And you are here why?

In the wake of the Golden Dawn arrests in Greece , The Guardian (of course) has a great visualization showing the rise of Neo-Naziism in Greece. Take a look below, or better yet, go check out the original.

"Kicking the can down the road', sadly, says almost everything that needs to be said about the EuroCrisis, and the way its been dealt with over the last few years.  Barry Ritholz takes it one step further though ... Yeah! The Greeks Voted! For the X n-th   time, important events took place in Europe that either did or did not resolve an impending crisis that is either imminent or not. This was absolutely and unequivocally crucial, unless it didn’t matter at all. Either of which was equally likely. Indeed, this past week was absolutely critical, except that it wasn’t. The Greek elections determining their future relationship to the EuroZone was simply of the utmost importance, unless not. Yes, they didn’t matter; No it was quite important. Unless it was the other way around. The ‘ mother of all central bank interventions ’ is going to save Europe, unless it doesn’t, in case its back to square one. Everything has changed, except nothing is different. Indeed, nothin...

FT alphaville asks the same question , and as usual, has an answer too.  Its all based on something called TARGET - not The House Of Cheap Plastic, the Trans European Automated Real-Time Gross Settlement Express Transfer . (ed: Who names these things?  Wackos, one and all).  To quote One of the mysteries, to me, of the Greek crisis has been why there should be any deposits left in the local banks. All those with more euros than they need in order to eat and stay warm and dry should have moved their savings to, say, Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, while they still can. The answer, of course, is that they have. The Greek system has only survived this slow-motion bank run thanks to the German banks sending it right back to them, via the Bundesbank, through the  Trans-European Automated Real-Time Gross Settlement Express Transfer. What, never heard of TARGET? Do keep up. It’s an international version of the transmission system which allows money deposited in Barclays...

So, it looks like S&P has cut Greece's rating to "Selective Default" To which, all I have to say is Could you possibly be later to the party ?  Seriously, as Barry Ritholz points out When a borrower informs their lenders that they will a) Not be repaying the full loan amount; and b) Not making those reduced payments on time — they are technically   in default . When they then  fail to make the full payments on time, they are actually in default Everybody has known for at least 6 months (you could argue for 2 yrs) that Greece was not going to be repaying the loan amounts on time.  Everybody! . Brings up the obvious question - does anybody even care about the ratings agencies any more? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

via @yvessmith

Why they persist on calling it a Bailout is utterly beyond me, its the biggest non-default Default ever, from what I can tell.  Felix Salmon has all the gory details ... The document gives us most — but not all — of the information that bondholders will need in order to be able to decide whether or not they’re going to tender their bonds into the exchange. It’s written in very dense legalese — the first sentence is 70 words long, with only one comma — so let me try to pull out the important bits. This is complicated, as you might imagine. It makes a significant difference (a) what bonds you hold, whether they’re Greek law or English law, and also (b) where you live, whether it’s in Europe or in the US. (There are also, it turns out, Swiss-law bonds as well, which have their own very special treatment.) But at the end of the day, most bondholders are going to get pretty much the same things when they tender their bonds; you’ll forgive me for ignoring some of the more niggl...

Pictures from the Atlantic with the people's reaction to the votes in Parliament . Go check the rest out - I, literally, have nothing else to say...

Hat tip Barclays, by way of ZeroHedge

Full article here... ... even if there are significantly lower interest rates combined with very optimistic assumptions about the economy, the surplus would have to amount to more than 10 percent of GDP -- a value that, as Klodt notes, not a single industrialized country has ever achieved in recent decades.   ... IMF economists concluded that emerging economies could support maximum debt levels of 63 to 78 percent of GDP in the long term. "... the IMF people are realizing that Greece, in structural terms, should really be classified as an emerging economy," says a senior official at ... the Bundesbank.  "After all, it doesn't make sense to demand debt repayments that can never be made."