The past weekend's pivotal elections in France and Greece will make some definite waves in Europe. On tonight's Daily Show, Jon Stewart recapped the events and pondered a few lingering questions that just beg to be answered.
Well, progress is progress. The New York Times reports that Greece is "inch[ing] toward [a] deal" establishing the new interest rates that Greek bonds will carry. No one can officially confirm what this compromise would entail, only that "bondholders have made significant concessions with regard to the interest rate." But let's not get too excited.
Remember credit default swaps? AIG? Hopelessly entangled exotic financial instruments tied to esoteric asset valuations that caused cascading defaults in 2008 and threatened to tank the global financial system unless taxpayers ate all the losses? Remember how we reformed Wall St. to make sure that never repeated itself? Someone tell Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley, because they've teed the whole damn thing up again, this time in Europe.
Europe will apparently not fall apart after German chancellor Angela Merkel shepherded a deal early Thursday morning to write down Greek's debt. It's complicated, but basically she got a bunch of banks to take a 50% haircut on what Greece owes them. Click on the image on the right to see how one of the negotiators diagrammed it in the middle of the night.
Here's a pretty remarkable interview with independent stock and forex trader Alessio Rastani on the BBC this morning, in which he's either being perfectly candid about how traders are viewing the Eurozone crisis, or he's just trolling. Anyway, he's a sociopath.
Sweden is weathering a rare "tropical hurricane," forcing Swedes to use the term "tropical hurricane," with quotation marks, because this whirling dervish is strange to them, exotic, bewildering, foreign. Sweden's hurricane is named "Katia." She is Class 1, and tore through British Isles earlier, killing one. [The Local, The Local]
Nonalcoholic beer has long been the beverage of choice for everyone from delusional recovering alcoholics to people too drunk to notice they accidentally bought nonalcoholic beer. Shouldn't you be drinking more nonalcoholic beer, if you know what we mean?
Sometimes you just have to trust that your government is willing to fight the good fight when comes to handling international crises. Take France and its production of foie gras — the not very humanely produced bird liver pate. The French take that shit pretty seriously. So when organizers of Germany's Anuga food fair banned French foie gras this year under pressure from animal rights groups, France's melodramatic external trade minister Pierre Lellouche shot back, saying the ban would have "global repercussions."
While the president continues his European tour with a stop in Poland, Michelle Obama is heading home. But is she going home to be with her daughters? Or is it because she hates Poland, and more specifically, its president?
Why has Iran suffered through so many droughts over the last few years? Many people would say "weather patterns, or whatever." But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows the truth! "Western countries have designed plans to cause drought in certain areas of the world," he said in a speech in the Iranian city of Arak. And not only that! "European countries are using special equipment to force clouds to dump" rain on their own countries.
Microsoft has just filed its first antitrust complaint, in the EU against Google. Let's try to get past the obvious fact that this is like Lady Gaga complaining that someone dresses weird and rips off Madonna while she hurls stones out of a glass house. This is important stuff. It could determine which massive tech corporation controls all of our data in the dystopian future!
