Metal Reviews

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/ ... 2220130316

people's depoists (aka their SAVINGS) will be taxed directly in Cyprus's bailout. this is unbelievable. praying the Portuguese finance minister doesn't get any bright ideas from this bullshit.

EDIT - guys, this is fucking obscene. i thought deposits up to 100k euros were insured. they're taking money that was supposed to be completely safe. and why not impose losses on bondholders like they did with Greece? because Cyprus is small enough that you can fuck them over, and because a sizeable share of the loss will be borne by people who can't vote Cyprus's current rulers out of power, they went ahead and did this. un-fucking-believable. hope this is not a precedent. seriously considering moving what little i have saved in Portugal to a foreign bank.

EDIT 2 - hmm, silly point up there. regardless of how many foreign depositors you piss off, they pissed off literally every Cypriot with a savings account, so either way it's political suicide.

a lot of the money was held by russians. i am curious to see who the biggest bondholders are, but i would venture a bet that they aren't russian.

where are the guarantees for cypriots that this won't be a one-off? and what will they tell portuguese, spanish, irish, greek and even italian people about their deposits?

What's happening in Cyprus is truly bullshit. Rest of PIGS can get away with it.

Amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1WSs9B4H5s

It's old, but damn what a fucking idiot. This guy has a say in legislature, kids.

Dudes like fucking Grady, sans beard, of Sanford and Son fame.

Who says politicians are bright

Portugal's constitutional court struck down measures in a state budget that included massive tax hikes. the government will likely make up the difference through spending cuts, though of course instead of attacking jobs for the boys and absurd partnerships with certain private companies, they'll go for cuts in public health services or something. negotiations with creditors should give us some more wiggle room regarding budget deficit targets.

meanwhile, former prime minister, the corrupt Jose Socrates, has returned to Portugal (he was studying philosophy in Paris) as a TV commentator, and of course lied through his teeth on national television (he's the former leader of the current opposition party). a couple of weeks later, the most controversial member of the government, Miguel Relvas, known for pocketing state funds, threatening reporters and buying his university degree, leaves his post because of the controversy over the latter issue (i like how no one mentioned all that other bullshit in his past).

fucking douchebag politicians are playing power games while Portugal's credibility is on the line, and 2013/14 will be the most difficult years in Portugal as far as i can remember. spending cuts and tax hikes last year already strangled our economy and i shudder to think of how it'll be in the next couple of years.

i am all in favour of balancing our budget and reducing debt, i am not in favour of doing it at the common taxpayer's expense while politicians and politically-connected companies preserve the status quo - none of the austerity measures attacked the ruinous private-public partnerships that heavily favour private companies thanks to idiotic contracts we agreed to, politicians still live in luxury, privatisation of the state's assets (like its share in the EDP energy near-monopoly) is handled in dodgy deals, nothing is done to improve transparency in hiring and public contracting and stories of jobs for the boys still surface daily. when Portugal's credibility with the markets comes back, the troika will bugger off, this cancerous, corrupt PS/PSD (the interchangeable ruling parties) governance will continue and we'll be asking for another bailout in about 20 years.

Welcome to the future. The rest of the world has been here for a while, but the North is getting quite cozy with the idea now too.

what North?

opposition leader Antonio Jose Seguro (Jose Socrates's successor as head of the Socialist Party, PS) may have committed political suicide:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=553330698045053

when the constitutional court struck down part of the 2013 budget, there was talk of the government resigning (that's what happened to PS). Seguro stated that he was 'ready to take over leadership'. when asked what he would do regarding this hole in the budget, he said, and i shit you not, 'those who brought us here should solve it'.

meanwhile on Socrates's tv commentary, the guy is either deluded or a shameless liar. he was in the government for 6 years of mediocre growth, with the crisis coming in the last months of his reign, and yet he washes his hands of all responsibility for what we're going through today.

this is our political class.

Distinction between the global North and South. A preferred binary to East and West. The North gets the US and Europe, the South gets South America, Africa, India, Indochina.

And Russia gets Russia.

from the behaviour of our politicians, Portugal is European only in geography...

http://economico.sapo.pt/noticias/dicot ... 66625.html

i could only find an editorial pointing this out in Portuguese, but it's worth translating and reading the whole thing.



i'm not sure whether by "1.6% of GDP" the author meant Dutch or Eurozone GDP, but still. the Eurogroup is a meeting of the Eurozone finance ministers, btw.

it's clear how small and peripheral you have to be to get fucked over by the Troika.

all this was defended by the powers that be by arguing that a full rescue would have seen Cyprus take on unsustainable debt (when whatever 'smaller' debt they took on as is will probably be unsustainable given the recession they have just been thrown into) and that the 'bail-in' would have been paid by russian oligarchs (it wasn't - there are many reports of massive outflows from Cyprus while this bail-in was in progress).

then the popular 'the rich paid for the crisis' slogan was thrown around a bit. apparently having €100k in a high street bank qualifies one as rich these days. here i was thinking the truly wealthy and shady were these people - http://www.icij.org/offshore/secret-fil ... bal-impact

what a bunch of bullshit.

Interesting bit on the monkeyshines over in Sweden and the UK last week.

http://takimag.com/article/institutiona ... z2UVv77wq5

I've been training to get through the entry exams for the federal police force for about half a year, and these kinds of situations only make me train harder.

dunno if you guys are following what's happening in Brazil, it started in Sao Paulo and spread around the country. apparently authorities had to turn off public lighting in Rio tonight. the metro and bus tickets in SP went up from 3 to 3.20 Reais (about 0.09USD increase), and there was a protest, mostly peaceful with a couple of assholes as usual. police did not distinguish one from the other and charged violently, the result as expected was even more and better organised protests.

it's not just the 0.20 Reais. Sao Paulo has about 24M people and is still growing, and the public transportation infrastructure is a disgrace. most of the city still isn't covered by metro, many important routes still don't have exclusive bus lanes and it can take over two hours to travel 10km within the city by bus. infrastructure is generally crap, in transport as well as in health and education.

there are many examples of police brutality, and a local, state and federal government that seems completely uninterested in any dialogue and is acting like nothing's happening, while they send in the shock police to beat up innocent people and confiscate cameras and cell phones.

generally, the country risks throwing away a decade of unprecedented growth through terrible income distribution, waste of public resources, insane red tape and a Nordic-level tax burden.

a country like Brazil should not be organising events like the World Cup and the Olympics.

good to see people waking up and holding these dickheads accountable.

EDIT - former president Lula, plus a few active politicians, have publicly stated the need for dialogue. let's see whether the decision makers agree, and whether people can get organised enough to sit at a negotiation table.

in Brasilia, protesters have taken over the roof of the Congress building. dunno whether this means they actually took the whole building. several roads closed in Sao Paulo. police says 100.000 people went out in Rio.

Are they yelling "DUHMOCRASUH" at the top of their lungs, wishing to oust a democratically elected official from his or her position? Because that's the latest fad in Turkey.

no, there's more to it than that. they don't question her legitimacy, although they do question her credibility (the ruling PT party had a massive corruption scandal - the "mensalão" case).

most protests have not been violent, and when they did take a turn for the worse, like in Rio, the next day people from the protest helped clean the city, to take a stand against the more violent protesters.

they want to get people's attention, about the image that Dilma and co. are trying to get across vs how it really is in Brazil. Brazil has shown massive waste of public resources, while the tax burden as a % of GDP is higher than in the US, Canada and Switzerland, as well as in Mexico and Turkey.

i'm not very familiar with the situation in Turkey (shame Kathy isn't around any more), but it would seem that while Erdogan was democratically elected, he's illegitimately trying to keep himself in power through constitutional amendments and political repression. at least that's what i've been fed by the media. i don't deny that the guy still seems to lead the polls, but then again so did Hugo Chavez back in his day.

A healthy democracy should allow such protests without police brutality, too. I don't really think that these issues (paving over a park and a small increase in the bus fare?) warrant such widespread protests, but am "checking my privilege" as a western outsider who knows next to nothing about the situations...

well, on Brazil... it's more like the 0.20 reais (an increase lower than inflation, to boot*) were the last straw. it's an increase on a public transport system that is a complete disgrace, in coverage, schedules and capacity. this spills over into brutal traffic jams and commutes that directly lower people's quality of life. that the elites choose to commute by helicopter (SP is the city with the world's highest helicopter traffic) is a telling sign.

all this while a fortune in taxpayer's money is blown on stadiums built way over budget (the privately-financed 70.000 person stadium in Porto Alegre cost 300M Reais, versus 1.2 billion for the 70.000 Mane Garrincha stadium in Brasilia, paid for by the state) and public services are a disgrace in health, education, transport and security, and where cost of life can be higher than in many European countries thanks to low competition in key sectors and huge taxes.

my guess is it would've blown over hadn't the police been so brutal on the first day of protests.

btw, i think they'll announce a reduction to the old fare (3 Reais) tonight. hope it doesn't stop this movement.

EDIT - * apparently the increase was below this year's inflation, but overall fare increases have been higher than inflation since introduction of the Real currency in 1994.

the Sao Paulo Metro is a money-losing operation, but i still think that it's better to have cheap and effective public transportation that has to be subsidised over polluted and congested streets that are probably also subsidised.