". . . a republic, if you can keep it."
The European Parliament has blocked a key agreement that allows the United States to monitor Europeans’ bank transactions – angering Washington. .
. . .
Top US officials – including Vice-President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner – had contacted MEPs in recent days to urge them to consider “the importance of this agreement to our mutual security”, the Associated Press news agency reported.
(Read more from news.bbc.co.uk)
@ 0:00 – Half Trillion $ per year trade deficit. Our government continues to do all it can to prevent Americans from saving.
@ 0:45 – Bailing out Greece creates moral hazard for nations and creditors & punishes responsible states.
@ 3:45 – Jobs bill & payroll tax holiday is a gimmick. It creates incentive to fire someone and hire a replacement at a discount. All the bill does is let politicians take credit for hires that will probably happen anyway.
@ 8:00 – This alludes to the Fed’s reluctance to raise interest rates. The Fed has painted itself into a corner. It needs to raise interest rates to stop bank from leveraging and lending out the massive quantities of money which have been printed, which would precipitate the collapse of the collar. But our phony economy and the big wall street firms with rule Washington are surviving on the easy money of artificially low interest rates. Peter Schiff discusses the Fed’s latest gimmick — paying banks to not lend money. It won’t work.
@ 9:20 – The Fed’s claim that they haven’t lost money on TARP is another obfuscation. They’ve bought crap from irresponsible banks. They won’t take a loss until they try to sell the crap.
See also: Greece is a poor country full of rich people [tax evaders]
Seems Greece can’t collect from its own citizens, so it’s going to collect from other Europeans.