Gilly wrote:
WUB, I'm thinking you're The Oracle.
Cheers for that. I absolutely will read them - just a bit shaken up tonight and incapable of being sensible. Tomorrow I'll knuckle down, because I want to know. Thank you.
Don't worry, it's not good to be sensible all the time.
humanspirit wrote:
So Iceland created new banks and left the old banks with the foreign debt.
So why don't other countries dump their foreign debt this way?
Also which countries have the most foreign debt,is it the smaller countries?
In answer to your first question, I think there are three reasons. There might be other ones, but these are the ones that come to mind.
Firstly, a lot of very prominent and ruthless people put a lot of pressure on these countries to conform. We can only guess what is said behind closed doors, but when you have such a huge and powerful 'international community', a lot of pressure can be put on a small country like Cyprus. At the same time, the same people probably tell them that if they go along with the 'bailouts' that everything will work out okay. And the politicians are inclined to believe this for the next two reasons.
Secondly, politicians like short-term solutions because it gets them off the hook. By the time there are any consequences to their actions it might well be someone else's problem.
Thirdly, most politicians are economically illiterate, so they don't really understand what is going on anyway. Certainly if you put them up against the top people from these ruthless financial institutions and banks, they haven't got a chance of standing up to them unless it's painstakingly explained to them what's going on, because for the most part they will have no idea whatsoever.
In answer to the second question, the United States is the biggest debtor nation in history by a considerable distance. You can see this here:
www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-wor...korder/2187rank.html
If you're looking for the US, try starting at the bottom. Note that the source of that information is the United States Central Intelligence Agency, so it's pretty uncontentious.
If you look at the top of that list, you'll note that number 1 is Germany, the primary player in the Cyprus 'crisis' and pretty much all the other top nations are either from the 'newly industrialising countries', or East, and / or oil / gold rich nations. Most of the nations that are thought of as being wealthy are near the bottom.
But you also have to take into consideration the size of the economy, so there is a lot that the US could do to turn things around. They are one nation that could actually pay back its debts, but it would take a radical reorganisation of the economy, and they'd have to hurt all the wealthy financial sector, corporate and special interest groups that currently run the country.
It's probably hard to say definitively what the world's most indebted nation is in practical terms, but you can see the level of debt it a lot of major nations here:
www.usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock.html#
The reason that small countries like Cyprus are targeted first is simply because they can be put under the most pressure in the shortest amount of time. If you look at the first phase of 'bailouts', they picked off all the smaller nations first before putting pressure on Spain and Italy.
) are greek origin, and i have read this and things similar before... heres the cut and paste of where most of the DNA studies are mentioned ...
