http://www.zerohedge.com Authored by Martin Lueck of UBS, Cyprus is the euro area’s third-smallest economy in GDP terms (larger only than Malta and Estonia, but likely to be outgrown by the latter this year), accounting for less than 0.2% of the region’s output. Yet, we believe it is big enough to cause trouble. The country urgently needs external funding and applied for an EU/IMF/ECB (in short: troika) pro ...

THEATER KIKKER IN UTRECHT From 8/1 until 26/1 Theater KIKKER in Utrecht presents a series of performances under the title: Greece on sale! (in Dutch: Griekenland in de uitverkoop). To advertise the performance, a big banner of the Greek flag with the word 'sale' was hang on the facade of the theater. Someone destroyed the banner. According to the artists, the aim of the performance is the study of the relat ...

The eviction of Athens' occupation points at the dead-end authorities in Greece are hastily driving themselves in.   In the early hours of December 20, a police unit drove down Acharnon, a busy thoroughfare in central Athens. Arriving at the imposing building lying at its junction with Cheyden St, they informed the occupants they would be conducting a "routine" check. Only a few hours later, the buildi ...

The green crowd used to feel pretty rosy about Greece. After former Prime Minister George Papandreou was elected in 2009, he set up a government ministry to study the environment, energy, and climate change, and he talked up initiatives on eco-tourism and renewable energy. But now, after six years of recession, the country has begun buying into several new environmentally damaging development schemes to gen ...

By JUDY DEMPSEY BERLIN — The euro crisis has not been good for NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Mr. Rasmussen has used every occasion to cajole alliance members into investing and collaborating more in defense. He said recently that allied defense expenditures had declined by more than $56 billion compared with 2009. Practically all of those cuts happened in Europe, reducing defense spending ...

Why not make slaves out of unemployed people? Unpaid work by unemployed people is the suggestion of the ex finance deputy minister, Petros Doukas. Mr Doukas outlined on his personal webpage a number of suggestions in order for Greece to exit the crisis. One of his brilliant suggestions is that unemployed people should offer unpaid work wherever the State needs them to. Also enterprises could be asked whethe ...

Consider it a mea culpa submerged in a deep pool of calculus and regression analysis: The International Monetary Fund’s top economist today acknowledged that the fund blew its forecasts for Greece and other European economies because it did not fully understand how government austerity efforts would undermine economic growth. The new and highly technical paper looks again at the issue of fiscal multipliers ...

Growers and shrinkers   The fastest growing and shrinking economies in 2013 MACAU will be the fastest growing economy this year, according to the latest estimates from our sister company, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Growth is expected to return to a faster pace as new casino projects are resumed and Chinese visitors (with rising wages) continue to raise gambling revenues. Mongolia, in second ...

Country faces year of destiny, with doubts about survival of government and of its eurozone membership as austerity bites In the three years that Greece has been engulfed by the drama of its debt, crises have come and gone. But the next 12 months are likely to be more critical yet with politicians and pundits predicting that 2013 will ultimately define whether Athens remains in the eurozone. For once, Greek ...

 The New York times LONDON — Last month, the European Commission’s top economic official in Brussels, Olli Rehn, received an intriguing e-mail. Greece, under pressure from its European creditors, wanted to retire some of its debt by buying back its bonds at a deep discount to their face value. A senior executive at Deutsche Bank proposed that Europe take a tough negotiating stance toward private hedge funds ...