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The spokesman for Greece's extremist far-right Golden Dawn party caused an uproar today when he physically assaulted two left-wing deputies on live television during a morning political show. Tempers frayed on the political show on the private Antenna television station during a discussion on the country's politics in the run-up to repeat elections on June 17th. Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris took offence at a reference by radical left Syriza party member Rena Dorou over a court case pending against him. Mr Kasidiaris (31) bounded out of his seat and hurled a glass of water across the table over Ms Dorou when she said there was a "crisis of democracy when people who will take the country back 500 years have got into the Greek parliament". He then turned on prominent Communist Party member Liana Kanelli, who had got out of her chair with a newspaper in hand and appeared to throw it at the Golden Dawn member. Talk show host Giorgos Papadakis ran over t...

You didn't think investors would voluntarily give up on the potential to generate returns between 50% and 333 % now did you following the ' coercively voluntary ' (aka Schrodinger Spanish Inquisition) Greek debt exchange? Because here they come. Reuters reports that a Hamburg law firm representing 110 Greek bond holders have formed a class action group and intend to sue banks and the Greek state following the Greek swap. It is unclear yet if there are any hedge funds participating in the group, or if these are the entities represented by Bingham. Most likely not: those will almost certainly seek non-class action status so as not to dilute the legal effort, if not fees. However, now that the precedent is set, look for the onslaught of lawsuits to start in earnest. What is probably quite important is that European taxpayers will now be delighted to know they are paying the Troika lawyers' $1000/hour legal fees ( and uncapped expenses). From Reuters: Lawyer...

Greece’s use of collective action clauses forcing investors to take losses under its debt restructuring triggers payouts on $3 billion of default insurance, the International Swaps & Derivatives Association said. A total 4,323 credit-default swap contracts may now be settled after ISDA’s determinations committee ruled the use of CACs is a restructuring credit event, according to a statement distributed today by Business Wire. Before the ruling, Greek swaps rose to a record $7.68 million in advance and $100,000 annually to insure $10 million of debt for five years. Swaps traders will hold an “expedited” auction March 19 to “maximize” the number of bonds that can be used to set payout amounts on the contracts, New York-based ISDA said on the committee’s website today. Auctions, which set a recovery value on the underlying bonds, typically are held about a month after credit events are triggered. A swaps trigger “raises the question of which country is next and which banks are m...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The International Swaps and Derivatives Association said Friday that the Greek government's use of collective-action clauses, or CACs, to amend to terms of Greece-issued bonds qualifies as a "credit event" for Greece. A credit event requires a payout to those who held credit default swaps as insurance to protect themselves in the event of a Greek default. The ISDA decision could trigger payouts on $3.2 billion of those insurance-like contracts, according to Dow Jones Newswires. The news comes after the Greek government announced that 83.5% of its private-sector bondholders agreed to a bond-swap deal. That rate fell short of the 90% needed to prevent legal force to get the rest of the private bondholders to participate, so Greece's finance ministry said it got approval for CACs, which would bring the total participation rate to 96% by forcing some bondholders on board. Original source

Greece’s secret loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) was a costly mistake from the start. On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to 5.1 billion euros, he said. Papanicolaou and his predecessor, Christoforos Sardelis, revealing details for the first time of a contract that helped Greece mask its growing sovereign debt to meet European Union requirements, said the country didn’t understand what it was buying and was ill-equipped to judge the risks or costs. “The Goldman Sachs deal is a very sexy story between two sinners,” Sardelis, who oversaw the swap as head of Greece’s Public Debt Management Agency from 1999 through 200...

National Intel Report - March 6, 2012 - Greece, the best and safest investments are gold and silver default will bring Europe down , the stock markets are about to crash , inflation will continue to rise.

Gold and silver were sharply lower Tuesday morning as markets focused on news that less than 90% of Greek government bondholders would voluntarily accept the terms of a bond swap. Spot gold was down 1.94% at 10:40 a.m., having traded as high as $1,685.80 and as low as $1,661.90. The London morning reference price was fixed at $1,685.50, according to Kitco market data. Spot silver was showing a 3.44% loss, bid at $32.83 with an ask price of $32.93. The morning high as of time of writing was $33.39, and the low was $32.45. Tuesday’s reference price was set at $33.22 in the London a.m. Some 75% to 80% of Greek bondholders are expected to voluntarily accept the terms of an exchange of some 177 billion euros ($234 billion) of long-term Greek bonds , according to a Wall Street Journal report , less than the 90% necessary to avoid triggering a collective-action clause that would force all bondholders to swap old for new Greek debt. Enacting the collective-action clause would trigger...

The situation in Europe has now reached the point that the major players have shown their hands. And they are: Germany will not put up more money unless Greece essentially passes up its fiscal sovereignty. The G20 will not give more money to Europe via the IMF unless Germany and other EU nations create a “firewall” by putting more capital into the ESM mega-fund.  The ECB has announced Greek bonds are not eligible collateral for its LTRO operations, so if banks need immediate liquidity, they need to go to national central banks ( read Germany). This is quite a turn of events. Prior to this, the ECB and Germany were seen to be working hand in hand (aside from the usual political spats) to save Europe. But between the ECB’s decision to swap out its Greek debt for new debt that won’t take a hit in the event of Greek default as well as its recent rejection of Greek debt as collateral for LTRO loans, it appears that the ECB is increasingly going to make Europe’s problems...

Earlier today, we learned the first stunner of the Greek "bailout package", which courtesy of some convoluted transmission mechanisms would result in some, potentially quite many, Greek workers actually paying to retain their jobs: i.e., negative salaries. Now, having looked at the Eurogroup's statement on the Greek bailout, we find another very creative use of "negative" numbers. And by creative we mean absolutely shocking and scandalous. First, as a reminder, even before the current bailout mechanism was in place, Greece barely saw 20% of any actual funding, with the bulk of the money going to European and Greek banks (of which the former ultimately also ended up funding the ECB and thus European banks). Furthermore, we already know that as part of the latest set of conditions of the second Greek bailout, an ' Escrow Account " would be established: this is simply a means for Greek creditors to have a senior claims over any "bailout" ...

If there is one war that Greece could not afford to join, that is with the global computer hacking collective known as Anonymous. Yet as of minutes ago, that is precisley what happened, after Anonymous, as part of what it now calls Operation Greece, took down the Greek Ministry of Justice ( http://www.ministryofjustice.gr /). While the pretext for the hacking appears to have been an arrest of the wrong people, is seems to have angered Anonymous to the point where they have left an extended message of demands on the Greek website, warning that unless the IMF withdraws from the country and the government resigns, all debts of Greek citizens will be wiped clean. Translated from the Greek:      Citizens of Greece       We are Anonymous.       We watch every day your government abolishes the constitution and institutions of the country.       We see them leading you closer and cl...

A plan has been laid out to help Greece and the worldwide ponzi continue to print money and pile on debt, but by no means is the deal complete. Those who’s actions a deal is dependent on are: Private investors holding Greek debt: The Institute of International Finance (IIF) is supposedly representative of private investors and the IIF will have a full committee review the details and make a decision. However, the IIF does not bind all private investors to an agreement. Gaining 95% of private investors to accept write down of 53.5% on the face value of Greek government bonds is what’s being deemed acceptable for the agreement to pass. Here’s more on the role of the private investors at CNN Money . European Union members: Per CNBC - Analysts at Nomura Securities questioned whether Finland and Denmark in particular would sign on. “The fact that the agreement was reached is a positive development in that it prevents an immediate disorderly default,” Nomura said. “However, th...

The regime of drastic cuts has tipped the economy into a violent downward spiral. They thought that private industry would muddle through as the state went through the austerity mincer. What the EU-IMF "Troika" did not fully understand is how many firms were really part of the state in disguise. "The Greek government outsources everything," said one official with close knowledge of the events. Faced with the guillotine, the state first slashed procurement contracts and then stopped paying its bills altogether. The government is now €7bn (£5.8bn) in arrears to private companies, including €3bn in unpaid VAT refunds for exporters. It is why business has borne the brunt of the fiscal squeeze, suffering 450,000 job losses, and why Greece's unemployment has soared to 21pc. At the same time the banking system seized up. More than €60bn of deposits were withdrawn. By November, no Greek bank could issue a letter of credit accepted anywhere in the world, with calam...

A written document giving firm dates and detailed actions for a planned Greek default has been in the possession of two top Wall Street bank currency trading bosses since the second week in January. The Slog has separate but corroborative sources affirming the existence of the document, and a conviction among senior bank staff that – at least at the time – the plan represented “a timetable, not a contingency”. The plan gives a firm date of March 23rd for default to be announced after the close of business. Senior bankers on Wall Street have been given detailed documentation setting out a timetable to Greek default, including firm dates and technical ‘orders’ about last use of the euro as a currency there. The revelation arrived at Slogger’s Roost last Monday, since when I have been trying to obtain corroboration. This arrived in the early hours of today (Thursday). One of the banks is Barclays Capital (Barcap) run by controversial figure Bob Diamond. The other must remain anonymous f...

News out of Brussels last night was that a package is being put together that would haircut Greek bonds by 70%, thus only paying back 30 cents on the dollar to anyone holding Greek paper. This will set a precedent that will eventually be played out all over Europe. Full AP story HERE.   This is extremely bad, and will spell the end of the big U.S. banks and the financial system in total. But EVERYONE needs to understand credit default swaps (CDS) first. CDS are insurance policies that investors have traded – very similar to OPTIONS for my old clients and cattle people out there. Buying a CDS is essentially like buying a put. The buyer pays a premium, or fee, to the writer, or seller of the CDS that says that the seller will guarantee and make whole the buyer’s position in a specific bond IF the entity behind the bond (such as Greece) defaults. In exchange for paying the premium and being made whole after a default, the buyer of the CDS surrenders the bond posit...

It was tried previously (several times) under "slightly different" circumstances, and failed. Yet when it comes to taking over a country without spilling even one drop of blood, and converting its citizens into debt slaves, Germany's Merkel may have just succeeded where so many of her predecessors failed. According to a Reuters exclusive, " Germany is pushing for Greece to relinquish control over its budget policy to European institutions [ZH: read ze Germans] as part of discussions over a second rescue package, a European source told Reuters on Friday." Reuters add: "There are internal discussions within the Euro group and proposals, one of which comes from Germany, on how to constructively treat country aid programs that are continuously off track, whether this can simply be ignored or whether we say that's enough, " the source said.' So while the great distraction that is the Charles Dallara "negotiation" with Hedge Fun...

Time for the dominos to fall where they may: head of sovereign ratings at S&P Kraemer spoke on Bloomberg TV, and said the following: KRAEMER: GREECE, CREDITORS `RUNNING OUT OF TIME' IN DEBT TALKS -BBG KRAEMER: EURO LEADERS HAVEN'T TACKLED CORE UNDERLYING PROBLEMS -BBG KRAEMER SAYS EUROPE MUST DEAL WITH IMBALANCES, COMPETITIVENESS -BBG And the punchline: KRAEMER SAYS HE BELIEVES GREECE WILL DEFAULT SHORTLY - RTRS The only thing he did not add is that the default will be Coercive. What happens next is anyone's guess, but whatever it is it is certainly priced in. Also, let's not forget that the inability of the market to react to any news ever again is most certainly priced in. Original source

With Max Kaiser and Directed by Stacy Herbert. It happens all over the world, but it's been a long, long time since a European country has had the experienced. Default. National bankruptcy. Here's what happens when a country goes broke.

Well, it is not just the CDS ban, the fact that Greece is now done is also a modest factor, but since nobody can short Greek default risk unhedged, the only option is to short the bonds. As they did today en masse. Greek 1 Year bonds: the most liquid proxy for default in the absence of 1 Year CDS, closed at 183%, after hitting an all time high of 188%, following yesterday's 173% close. To all those who bought 1 Year Greek bonds when yields hit 100% a month ago because "they just couldn't possibly drop any more, and you would double your money in one year guaranteed", condolences for the 50% loss. We are certain that a new batch of bottom callers will emerge, this time calling for doubling your money in six months.... Then three.. Then one and a half... etc... Until finally Zeno's paradox catches up and you either double your money overnight or you lose it all. Original source at Zerohedge .