11:00 – Autumn weather has really arrived in Winston-Salem. Our highs for the next few days are to be in the mid-50’s (~13C), with lows in the low 40’s (~5C). Now if only we’d have a hard freeze to kill all the mosquitoes.
Barbara is cleaning house this morning, after which we’ll work on biology kits. She still has a couple sets of bottles and a bunch of sets of envelopes to label, and I have solutions to make up.
12:02 – It sucks to be a Greek in Greece right now, and it’s going to get a lot worse quickly. The ECB’s Asmussen has just rejected Greek pleas for more time, which, as Asmussen correctly points out, is actually a request for more money. Time is, after all, money.
As Greece said earlier this week, it runs out of money next month. Not just money to repay outstanding loans and bonds. Greece runs out of money, period. That means no money to pay government salaries, including those of the police and military. No money to pay pensions. No money to provide even basic health services. No money to import desperately-needed food and drugs. No money, period. And no one is willing to lend them any more. At this point, Greece is already a failed state. Its last hope was the €31.5 billion bailout tranche, which has been held up for months and looks almost certain to be a chimera.
For years now, Greece has pretended to be attempting to comply with the Troika’s terms, while in fact simply ignoring them. For years now, the Troika has been pretending to be convinced that the Greek government is actually trying to comply with their terms, while being aware the whole time that Greece has never made any attempt to do so and has no intention of doing so. I’ve known all along that Greece and Greeks would eventually pay the price for 30 years of partying on borrowed money. When something can’t go on, it eventually stops.
For years now, everyone has been completely aware that Greece was going to crash eventually. And the truth is that no one really cared about Greece and Greeks then, and no one really cares now. All the EU ever cared about was preventing the crash of Greece from crashing the euro itself. The general feeling is that Greece and Greeks are going to get what they deserved all along, and they’re going to get it good and hard. If that €31.5 billion tranche isn’t granted, which I don’t expect it to be, expect to see Greece descend into complete chaos beginning late this year. By January, I expect to see Red Cross and UN humanitarian relief teams thick on the ground in Greece. Greece will become a fourth-world country by then. And, even if that tranche is somehow miraculously granted, that puts off the collapse only for a few months. Greece is going down, big-time.