#1 The financial situation in Portugal continues to deteriorate thanks to an emerging political crisis. It all began last week when Portuguese finance minister Vitor Gaspar resigned...
"Mr. Gaspar's resignation on July 1 has opened a Pandora's box," says Nicholas Spiro, managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy. "Portuguese politicians from the President down are treating the exit of Mr. Gaspar, the architect of the fiscal and structural reforms demanded by the troika, as a green light for a public debate about the bail-out programme. Yet the manner in which this debate is taking place, with the President undermining the prime minister and the opposition leader seeking to renegotiate the terms of the programme, is spooking markets."The general population is becoming increasingly restless as the nation plunges down the exact same path that Greece has gone. Nobody seems to have any solutions as the economic problems continue to escalate. According to Reuters, the president of Portugal has added fuel to the fire by calling for early elections next year...
Portugal's president threw the bailed-out euro zone country into disarray on Thursday after rejecting a plan to heal a government rift, igniting what critics called a "time bomb" by calling for early elections next year.Due to all of this instability in Portugal, the yield on Portuguese bonds shot up to 7.51% this week. That is a very bad sign.
#2 The economic depression in Greece continues to deepen, and it is being reported that Greece will not even come close to hitting the austerity targets that it was supposed to hit this year...
A leaked report from the European Commission confirms that Greece will miss its austerity targets yet again by a wide margin. It alleges that Greece lacks the “willingness and capacity” to collect taxes. In fact, Athens is missing targets because the economy is still in freefall and that is because of austerity overkill. The Greek think-tank IOBE expects GDP to fall 5pc this year. It has told journalists privately that the final figure may be -7pc.Another 7 percent contraction for the Greek economy?
It has already been contracting steadily for years.
At this point, it would be hard to overstate how bad economic conditions inside Greece are. The following is from a recent article by Simon Black...
My friend Illias took a drag of his cigarette as he contemplated my question.#3 The economic crisis in the third largest country in the eurozone, Italy, has taken another turn for the worse. The unemployment rate in Italy is up to 12.2 percent, which is the highest in 35 years. An average of 134 retail outlets are shutting down in Italy every single day, and the debt of the country has been downgraded again to just above junk status..."
"Our government tells us that this will be a better year. No one really believes them. But all we can do is be optimistic. Too many people are committing suicide."
His statement probably best sums up the situation in Greece right now. It's as if the hopelessness has gone stale, and the only thing they have to replace it with is desperate, misguided, faux-optimism. And anger.
There are roughly 11 million people in this country. 3.4 million of them are employed, of which roughly one third work for the government.
1.34 million people are 'officially' unemployed. To put this in context, it would be as if there were 36 million officially unemployed in the US.
More startling, if you add the number of 'inactive' workers (i.e. those who gave up looking), the total number of unemployed is roughly 57% of the entire Greek work force.
at http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/10-reasons-why-the-global-economy-is-about-to-experience-its-own-version-of-sharknado
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