It’s the marching season in Northern Ireland so Tyrrell must be hankering after his RUC days.

Kev, They are busy at De La Rue, printing batches of Euro 110 billion…

Iceland? Here in Lilliput they still think that what happened in Iceland related to their not being EU members.

Don’t waste your pearls here, Du da. Time is precious. Just throw them a few bones once in a while and watch them trying to tear your face with it.

[Daphne – Don’t bother being false, Husband of Sharon. Du Da is James Tyrrell, your old friend in opposition to EU membership, along with Nigel Farage. I rather suspect he’s got a lot worse than Sharon’s cow suit in his cupboard.]

James who?? Beowulf?? Du da and K.P.Smith (my real name and Maltese) very much me, along with serfsdown – which you also failed to post.

Misogyny ? I don’t think I’d better tell you just how much I LOVE woman. Check YOUR articles. Maybe I’m just falling out of love with your writing. Has that ever crossed your mind.
Bored?…most probably.

Do you think I didn’t know you’d match up I.P numbers? I do read your blogs – but with the same cringe factor I’d reserve for Eastenders.

[Daphne – See a psychiatrist, Mr Tyrrell. I mean it. You’ve got a bad problem there. It’s not normal or sane for a British man of around 60 who lives in some obscure part of Northern Ireland to become neurotically and negatively fixated on a columnist in Malta and to stalk her all over the internet. If you knew I would match the IP numbers then you wouldn’t have bothered using different names. If I didn’t know you were born in the 1950s I would assume from your love-hate stalking fixation that you were 15 and afflicted with acne. The difference between 15-year-old boys and 60-year-old men is that the latter are dangerous and this behaviour indicates madness not hormonal puberty.]

Ho, ho, ho, you are sooo funny, ciccio.

Perhaps it would interest you to know that this article omits the fact that these $12 billion were the fifth and last tranche of the €110 billion bailout agreed in May 2010 and that a second €110 billion bailout was discussed during the June Council meeting, to be continued later this month and probably concluded in September. And Ireland might need a second one too… then there’s Spain…

Make us laugh, ciccio.

So, the blogfrau has finally woken up to our continents tip-of-the-iceberg problem – the telling-off she so liberally slapped the island with for not being au courant with what has been playing out for close to a year now, notwithstanding.

[Daphne – Look, James Tyrrell aka Beowulf/K P Smith/and now Du da, being a woman might make me stupid by definition in your book, but you should be able to work out that even a dumb woman like me can match up IP numbers, even if I’m not professionally sharp enough to match up writing style, choice of uniquely unpleasant British (make that Northern Irish) self-expression and personal animosity, which incidentally, I am. Whatever your problem is, do please make sure that you carry on dealing with it this way, by posting comments on the internet instead of going out to rape and batter some unsuspecting woman, which is the natural progression with your sort of sentiments and instincts. As for the rest of your comment, it’s the sort of tripe you used to have published in the letters section of The Times (before the online version became your idea of paradise) during the EU referendum campaign: interfering British man from northern Ireland, with a serious case of sexual inadequacy and severe misogyny problems, tells Malta to vote No. Clearly, you need a fresh supply of snuff movies there in County Atrim – or is it Gozo today? – because you’re bored again.]

It’s strange how the reason for her weekly column seems to be to apportion dunce hats to the island with the same gusto as a traffic warden giving out tickets on his first day at work.s to weather she really understands the problem herself , was not wholly clear from the article, even though her position was crystal – but as see-through and fragile as glass.
Is she familiar with the term ‘odious debt’?

A few areas that were not touched on – and with good reason I’d imagine :

how does a country which is already up to it’s neck in un-payable debt, hope to service a now, greatly larger sum? Not with Feta cheese and olives, I can assure you. Never, would be more like it.

Is this a Greek bailout; or a European Banks/Bondholder/ CDS underwriter bailout, and if so, should the Greeks WANT to be forced in to debt peonage for someone else’s losses. Would you?

What happened to the idea of ‘Free markets’, when debt instruments and equities reflected the amount of risk associated with them, and investors took their losses along with their profits. You should know the cliche for our era by now; private profit, public losses.

If there’s one thing that we fail to realise at our own peril it’s that by continuing on this path is just perpetuating the same, systemically-flawed ideas by the same people who steered us here to begin with. And to make things worse, to a much higher and more dangerous degree. Shouldn’t that at least make you think what bailing out Greece means if we then stop to consider the other countries that will be lining up to deny (again) needing more funds.. until they do?

There are two reasons why Greece has been jack-booted in to coughing up (in oh so many ways), and they are CDSs -(credit default swaps), a financial euphemism for what is nothing more than an insurance policy (derivative) which is akin to buying fire insurance on your neighbours house – as many policies as you like (and by the nature of the investment, gives you a strong desire to see that house burn down). And Shorts, or the ability to borrow financial instruments from brokers and selling them in to the market en mass to influence price discovery, usually downward (even though this was not their initial function).

What this means is that the investment bankers who underwrote and sold these instruments have more than a vested interest in seeing Greece not default (Greece had no say in it) simply because the underwriters can’t pay out on the losses. And the other side of the bet are the whales who wish to see Greece do just that, and fail.
In the past it was: bulls and bears make money – pigs get slaughtered. They clearly hadn’t met the sacrificial lamb yet.

What makes this episode in history so sad is the fact that the country is being made a scapegoat in what is little more than a game of poker between vested financial interests who are rewriting the rules as they go along, stumbling from one self-made disaster to another.

Here’s who is at the table: IMF/ECB (yikes), CDS/investment bank/underwriters (double yikes), EU countries/commercial banks holding Greek bonds, hedge fund investment companies trying to make a killing, one way or the other. It may as well read :

Dealer – ‘bottom-card Billy’ , on the small blind; Joe ‘two fingers’, Fred the ‘ long fraud’ on the big ….and the ECB all-in on a busted flush. Sad.

Does it even matter that the decision to resort to this action goes against the same mandate that EU leaders -especially Germany- set out as a prerequisite for the launch of the currency?
To me, only one question is important: was it planned to happen this way (why wait for a crisis when we can create one) or was it just one miserable ‘cock-up’ that the Euro team sleepwalked into? Either way….would you trust them with your money?

They should take the Icelandic-middle finger approach. They seem to be doing quite well.

Kev, I’m sorry, I could not find the one in Brussels, but here is some help for those reading Kev’s contributions from the UK. It is getting very depressing.

http://www.nationaldebtline.co.uk/england_wales/debt_advice.php

Malta has pledged half a billion euros towards the permanent debt mechanism. Yes, Gonzi signed a treaty and hardly told us that we’d need to borrow a further €507 million to throw into the bailout zone by 2013.

In 2009 we were €3.95 billion in the red. By 2010 it was €4.25 billion euros . By 2013 it will top €6 billion. What are we going to do about this spiraling debt? Interest payment is bleeding us dry, currently exceeding €200 million a year. Soon we’ll be borrowing from the IMF itself…

It’s a debt-trap. And it did not just happen.

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110623/local/malta-ready-to-contribute-to-new-greece-bailout.372107/comments:4