to figure out the impact of a default of say $100 Billion dollars. The first and foremost impact will be to the banks in Greece. They will effectively be shut down because their money supply will dry up. That would be bad, but would primarily impact Greece. The EU would have to kick Greece out to avoid destabilizing the Euro and throwing the entire EU economy off the tracks. The impact outside of Greece would be to France and England (and several other EU nations) because France holds roughly $65 billion in Greek bonds and England has debt swaps in place that assume roughly half of that debt. The U.S. holds roughly $40 billion in Greek debt. Presuming a loss of 1/4 on the above ($400B total debt, $100B write down) means France would be on the hook for about $17B of which roughly half would be absorbed by England. U.S. financial entities would be on the hook for about $10 Billion. Now the question is "Would this be enough to topple the world economy?" I take the position that it is NOT though there would be significant bankruptcies of financial entities and there would be a major disruption in overal economic activity.

Why is this significant? Because as noted a few posts above, financial interests are putting on a full court press to push for an IMF/ECB bailout of Greece so they can avoid a major haircut. The Germans have recognized that Greece needs to take the medicine and get it over with. The sooner done, the sooner the world economy can get to recovery.

In the final analysis, this breaks down to transferring private debt losses to the public as a whole. Bail out the banks at the expense of the people a' la Ireland.

DarJones

Osborne to "Ring-Fence" UK Banks
 

[url=http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110615/wl_uk_afp/britainfinanceeconomybankingosborne_20110615012605]UK To Return to Glass-Steagall-Style Banking Separation[/url]: [i]The practice of banks using money from their retail arms to fund investment operations has been widely blamed as a major factor behind the global banking crisis.[/i]
[quote]LONDON (AFP) – The Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is on Wednesday likely to back plans for banks to ring-fence their retail operations to prevent a rerun of the 2008 financial crash, a treasury source said.

Osborne was likely to approve the Independent Commission on Banking's (ICB) recommendations that banks keep their high street and investment arms separate in a speech to the leaders of the financial sector.

"This is a far reaching shake up to make high street banks safer and protect taxpayers," said the treasury source.

The practice of banks using money from their retail arms to fund investment operations was widely highlighted as a major factor behind the global banking crisis.

The ICB was set up to examine how banks can be made more secure and made the recommendation in April's interim report.

It also suggested that banks raise raise their reserve levels above the international minimum of seven percent, to provide a greater cushion against the risk of failure.

The measure would mean that they would only be able to lend around 10 times what they hold rather than the 14 times allowed by the international minimum.

Osborne was expected back this proposal, as well as a proposal to privatise Northern Rock. It was nationalised by the previous Labour government as it foundered in early 2008 when the financial crisis took hold.[/quote]
[i]My Comment:[/i] Consider that snip above: "...*only* be able to lend around 10 times what they hold"...And of course here in the U.S., the 2004 relaxation of the net capital rules for the 5 biggest U.S. iBanks (technically, "broker-dealers"...then-head-of-Goldman and future Treasury secretary Hank Paulson played a key role in lobbying for the leverage-limit relaxation), the so-called [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_capital_rule]"Bear Stearns exemption"[/url], [b]remains in effect[/b]. Consider the names of the 5 iBanks which were allowed to lever up 30 and 40:1 as a result: Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley. Of those five, two (Bear and Lehman) blew themselves (and much of the global financial system) up utterly, Merrill only survived by way of a shotgun wedding to not-quite-as-blown-up BofA, and the survivors are only still around (and raking in huge profits and bonuses form a fresh spate of market-rigging and speculating) thanks to unprecedented government (that is, ultimately borne by taxpayers) bailouts. And yet the hyperleveraged insanity is allowed to continue.


[url=http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/06/merkel-wimps-out-sarkozy-merkel-ecb.html ]Merkel Wimps Out, Agrees to Laughable "Voluntary" Solution to Mess in Greece; Four Things to Expect Shortly[/url]
[quote]The Euro is up sharply today on news of a "solution" that allegedly involves "voluntary" rollover of Greek bonds by private investors.

The whole world knows there is nothing voluntary about it. Moody's has even stated it will not be considered voluntary. However, such details do not stop stubborn fools like ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet and French president Nicolas Sarkozy from insisting they can dictate solutions to the market.

On the "news" which everyone knew was coming, 2-year Greek bonds fell to 27.52% from 29.69% but are now trading at 28.03%.
[EWM: Mish posts later that 2-year Greek bonds closed at 28.79%, i.e. the yield demanded by investors ended up falling by less than 1%, not exactly a vote of confidence from the bond markets.]
[b]
Merkel Wimps Out
[/b]
As we all knew she would Merkel caved in to demands from Sarkozy and the ECB. Whether or not the German parliament will go along remains to be seen.

Bets are also off if Greek Prime minister George Papandreou does not survive an upcoming "vote of confidence". If Papandreou hangs on, it will be by 1-3 votes out of 300, hardly confidence inspiring.

One way or another, Papandreou will not survive this fiasco. The only question is whether he is booted out sooner rather than later.

Please consider [url=http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-17/merkel-says-she-s-prepared-to-work-with-ecb-on-investor-role-in-greece.html]Merkel Agrees to Voluntary Greece Bondholder Role[/url]
...[b]
Four Things to Expect
[/b]
o Expect the market to call another can-kicking bluff as early as next week.
o Expect more pompous foolery from Trichet and Sarkozy.
o Expect Merkel to take another well-deserved election pounding in September.
o The main thing to expect is for the market to start demanding involuntary haircuts on the debt of Portugal, Ireland, then Spain and Italy.

Nothing Solved by Pompous Foolery

It is amazing to watch German chancellor Merkel wimp out time and time again to French president Sarkozy.

Not a damn thing has been solved by this exercise in pompous foolery by Trichet and Sarkozy. The structural problems all remain.[/quote]

Surplus/Deficit as a % of GNP/GDP
 

Barry Ritholtz has a timely post which charts [url=http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/06/surplusdeficit-as-a-of-gnpgdp/]Surplus/Deficit as a % of GNP/GDP[/url]

But, the chart omits the oh-so-inconvenient "intragovernmental borrowings", which left some of Barry's readers confused. I clarified, but my reply got garbled by the web forum-comment software, so I pointed interested back to this post.


@nilsonb:

"According to UST historical data on their website, the national debt has increased every year, in fact every Q, since about 1954.
So how was there a surplus around 1999-2000 if the national debt increased every Q and never went down?
What am I missing?"

You are missing "intragovernmental borrowings", which is the government's benign-sounding euphemism for "raiding the social security and medicare trust funds in order to make the yearly budget hole look better than it is." Treasury types like to justify the benign name via the definition "It is federal debt that the government owes to itself." I would argue that no, it is federal debt that the government owes to to those who paid into said trust funds and expect the money to be used for its promised purpose.

Wikipedia explains it nicely [[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget][/url] - Interestingly, the quote below is from the snapshot of the page I viewed last year, it has since been sanitized, no more mention of 'gimmick' and such:

"These on-budget and off-budget items essentially amount to accounting gimmicks and schemes. In reality, what really matters is how much money comes in and how much money goes out. The federal government publishes the total debt owed (public and intragovernmental holdings) at the end of each fiscal year [50] and since FY1957, the amount of debt held by the federal government has increased every single year."

The total amount of these Treasury IOUs currently stands at around $4.5 Trillion, or roughly 30% of GDP.

Here is the link in the above reference [50]: [url]http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo4.htm[/url]
That covers 1950-1999; for 2000-2010 go to the ...histo5.htm page.

The above Treaury pages give just the absolute total of IGHs as of 9/30 of every year (6/30 before 1977), so I crunched the numbers, here is the resulting table, in which each line starts with a year and follows with a dollar amount representing "Year-over-year increase in intragovernmental borrowings as of 9/30 of the current year". Negative right-column numbers represent surpluses, and indeed 1957 is the last time we had one of those, although Clinton did come close in his last year in office (though some of that budget goodness was admittedly unsustainable windfall revenues from the about-to-pop dotcom bubble):

[* = rounded to nearest million]
[code]
Date Debt Oustanding YoY Change
---------- ------------------ -----------------
09/30/2010 13,561,623,030,891 1,651,794,027,380
09/30/2009 11,909,829,003,511 1,885,104,106,599
09/30/2008 10,024,724,896,912 1,017,071,524,650
09/30/2007 9,007,653,372,262 500,679,473,047
09/30/2006 8,506,973,899,215 574,264,237,492
09/30/2005 7,932,709,661,723 553,656,965,393
09/30/2004 7,379,052,696,330 595,821,633,587
09/30/2003 6,783,231,062,743 554,995,097,146
09/30/2002 6,228,235,965,597 420,772,553,397
09/30/2001 5,807,463,412,200 133,285,202,314
09/30/2000 5,674,178,209,886 17,907,308,271
09/30/1999 5,656,270,901,615 130,077,892,718
09/30/1998 5,526,193,008,897 113,046,997,500
09/30/1997 5,413,146,011,397 188,335,072,262
09/30/1996 5,224,810,939,135 250,828,038,426
09/29/1995 4,973,982,900,709 281,232,990,696
09/30/1994 4,692,749,910,013 281,261,026,874
09/30/1993 4,411,488,883,139 346,868,227,618
09/30/1992 4,064,620,655,521 399,317,303,824
09/30/1991 3,665,303,351,697 431,989,899,920
09/28/1990 3,233,313,451,777 375,882,491,590
09/29/1989 2,857,430,960,187 255,093,248,146
09/30/1988 2,602,337,712,041 252,060,821,088
09/30/1987 2,350,276,890,953 224,974,274,295
09/30/1986 2,125,302,616,658 302,199,616,658
09/30/1985 1,823,103,000,000* 250,837,000,000
09/30/1984 1,572,266,000,000* 195,056,000,000
09/30/1983 1,377,210,000,000* 235,176,000,000
09/30/1982 1,142,034,000,000* 144,179,000,000
09/30/1981 997,855,000,000* 90,154,000,000
09/30/1980 907,701,000,000* 81,182,000,000
09/30/1979 826,519,000,000* 54,975,000,000
09/30/1978 771,544,000,000* 72,704,000,000
09/30/1977 698,840,000,000* 78,407,000,000
06/30/1976 620,433,000,000* 87,244,000,000
06/30/1975 533,189,000,000* 58,129,184,269
06/30/1974 475,059,815,731 16,918,210,419
06/30/1973 458,141,605,312 30,881,144,372
06/30/1972 427,260,460,940 29,130,716,485
06/30/1971 398,129,744,455 27,211,037,506
06/30/1970 370,918,706,949 17,198,453,108
06/30/1969 353,720,253,841 6,141,847,416
06/30/1968 347,578,406,425 21,357,468,631
06/30/1967 326,220,937,794 6,313,849,999
06/30/1966 319,907,087,795 2,633,188,812
06/30/1965 317,273,898,983 5,560,999,726
06/30/1964 311,712,899,257 5,853,266,261
06/30/1963 305,859,632,996 7,658,810,276
06/30/1962 298,200,822,720 9,229,884,110
06/30/1961 288,970,938,610 2,640,177,762
06/30/1960 286,330,760,848 1,624,853,770
06/30/1959 284,705,907,078 8,362,689,333
06/30/1958 276,343,217,745 5,816,045,849
06/30/1957 270,527,171,896 -2,223,641,753
06/30/1956 272,750,813,649 -1,623,409,153
06/30/1955 274,374,222,802 3,114,623,694
06/30/1954 271,259,599,108 5,188,537,470
06/30/1953 266,071,061,638 6,965,882,853
06/30/1952 259,105,178,785 3,883,201,971
06/29/1951 255,221,976,814 -2,135,375,537
06/30/1950 257,357,352,351[/code]

So, roughly speaking, total debt really got out of hand starting under Reagan, during whose 2 terms it nearly tripled. Under Bush Sr. it increased 50% in 4 years, under Clinton added another 40% in his 8 years, Bush Jr. nearly doubled it in his 8 years, and Obama is on a pace to outdo even his predecessor.

Collapse of the Eurozone
 

Yes the title is exaggerated, yes it is inflamatory, yes it is intended to induce serious thinking. This is not some long term possibility, it is something that could happen within 2 to 4 years.

The ongoing dog and pony show in Greece is a harbinger of things to come. Greece will require propping up to the tune of an additional $450 Billion over the next 5 years. The Eurozone can't afford to continue forking out this level of cash to stabilize one country. The given conclusion is that at some point the Eurozone has to collapse, hopefully in an orderly fashion by kicking Greece and possibly other member nations out. The trigger event would be a default by Greece. Trickle effects would push writeoff of Greek debt into other member nations such as France, Germany, and Britain which would induce confidence problems for Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy causing their ability to borrow on the market to erode causing another round of nations to have to exit the EU.

I can only see two ways for this to be resolved. The first path is to kick out the weakest member nations. The second is to abandon the Euro common currency. Either will have drastic consequences. You might get the impression that Uncle Joe has schizo-multipersonality-disorder which is the reason the finance ministers are racking their brain to figure out a way to hold things together. If they abandon the Euro, member nations would have to go back to unique currencies. This would allow Greece to print money to pay the debts in effect inducing runaway inflation and transferring the burden of the financial holocost onto the Greek people. The alternative of kicking Greece out of the EU would likely involve having to kick out Portugal, Spain, and Ireland before the convulsion is over.

Either path will leave the Greek people in a dire financial position.

Where does this leave Uncle Sam? At a guess, the U.S. will at some point have to print trillions more $ which will cause inflation that will remind us all of Zimbabwe.

DarJones