Greece

Greece is the basket case of Europe. They are part of the Euro-zone which has strict economic requirements to join, but Greece has been a socialist country for many years under its PM George Papandraeou with enormous social benefits, and together with the economic downturn this has caused huge deficits in Greece. In order to help Greece, and because several other Euro-zone countries such as Portugal, Spain and Ireland have been having similar difficulties, the EU leadership met last month to see what they could do. But, unlike the US, the EU has no common economic system to subsidize each other. In fact, apart from agreeing to give Greece guaranteed low-interest loans, the other EU countries led by Germany did nothing. This left Greece to take major austerity measures that caused several nationwide strikes. Finally it now appears that Greece has a need for 60 billion Euros or the country will default, and they could not get these funds from private sources. So they went to the EU countries and asked for the loans that they had offered, but so far they are not forthcoming.

It seems now that there are three possibilities, either Germany will agree to foot the bill for the loans, or Greece will default, and if it does it may be forced to leave the EU. This would be a disaster for the EU, not only because of the financial situation and the apparent weakness of the Euro, but there are several other countries waiting in the wings to see what happens. You can be sure that the financial powers that be (including George Soros) will be betting that that Greece will defalut and they will make enormous profits if it does.

Two further comments, first, the UK and the USA are both in financial difficulties, for different reasons. In the UK it is because they did not handle the economic downturn very well, but in the US it's because Obama paid enormous sums to the banks and also now has to foot the bill for the healthcare plan. We hope they both pull out of it. The other comment is that Israel is not in a similar situation to Greece, its economy is strong. There are several reasons for this, first when Netanyahu was Finance Minister in Sharon's Government he forced the financial system to reform to a more capitalist model. Also, the banking system in Israel is much stricter, so there were very few bad loans made. Also, Israel's system is based largely on technological exports to the world that gives it a cushion from local fluctuations. So whenever we complain remember that there are others worse off than us.