There’s a pretty striking article in Vanity Fair this month by Michael “Liar’s Poker” Lewis on the Greek debt crisis:

Beyond a $1.2 trillion debt (roughly a quarter-million dollars for each working adult), there is a more frightening deficit. After systematically looting their own treasury, in a breathtaking binge of tax evasion, bribery, and creative accounting spurred on by Goldman Sachs, Greeks are sure of one thing: they can’t trust their fellow Greeks.

Some quirky nuggets include:

• The average Greek railway employee earns 65,000 euros a year – yet the nationalised train system is so broken it’s been calculated that it’d be cheaper to put all the passengers into mini-cabs.
• ‘Arduous’ pensions kick in at 55 for men and 50 for women. Among those who’ve managed to get themselves on the list are hairdressers, radio announcers, and musicians.
• No one is ever punished for not paying taxes – it is compared by one insider to not opening a door for a lady.

There’s paragraph after paragraph of this stuff. Dumbos who compare Greece with the US or UK, read it and weep tears of relief.

(Source: Vanity Fair)

Rupert Murdoch surely expected the readership of the The Times to drop today, as he begins charging for access to his flagship online newspaper.

But I wonder if he thought it would fall so far ahead of time, when registration was required but access was still free?

If graphs had sound FX, this one would go: "Deeeoooowwww...."

A 60% drop in traffic in just a couple of weeks is not to be sniffed at. But Murdoch is gambling that fewer readers coughing up £1 a day is worth a lot more than millions of extra readers paying nothing.

As an Internet publishing mogul myself, I’d love to see paid-for content becoming widespread on the Web. Either I’d get more cheapskate visitors, or I’d get more advertising, or – vanishingly unlikely – I could start to charge, too.

Yet I can also tell you the immediate problem for The Times is that nobody is now going to link to it. I’ve already dropped it from ‘Weekend Reading’ over on Monevator. Over time this will have a huge impact on its traffic.

Finally, the Daily Mail’s massive readership is depressing. All those sneaky peaks of a celebrity’s diet horror or a pop starlet exposing herself really do add up.

(Source: BBC)

The weakness of sterling means that London is now on a par with Budapest and Warsaw when it comes to living costs for international executives who are being posted abroad.

The extreme currency movements of the past couple of years have pushed other countries down this dubious ranking, too:

“These movements demonstrate the impact of exchange rates on cost of living and salaries for international assignees,” says Lee Quane, Regional Director – Asia, ECA International. “Three years ago, the weakness of the yen pushed Tokyo out of our global top ten, but as the currency has strengthened, the cost of living for international assignees has risen. This, coupled with Luanda’s fall from the number one spot due to the depreciation of the kwanza as its unofficial peg against the US dollar was loosened, means Tokyo now sits at the top of the ranking.”

Clearly, we’re not talking frugal living here. These are living costs for a busy Jones-chasing exec who’s going places, not a frugalist cutting his or her cloth on the fringes.

Hence why the Angolan capital makes the top three in the full list:

Rank 2010	Location	Rank 2009
1	Tokyo	2
2	Oslo	8
3	Luanda	1
4	Nagoya	3
5	Yokohama	4
6	Stavanger	14
7	Kobe	6
8	Copenhagen	7
9	Geneva	9
10	Zurich	10
11	Bern	13
12	Basel	11
13	Libreville	12
14	Helsinki	15
15	Moscow	29
16	Paris	16
17	Abidjan	17
18	Abuja	19
19	Tel Aviv	24
20	Seoul	102
21	Stockholm	80
22	Jerusalem	27
23	Kinshasa	20
24	Vienna	23
25	Brussels	35
26	Berlin	22
27	Canberra	149
28	Rio de Janeiro	132
29	Manhattan	18
30	Sydney	150
31	Baku	21
32	Strasbourg	31
33	Gothenburg	99
34	Hong Kong	30
35	The Hague	36
36	Munich	34
37	Melbourne	163
38	Luxembourg	40
39	Rome	38
40	Brisbane	169
41	Honolulu	25
42	Lyon	44
43	Perth	168
44	Antwerp	43
45	Adelaide	172
46	Shanghai	28
47	Cameroon	50
48	New York	32
49	Dusseldorf	41
50	Athens	49

(Source: ECA International)

Well, it’s the day after the afternoon before and the papers are filled with budget analysis. One humble blogger can’t hope to be more comprehensive, but I did think this graph from the BBC budget analysis was revealing and worth sharing:

Not good if you're very poor or rich

This graph suggests it’s the tails of the income bell curve who have been hit hardest.

An interesting political outcome, and perhaps a quirk of coalition government aiming to pacify the majority of voters, as well as a minority of its own politicians?

(Source: BBC)

Some sterling and creative entries over on LogoMyWay’s BP logo redesign competition:

Very creative stuff, but this kind of thing just makes BP shares even more a buy in my book.

(Source: LogoMyWay via The Big Picture)

According to this article in The Guardian, the US outcry over the BP leak in the Gulf is as usual rather myopic coming from the world’s largest per capita consumer of oil.

Look at the situation in Nigeria:

According to Nigerian academics, writers and environment groups, oil companies have acted with such impunity and recklessness that much of the region has been devastated by leaks.

In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig last month.

I think the US public is right to be up-in-arms about the BP leak – but I think it’s anger should go further.

(Source: The Guardian)

If you’re wondering why your Lloyds shares fell nearly 10% today (or was that just me?) then you need to keep an eye on Libor, which hit a 10-month high in dollar terms today:

The three-month U.S. dollar London interbank offered rate, or Libor, was fixed at 0.53625%, up from 0.50969% on Monday, according to the British Bankers’ Association. Tuesday’s rate marked the highest level since early July and continues an uptrend that began in the spring.

Libor is a benchmark of how much banks charge each other for borrowing funds from one another in the London wholesale market. In normal times it closely tracks base rates, but at times of crisis it balloons.

We’re still a long way from the 5% interbank rate we saw in 2008 as fear gripped the market, but the steady rise on the back of European sovereign debt worries is certainly unnerving some people.

A key difference between 2008 and now is that bank balance sheets are much ‘cleaner’ today, compared to the height of the credit crisis, when every banker wondered what timebomb was about to explode next.

This may not stop Libor continuing to rise – or Spanish banks failing, of course – but it does mean its progress should be more logical and orderly, and thus that we should avoid the complete shutdown of the market.

Well, touch wood!

(Source: MarketWatch)

The most interesting aspect of the 750 billion euro ’shock and awe’ stability package outlined by European ministers today is that the ECB is now going to be purchasing Euro government bonds.

This is a turnaround for the ECB, which said only last week it would be doing no such thing!

No wonder markets were caught on the hop. (Though some may say it’s hardly cricket to say one thing then do the complete opposite the very next week).

So, is this Eurozone quantitative easing, Bank of England style?

Not exactly. The ECB is saying that the bank’s purchasing of troubled bonds will be ‘sterilized’ by selling other assets that it owns. This differs from the Bank of England’s approach, which has seen entirely new money created and injected into the economy.

But I wonder how long the ECB’s approach will last.

The stability fund means Euro zone government debts will surely be repaid in the medium term – the immediate liquidity crisis is over.

But it doesn’t make Greece, Italy or Spain any richer overnight.

Ultimately, as with the UK and America, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that inflating away the worst of Europe’s liabilities will be politically tempting. The result could be higher yields on even German government bonds and a weaker Euro in the long-term.

That could be good for German and French exporters – and their stock markets – which may help the Eurozone balance its books. But long-term higher yields won’t help the Spanish or Italian economies, let alone the Greeks.

And closer European integration to justify support for the peripheral countries – or else eventual ejection of the weaker members – now seems even likelier to me.

Sometimes the market does something extraordinary while you’re looking the other way. Take UK gilts, for instance, where the 10-year yield has come down around 50 basis points (or around 0.5%) since hitting 4.25% in March, mainly in the past 10 days:

A big move in a big, liquid market

A few guesses as to why:

• The UK has taken on ’safe haven’ status in the face of Greek woes
• The market is satisfied with all the parties in today’s election
• People have got jumpy, and run away from risk

Long-time readers will know I don’t hold gilts and am waiting for a yield of at least 5% on the ten-years before I start buying.

Drinks are on you this month!

(Source: Fixed Income Investor)

At least that’s what happened last time:

What goes up must surely come down?

(Source: Business Insider)