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All our guests do - see here - and feel much better for it. Here at Riverbend, we consider no (evening) news to be good news!
However, if you're still hooked on it, here's some interesting financial news (and isn't everything dominated by money these days?):
Greek newspapers are reporting that 1,000 homes lose electricity each day in Greece. Not just because they can’t pay their power bills, but also because the commonly evaded property taxes are now included in electricity bills.
Maybe some of the disconnections are legitimate though. Der Spiegel is reporting ‘more than 120,000 professionals have left Greece since the start of the country's financial crisis in 2010, according to a recent study by the University of Thessaloniki.’ When I lived in Greece, I regularly got stuck in lifts and it took forever for the technician to turn up. A country in crisis has very real consequences for the people there.
Meanwhile, the Greek government commissioned a report to total up the damages Germany owes the country because of the two world wars. The report was leaked and the owed amount comes to €162 billion. That would cut Greece’s debt in half. In other words, the Greek government inflicted twice as much economic damage on their own country as the Germans could in two world wars...
In Italy, the CEO of Unicredit bank told thrilled depositors that confiscating their deposits to bail out a bank is OK if ‘everyone else is doing it’. Meanwhile, a car carrying a ton of gold (literally a ton) was intercepted at the Swiss/Italian border.
News network Reuters released EU draft plans for Cyprus to sell most of its gold to pay for a small proportion of its bank bailout. Even though gold makes up a huge 62% of Cyprus’ reserves, selling most of it raises just €400 million.
That’s tiny compared to the EU’s €10 billion bailout, which just goes to show how undervalued gold really is and why no other European country has even discussed selling their gold to pay down debt.
Cyprus has since denied any discussions about selling its gold. But the size of the required bailout has increased 35% in the last month, with Cyprus expected to scrounge up an additional €6 billion euro from somewhere.
The Germans are no doubt rather annoyed about a new ECB study showing they’re amongst the poorer nations of Europe. Spain, Italy and Cyprus topped the wealthy end of the list. The reason for the surprising numbers lies in house prices.
In Germany, owning a house is less common and prices are much more stable, so rising house prices don’t drive national wealth. In much of Europe, owning a house is the major factor in personal wealth. Unfortunately, house prices in Spain fell 9.7% over the last year.
Saving the best until last, the EU is threatening to fine Spain if it doesn’t implement additional taxes. This is straight out of nincompoop land. Fining a country that can’t pay its bills because it can’t pay its bills?
Things will get a lot worse before they get better so I suggest you switch off the evening news.
