Dollar bonds to solve national debt?

"[The government] will this month launch a multibillion-dollar bond in the US in its hunt for new investors, selling itself for the first time as an emerging market country as demand for its debt dwindles in Europe."

No, not the British government, the Greek government.

Read more over at The Tap (where Mrs R found this story) and on Business Week

Remember that the current British government has been printing money to buy its' own bonds - pushing cash round in circles in a pretend marketing exercise, British national debt is at an all time high, and productivity is low. Then read this, also from Business Week:

“I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of reception from people who have a lot of history with sovereign defaults and near defaults and IMF packages,” said Jim Craige, who oversees $12.5 billion of emerging market debt at Stone Harbor in New York. “You’re going to get a fairly skeptical audience.”

And from CNBC

"Despite the recent statement by the European authorities that 'a solution has been found,' nothing has been achieved mainly because of very conflicting rhetoric out of Berlin and Paris,"

That Germany and France still won't let go of the European purse strings is almost as disconcerting as realising that the Euro experiment might be coming to an abrupt end.

Tucked away in the vaults of the Bank of England are lots of lovely Euros that that nice Mr Brown bought when he sold British gold at a rock bottom price.

What, Mrs R wonders, is the market value of scrap currency? A double dip for Britain's financial reserves?

And Labour, naturally, sidesteps the issue of financial management in its' manifesto.

The economy, and the country's finances, should be at the top of the election agenda, because unless the country's financially solvent it can't do anything at all. It can't spend on military, can't spend on healthcare, can't spend on infrastructure and it can't spend on civil service wages, not even if they're called quangos, charities or agencies - because any spare money will be spent on servicing debt. But Labour, and Labour-supporting media, won't let this debate happen. Labour, through their minions and placemen, control the pre-election agenda and they want us to talk about what the leader's wives wear, and make an in-depth assessment of the various leader's parents' lifestyles. How puerile is that?

The country deserves the truth from those in government - not vote-winning rhetoric.

People need to know that there can be no more rises in benefits, there can no longer be generous government hand-outs to anyone, not for years - because there's nothing left in the coffers. They've even sold the dead moths, and the British National Lottery is now run from Canada.

It's time the red ostriches, currently strutting the streets and attempting to glean a few votes from the remains of Labour's failed harvest, faced up to the grim reality that, whatever the outcome of the election, the country will be living with the rotten results of Brown's monetary policies for the next two or more generations**.

Thanks solely to Mr Brown's mismanagement, there has, truly, been an end to boom and bust. We're left with bust, bust, bust.

When the hidden books are eventually opened after the election and we see, for example, the true cost of PFI, there will be nothing but red numbers on the balance sheets - perhaps a fitting epitaph to a political party sporting the red rosettes.

Greeks bearing gifts? Perhaps the Greek economy will, ultimately, prove to be Europe's Trojan Horse.

**
Generation, in terms of ancestry, is 25 -> 30 years

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