Skip to main content

Greece -- an deal has been stuck, but will it stick?

One clause of the Greek/EU/ECB/IMF agreement felt wrong; Sunday trading -- this was considered an essential change that Greece has to enact.  Greece had to allow, even promote Sunday trading, this was an essential demand from Germany.  And yet if you ever travel to Germany (or France) you will notice that everything is shut! If this was so essential to the economic health of Greece, well then you would expect other European nations to enact/have similar laws, but this is not the case.  

The Greeks have just bought themselves a lot of money (necessary) to repay their lenders (German/British and American financial institutions -- and the providers of credit protection (CDS) must be breathing in relief).  Greece just got $90 billion that should keep them going until early 2016 -- their repayment/refinancing obligations run at around Euro 10 billion a month.  I've not seen/heard about any debt forgiveness or loan extension. 

There is no doubt that massive changes are about to occur in Greece, the Greeks themselves are in for a shock and a difficult time, but they got a taste of economic armageddon when the ECB effectively shut down the banking system.  One item missing from the agreement:  Debt forgiveness.  Greece will never be able to repay its outstanding debts, debt forgiveness should/must be part of the solution, but the asymmetry of power -- Greece has no cards left, allow Germany to dictate terms that itself would never agree to abide by in terms of economic changes.   

It is more than likely that I have lost my bet that Greece will leave Europe and the Euro.  Although my bet still has nearly 21 months until it expires.  The demands on Greece were onerous, the concessions appear to be few, and in fact if Greece could not afford $ 340 billion in debt, I am not clear how an additional $90 billion will help -- it just seems to me that the can was, once again, kicked down the road (BTW I am fully aware that most of the $ 90 billion will be used to refinance existing debt... so the overall debt burden may not rise as much as $ 90 billion).

Time will tell 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu