The Euro Crisis: Why Greece’s Election Doesn’t Matter

Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza party defeated Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s New Democracy to place first in Greek elections, exit polls showed, after a backlash against years of budget cuts demanded by international creditors.

Political tumult in Greece, plunging stock and bond markets, the threat of default and exit from the euro: the script is eerily similar to the nightmare scenarios of 2010 and 2011. Debt-infested Greece skidded close to the edge then, saved by 240 billion euros (US$297 billion) in emergency loans improvised by European governments led by a reluctant Germany. Now, after achieving some signs of economic recovery, the government in Athens is again teetering, provoking a fresh round of doomsday speculation.

Barely five years ago, when Canadian pipelines could do no wrong and Canada was the darling of the United States’ oil industry, a joke making the rounds at Enbridge Inc.’s expanding Houston base was that Hugo Chavez had been named Employee Of The Year. “He’s done a lot to help us,” Stephen Letwin, who was in charge of Calgary-based Enbridge’s U.S. operation, said at the time.

Michael Pettis at China Financial Markets asks the question "Will Greece unravel by Christmas?"Pettis makes a historical case for exactly that while stating "I don’t think Europe can postpone Greece’s exit much longer."　From Pettis, via Email, with Permission ....Will Greece unravel by Christmas?

Greek stocks fell more than at any point during Europe’s debt crisis Tuesday after Prime Minister Antonis Samaras gambled his political future on bringing forward a parliamentary vote on a new head of state. Greek stocks tumbled the most since 1987 and three-year yields surged in response to the prime minister’s move. Unless he can persuade 25 opposition lawmakers to support his choice, Samaras will be forced to call a parliamentary election that anti-austerity party Syriza would be favourite to win.

Winning the Summit but Losing the War German chancellor Angela Merkel was the EU Summit Winner. She gave next to nothing to Italy and France, and a pittance to Spain. However, there was a price to that pittance, and it could cost Merkel dearly. Please consider German Party Leader Threatens To Axe Coalition

For a long time, Germany had a kind of modified two party system in which either the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats would win more votes and then the winning party would forge a coalition with the small Free Democrat liberal party. Then it evolved into a four-party system that was really a kind of two-party system in which a stable SPD/Green alliance of the left faced off against a CDU/FDP alliance of the right.