Comments by Tall Will

Well said. Talk about thin skins - east wind, you not only misunderstood the article, you added the accusation that the USA is racist and white supremacist.

Yes, there is racism in the U.S. (though fading fast) but if you ask any other Asian, and particularly any black African or American about Chinese attitudes to race, you would be shamed by their observations. The Chinese are blatant racists about all other colors, especially about blacks.

You are throwing stones from your glass house.

Yes, short-sellers can be "lone voices of sanity", but the rhetoric that "short-selling" is inherently a healthy corrective to the Buy! Buy! herd mentality, cannot be sustained.

Congratulations to The Economist for bringing this out, though I must carp that it's about time: you have been parroting the conventional line, against the evidence of the harm short-selling does, for years. At last we're seeing the proof.

Good luck on obtaining more loans...

...I know that debtors universally resent their creditors, but whence this sympathy for the Greeks? From top to bottom, they have been gaming their system, evading taxes; lying through their teeth about their true financial situation; featherbedding their industries...and now, the attitude is - among highly educated Greeks no less, not just the lumpen proletariat - "Well, let the Germans pay; they didn't pay enough for what they did to us in the war."

Er, guys: it's game over.

Nige,

It's not race, it's religion. Think Roman Catholic vs. Protestant in Europe in the 16-17th centuries, or Northern Ireland.

They're all the same race.

I'd offer a more calibrated view of the Syrian military's willingness to kill fellow-Syrians. For now, most of the civilian casualties appear to be from snipers and stand-off shelling and mortaring rather than from the army "firing into crowds", which the Egyptian army declined to do.

If the Syrian army officers are finding it hard to get their soldiers to in effect execute civilians, this would explain why the rebels can so easily take control of cities and towns - the regular army shrinks from the face-to-face brutality of street fighting - and why they cannot hold them when the army moves up the tanks and the artillery and starts shelling.

Mexican stand-off? Maybe, but the long game looks to favour the opposition: the army will find it increasingly difficult to enforce compliance among the troops. Desertions would certainly rocket if there were a safe haven along the Turkish border, and it would become self-fulfilling.

A lot of civilians will die first, though.

I used the word "bane" in the second sense, of "a source of persistent annoyance and exasperation". I doubt that many would disagree with this meaning, obviously not the Palestinians!

You have conflated from taking the other meaning to put words in my mouth - please read only what i wrote - I have never said or implied, and I certainly do not believe, that Israel should be "removed".

Let me try to be even more clear: I believe religious extremism is a curse on the world. Whether it is Hindu, Christian, Moslem or Jewish extremism hardly ever matters - every one of the fanatics sow misery, hatred, and contempt for other viewpoints, often even for human life.

Effectively, you are saying "My guys are not as bad as those other guys." Well, they are: they're equally loathsome. What I'd love to see if for Muslims world-wide to stop excusing their religious brethren for the sake of "solidarity of the Umma", and for secular Jews to stop saying silent for the sake of the tribe's solidarity, the face of Jewish religious fanaticism.

As for john4law, your statements are offensive and do not merit a response.

You must be a Ph.D in Economics who has never been out in the real world.

A brilliant exposition of the situation, from the SUPPLIER'S viewpoint. Turn it around and ask if the consumer benefits, and all your arguments fly out the window. Lower prices for the user, do not place restrictive trade practices to stop the free flow of goods and ideas, and let the shop-workers (and cobblers) re-train to do something else.

What do you recommend, protecting coopers; fletchers; cobblers; ink-makers; type-setters...to preserve jobs?

The Europeans will be dragged kicking and screaming to reality, but they will be forced to face it.

Very true. May I recommend that you read "Bloodlands - Europe Between Hitler & Stalin" by Timothy Snyder. It is a shocking, depressing, but unforgettable book. Stalin killed more than Hitler.

A difficult and very touchy subject. Albert Einstein was, initially, anti-Zionist because he reasoned his own tribe would be just as oppressive when top dog as others had been towards the Jews when THEY had the whip hand. Later, he changed.

Still, it is a hard road to follow when one has many Jewish friends, likes and respects Jewish culture (and humour!) - though not the harsh, intolerant Abrahamic religion - but finds the modern state of Israel a bane on not only the Palestinians but on the whole possibility of peace in the Middle East. And, because the Jewish religious fanatical fringe hold the balance of power, the whole state is becoming more and more extreme and dangerous (e.g., bomb Iran), as Netanyahu and Likud pander to them to stay in power.

Point this out, though, and you're routinely smeared as anti-semitic.

Sad.

Ah yes, so all those Greeks who retire at 55, having evaded taxes all their lives; those Italians who rort the system and block any labour market reform that would permit growth and new jobs...they are all dupes of the wicked Anglo-Saxons.

It hasn't been that the Greeks are so uncompetitive that, even if 100% of their debts were written off, they cannot fund more than 80% of their current life style without further borrowing.

Thanks for clearing up my misunderstanding.

This furphy that if you don't continue to pay bankers huge bonuses they will all leave, cannot go unexamined.

Leave, where to? THe financial sector is, rightly, under the microscope, and now the regulators at last are starting to limit banks' own-capital highly leveraged bets (where the taxpayer bears the eventual losses but in the meantime while the bubble inflates, the traders take the bonuses), it's possible that the old model is dead.

Boards of Directors would do well to look much more critically at past practice of paying out 70-80% of "profits" to staff (including CEOs) in cash. At the very least, they should demand that bonuses be mostly in long-term deferred form, i.e., shares. In this respect, the RBS Board got it right.

Nice maps. Pity no one thought to ask the Palestinians, in 1920, 1922 or 1947.

And this Winston Churchill is the same man as who said, "I hate the Indians...if we have to shoot a few of them to get order, so be it." This is not to deny he was a great man, only that he had his Racist blind spots, and his imprimatur for a Jewish homeland should not be taken as gospel, especially as he fought tooth-and-nail against Indian self-determination in the land they already owned.

The Israelis can have peace or they can keep the West Bank. They cannot have both, and all the legalisms such as your referenced article are mere obfuscations.

"...could really cut the mustard as President". Really?

W. stole the 2000 election (thanks to Rehnquist's Supreme Court), got lucky with 9/11, and rode the "support the troops" emotion to a second term. One of the dumbest, least inquiring presidents since WW2.

What did WE get? A budget blowout that will take generations to clear; a trillion dollars spent on two unnecessary wars, starving the economy of fiscal oxygen; and a Republican-inspired GFC (with help from the Democrats in Congress) as a mess for Obam to clean up.

Fukushima was not a nuclear disaster in the Three Mile Island or Chernobyl sense. It was a failure, certainly, by TEPCO and the Japanese regulatory authorities, but the nuclear part of the disaster was triggered by TEPCO's failure to build the sea wall high enough to withstand the tsunami, and was compounded by its failure to place the diesel-powered back-up generators high off the ground in case of flooding, neither of them related to nuclear critics' codemnation of nuclear energy.

The foolishness of the global responses to this are typified by Switzerland's abandonment of its nuclear power sector. When was it last hit by a tsunami (or an earthquake)?

More band-aids. Disillusion (again) tomorrow. The only way to deal with this is to address the immediate AND the underlying problems: unlimited backing of Euro bonds coupled with taxes across the whole euro zone (spready the pain!) to amortize said bonds, and budget measures to to bring the PIIGS back into balance.

If the PIIGS do not balance income and spending before interest, all the liquidity help under the sun will only put off, not avoid, the inevitable systemic collapse. They will need to run a budget SURPLUS to cover interest and the lower the interest bill (bond yields) by Euro-wide help, the less severe will be the required fiscal tightening and the sooner the return to growth.

You have put your finger on the central point. Germans will not consent to anything that smells like a bailout unless the profligates (Greece; Spain; Italy etc.) are held to account. But who can trust them to keep their word? And even if the German politicians defy popular sentiment and agree to unlimited backing for EU governments, they will be shot down by Germany's Constitutional Court.

How to square this circle? The plan to jointly guarantee all sovereign borrowings over 60% of GDP and repay them over 25 years, backed by a special tax levy ranked senior to all other domestic sovereign borrowing and by strict budgetary rules limiting further borrowing is the key to the exit out of this mess. Countries such as Greece and Italy can put their house in order (i.e., balance their budget) while still going for the growth that is the only way they will eventually get out. They could start by freeing up their labour markets - it is notable that for all of the promises that were so impossible for Berlusconi, not one involved labour market reform (the French riot over lifting the retirement age from 60 to 62; the Greeks do the same; the Spanish reluctantly accepted that it go to 67, but not until 2026!). There is still a long way to go.

Unfortunately, you're right. A friend visited Greece last Summer (August) and many well-educated Greeks shocked her by saying, "Why should we do anything? The Germans can pay; it's their duty after what they did to us in the War."

Unfortunately, you're also totally wrong (and Sikorski is totally right): this is in Germany's interest, even more than in Greece's.

By all means make them trim their sails to fit their cloth. But by waiting to "help" until AFTER they have done so will be too late - you will all be down the gurgler. The (German) Committee of Economic Experts' plan is the best, and maybe by now the only, way to stabilise the eurozone.

Bravo!...and, for a change, clear sentences, no waffle, even elegance: no one can mistake the need, the urgency, or the implications.

Not quite. Certainly in Italy, and maybe in Greece (I do not have the figures), the country's assets far exceed its liabilities if we take into account government-owned land (i.e., sellable land, not the real estate under, say, the parliament); corporate assets; and investments. It's the UNWILLNGNESS to monetize these, not their value, which leads to the misconception that Italy is broke.

I disagree that technocrats are less adept than politicians in working out "pain-distribution" or income distribution. If anything, they are better, because they can look unblinkingly at the most utlititarian choices, i.e., the greatest good for the greatest number. For example, raising the retirement age; ending featherbedding & closed shops; eliminating early retirement options; making firing (and hiring) easier etc. etc. are all "pain distributions" which the POLITICIANS find impossible to put through in the face of entrenched lobby opposition. The technocrats do not care, and once they have done it, it will be very difficult later to re-introduce such distortions.