Month: January 2017

Weekend Reading: Trump-eting Dow 20,000

Submitted by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Well, it finally happened.

After repeated attempts by investors to push the Dow above the psychological barrier of 20,000, it finally occurred during a flurry of executive orders and actions during the first week of the Trump Administration. Between orders for building a wall, orders to freeze regulations and plans being discussed for infrastructure projects, the basic material, technology and industrial sectors pulled all three major indices to historic highs as investors bet on increased spending and growth.

Of course, the push to all-time highs has also led to a further extension of the overbought and overly exuberant conditions of the market. As noted yesterday, the stock-bond ratio is at levels that have previously denoted trouble for the markets.

Furthermore, while interest rates turned up this week after their recent decline, the historic relationship between extremely suppressed volatility and the 10-year Treasury rate suggests a “flight to safety” is likely not too far into the future. 

I can only surmise how this eventually turns out. But whether it is extremely suppressed volatility, extreme long positions in small-cap stocks or historical short positions in bonds, the “rubber band” is stretched very tightly. 

Of course, while “Trump-xuberance” currently reigns, there seems to be nothing to worry about.

But then again, maybe that is exactly what we should be worrying about.

In them meantime, here is what I am reading this weekend as I wear my “Dow 20,000” hat.

Trump

Markets

Interesting Reads

“Gambling with cards or dice or stock is all one thing. It i??s getting money without giving an equivalent for it.” -? Henry Ward Beecher

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That Special Relationship Is Also With London’s City

Via The Daily Bell

 

On Friday, British Prime Minister Theresa May will become the first world leader to meet with Donald Trump since he was sworn in as U.S. President. The meeting breathes new life into the long-standing “special relationship” between the United States and Britain, with Mr. Trump already calling her “his Maggie,” drawing comparisons to the political bond forged between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. -The Globe and Mail

President Trump and Ms. May had a press conference to discuss some of their conversations and seemed to indicate it had gone well on a number of levels.

But really it doesn’t matter so much because the real special relationship is not so much between Trump and May as it between Washington and London’s City.

It is The City of London that has decided, at least partially, that Britain and America have a special relationship. That special relationship involves to some extent London’s city telling America what to do and even how to do it.

More:

Despite the many political differences between Ms. May and Mr. Trump – at first glance significantly larger than those between Mr. Reagan and Ms. Thatcher – both leaders would welcome a constructive partnership that builds on the traditional ties between the two countries, ties founded on demographics, religion, culture, law, politics and economics.

 

For Ms. May, the rekindling of this special relationship, in a post-Brexit context, would potentially add some credence to her aspirations for a new “global Britain,” while Mr. Trump’s as-yet untested credentials as a leader on the world stage would be burnished.

We can see from this that the special relationship is potentially good for both leaders. But if neither leader wanted a special relationship, the relationship would still exist. The leaders would be gone.

That’s right. One way or another, the people at the top would be encouraged to leave if they didn’t believe in the special relationship. The special relationship is that important.

It is a relationship based on the influence of top bankers in The City of London over the American financial system. It is not necessarily clear who these bankers are. They may be the Rothschilds or they may be other less well known families.

But it is a relationship based on the power that the City has around the world.

The City’s power goes back thousands of years. It may have begun in Sumer or Babylon. Then the neolithic culture that spawned it was found in Egypt and then Rome. After Rome, it was heavily integrated with the Holy Roman Empire and then with Venice.

After Venice, the City migrated to England and the square mile in London that comprised the Roman part of the City of London.

The City was primarily financial in nature and comprised primarily of banking. Its banking nature was reinforced in the 15th century when it became involved with central banking. It offered the King the ability to make war and forgave his debts in return for printing official bills.

Since then the City has only deepened its relationship with central banking and the counties that have central banks. The relationship is rarely spoken about. But it apparently runs around the world.

In Afghanistan, once the Americans came to power, they started a central bank though it doesn’t do much of anything. There is even a central bank of Libya, though the country itself is in a state of collapse.

Often as we can see it is America that helps create the foreign central bank. But ultimately central banking is run out of London’s City to a greater or lesser degree. This gives London’s City enormous, often unspoken, power.

Again, London’s City is not the same as London itself. It is a square mile within London that operates with its own rules. There are at least two other regions that are similar. One is Washington DC, and the other is the Vatican.

A fourth region may be added to these three. That would be Jerusalem.

But the City of London is where it all originates from what we can tell. And each central bank has a monopoly orientation. Thus the monopoly orientation of central banking is also encouraged by the City.

Conclusion: The City of London is at least partially behind the special relationship between England and America. The City is also behind monopoly central banking around the world. The special relationship is not necessarily objectionable but monopoly central banking most certainly is.

Other stories:

The Guardian Wants Other Newspapers to Help Share in Trump Investigation

Now the Entire EU Is Urged to Adopt a Basic Income

Negative Trump Coverage Is Long-Term Threat to His Presidency
 

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Mike Pence Speaks at March for Life, Photos of Trump Have NOT Been Edited to Make His Hands Look Bigger: P.M. Links

  • PenceVice President Mike Pence addressed the crowds at the March for Life in Washington, D.C.
  • Is the White House editing photos of President Trump to make his hands look bigger? Of course not, you morons.
  • The Atlantic has to correct like absolutely everything in this article about ultrasounds and abortion.
  • The University of Washington College Republicans published a statement that looked to some like a call for violence. (It’s particularly insensitive, given that someone was actually shot at the UW-CR’s recent Milo Yiannopoulos event.)
  • An author found a key witness in the Emmett Till murder case of 1955.

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Stocks Soar To Record Highs As Peso Jumps Most In A Year

Just seemed appropriate…

 

Ugly GDP helped take US Macro to its worst weekly drop in over 3 months…

 

Stocks had their best week in 2 months…(Trannies best, S&P worst)

 

Banks had a great week…(post-Inauguration)

 

But we wanted to bring this to stock traders' attention…

 

Note however that the short-squeeze highs were hit on Wednesday's open…

 

VIX plunged to its 2nd lowest close in 11 years… and note the desperate VIX plunge to get Dow back above 20100 into the close…

 

As realized vol crashed…

 

The VIX curve has steepened drastically…

 

The collapse in VIX has pushed the relative risk of stocks to bonds to near-record lows (something that has not ended well previously)…

 

With all the excitment in stocks, bonds ended the week barely unchanged (0-2bps higher)…

 

The USD Index fell for the 5th week in a row, closing at 2-month lows…

 

 

Yuan sold off into golden week (which is seasonally normal)…

 

The Mexican Peso surged to its best week in almost a year – the 3%-plus spike is the best since Feb 2016…

 

Oil ended the week unchanged, glued around the $53 level…

 

But RBOB (amid major inventory builds) tumbled for the 4th week in a row…

 

Silver spiked back to unchanged on the week…

 

And gold was monkeyhammered to its worst week in 6 weeks, back below $1200…

 

Top-down things don't seem so awesome…

 

And the gap between reality and hope is at a record high…

 

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Obama Issued A Massive Ammunition Ban Just One Day Before He Left Office

Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

In early December SHTFplan contributor Jeremiah Johnson warned the inauguration was still a long way off and that we should never underestimate a Marxist with an army of oligarchs to lean on. It turns out that Johnson’s warnings were right on target, as we have learned over the last couple of weeks that President Obama and officials in his administration moved feverishly to implement new rules and regulations with last minute initiatives.

One such regulation, which seemingly disappeared within the hustle and bustle of inauguration day, was a new order issued by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe just 12 hours before our new President was sworn into office.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe, an Obama appointee, ordered a new ammunition ban for certain federal lands on Thursday–his last full day in office.

 

The ban, which took effect immediately, eliminates the use of lead-based ammunition on federal lands like national parks and wildlife refuges, as well as any other land administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service.The ban is expected to have a major impact on much of the hunting that takes place on federal lands across the United States as lead-based ammunition is widely legal and used throughout the country.

 

Ashe said the order was necessary to protect wildlife from exposure to lead.

 

Source: The Free Beacon Via Survival Blog

That may seem like a big win for the anti-gun left, but The National Shooting Sports Foundation has already leapt into action:

“This directive is irresponsible and driven not out of sound science but unchecked politics,” said Lawrence Keane, the group’s senior vice president.

 

“The timing alone is suspect. This directive was published without dialogue with industry, sportsmen, and conservationists. The next director should immediately rescind this and, instead, create policy based upon scientific evidence of population impacts with regard to the use of traditional ammunition.”

As we noted earlier, President Trump has a lot of work to do to reverse the damage caused by the Obama administration.

Reversing this asinine ammunition ban is a good start.

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Homeschooling Then and Now

When the modern homeschooling movement started to emerge in the 1970s, many jurisdictions considered it a crime to teach your children at home. Today homeschooling is lawful in every state, albeit with different degrees of restrictions. It’s one of the great victories for educational choice, and its impact is only increasing. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of homeschooled children has grown from 850,000 in 1999, when the center started to count them, to 1,770,000 in 2011, the last year for which it has done a tally.

In other words, we’re long past the days when the stereotypical homeschooler was a hippie or a fundamentalist. They’re still there, but they’ve been joined by many members of the American mainstream.

Here’s an artifact from the days when homeschooling still seemed novel and strange. It’s a 1981 episode of Donahue, and the guests include two homeschooling families and John Holt, a fervent critic of institutional education. Back then, if Holt’s estimate on the show is accurate, there were only about 10,000 homeschooling families in the U.S. (That’s families, not students. But even if each of those families had a dozen kids, it would still be a big jump from there to 1999’s numbers.)

The audience greets the guests with a mixture of interest, skepticism, and sheer fascination. (One woman accuses one of the families of operating a commune.) Phil Donahue, as always, has a ball hopping around and playing devil’s advocate. And the video includes the ads from when the program first aired, so you’ll also get to see spots for everything from The Muppet Show to the Barnum & Bailey circus (RIP):

Bonus links: John Holt’s one article for Reason, way back in 1971, is here. The left/right alliance that legalized homeschooling is described here. And past editions of the Friday A/V Club are here.

National School Choice Week runs from through January 28 and features over 21,000 events involving almost 17,000 schools from all 50 states. Go here for more information about events and for data about how increasing school choice—charters, vouchers, educational savings accounts, and more—is one of the best ways to improve education for all Americans.

As a proud media sponsor of National School Choice Week, Reason is publishing daily articles, podcasts, videos, interviews, and other coverage exploring the ways education is being radically altered and made better by letting more people have more choices about learning. For a constantly updated list of stories, go to Reason’s archive page on “school choice.”

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‘CalExit’ Secession Petition Gets Approval to Circulate

California FlagLooks like we’ll see how mad Californians actually are about Donald Trump becoming president. The secretary of state has cleared the CalExit petition to collect signatures from voters.

As we noted back in November, CalExit is the hashtag for a movement for the Golden State to secede from the union and become its own country. While the movement existed prior to Trump’s election, it got a huge burst of publicity in the outrage and protests in left-leaning cities who were not happy about Hillary Clinton’s loss.

The CalExit folks now have 180 days to get more than 500,000 signatures for their initiative to get on the ballot in the fall. It’s actually a two-parter. The first part would ask voters to repeal the part of the state constitution declaring that California is an “inseparable” part of the United States and a follower of the United States Constitution. If that initiative passes, it would then place another measure on the ballot in 2019. That initiative would be the one to decide whether Californians actually want to secede from the union.

When this first started getting massive media attention, I was pretty sarcastic about the effort, so let me be very “Yes, I’m a libertarian” clear: Californians should have every right to decide whether they want to remain part of the United States. I was previously a supporter of the right of the citizens of the United Kingdom to decide whether they wanted to remain part of the European Union.

Having said that, though, I have seen little to change my mind that the people who are pointing to CalExit as a possibility have little grasp of either the demographics of the state, nor its actual finances. It is oblivious to the fact that the non-coastal parts of California are similar to the non-coastal parts of the rest of the United States (more conservative folks who voted for Trump). It is oblivious to the reality that the state’s financial crisis is due to overspending within California and not because they’re sending money to D.C. (Gov. Jerry Brown just announced that the state is sliding back into deficit spending again).

It would be fascinating if CalExit passed, and then the citizens within the state said, “Well, why stop there?” and continued seceding to create their own little quilt of Luxembourg-style countries. After all, citizens within the state, particularly those in Northern California, have been trying to secede from California to create their own states. They feel as left out by a state government dominated by coastal progressives who don’t care how their favored policies and regulations affect the economies in less-well-off parts of the state.

But let’s not get overexcited at the possibilities yet. The Los Angeles Times notes that the committee pushing the initiative hasn’t raised any funds and its volunteer numbers have dropped since people were so very angry in November and December. There’s also the matter that America (and American voters) would have to agree to let California leave.

If nothing else, secession organizer Marcus Ruiz Evans showed he’s at least familiar with what Reason Hit and Run commenters are likely to respond whenever we write anything here about the state of California.

“America already hates California, and America votes on emotions,” he said. “I think we’d have the votes today if we held it.”

Maybe he’s a lurker here.

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Is It Smart For Trump To Embrace “Big League” Dow Gains? History Says No

President Trump is anything but traditional.  He frequently says things that his predecessors would never have dared to utter publicly.  But, for the most part, his supporters applaud the candor and straight talk.

That said, one Presidential tradition that Trump may not want to break is celebrating stock market gains because what goes up, at least on Wall Street, usually comes crashing down in spectacular fashion at some point soon thereafter.  Alas, that didn’t stop Trump from celebrating #Dow20K over twitter:

 

Trump assistant, Anthony Scaramucci, also celebrated, saying “Dow 20,000 = big league. Thank you @POTUS.”

 

Of course, the only problem with taking credit for the gains on Wall Street is that you set yourself up to also get blamed for the losses.  Thats why, according to The Hill, past presidents have shied away from linking their presidency to stock market gains.

Under former President Obama, the Dow more than doubled in value, but his administration rarely cited gains in the market when promoting its record on the economy.

 

The main reason for that, longtime Wall Street observers say, is because what goes up will almost always go back down.

 

“There’s always a temptation for the president to celebrate what Wall Street is applauding,” said David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. “Wise advisers usually restrain them from doing it.”

 

Wessel noted that during the tech boom of the late 1990’s, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin counseled President Clinton against any back patting for surging stocks.

 

“He told the president, don’t take credit for the market going up, because you’re setting yourself up to take the blame when the market goes down,” he said.

There is no doubt that the “Trump Bump” is real with the Dow surging since election day.

Dow

 

That said, there is also no doubt that with each passing day, U.S. stock markets are looking increasingly bubblicious.  And, unfortunately for Trump, if it all comes crashing down over the next 4 years he will be saddled with the blame even though this catastrophe has been in the making for quite some time courtesy of Yellen & Co.

DOw

 

Taking a look at the Shiller 10-year trailing P/E, aside from the tech boom in 2000 when company valuations soared despite generating no revenue, the S&P hasn’t been this overvalued since the great depression in 1930. 

Shiller PE

 

So, while it’s fun to “win”, we suspect this fight will only have losers.

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Make Stocks Volatile Again

The general sentiment on the Convergex trading desks continues to be bearish, so today Nichaolas Colas reviews seasonal patterns for the CBOE VIX Index going back to its starting point in 1990 to see what that math says about current market risk.

Over the last 27 years, the VIX has tended to bottom in three specific months: January (15% of the time), July (22%), and December (30%).  When the VIX does bottom in January, its average low reading is 12.2; today’s close was 11.9. That doesn’t guarantee that we’re at the lows on the VIX for the year, but given January’s propensity to represent an annual low it does merit your attention.  And since changes in the CBOE VIX index are strongly (and negatively) correlated to equity market returns, this is a warning sign about the near term direction of US stocks.  Potential hiding places are few and far between, but we’d look at yield sensitive groups like Utilities, Consumer Staples and REITs, plus precious metals.

Nothing much typically happens in January, right?  It is cold out, daylight is in short supply, and everyone is economizing after spending too much around the Holidays. More recently, the “Dry January” movement seems to have emptied out the bars and nightspots in New York as well.

Yet a quick look at the history books shows that January (and not just the one in 2017) does get its fair share of excitement.  A few examples:

  • January 1, 1863. President Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation.  (Which, by the way, was a Presidential Executive Order.)
  • January 1, 1959. Fidel Castro rolls into Havana.
  • January 8, 1982. Breakup of the American Bell System into regional phone companies and AT&T long distance service.
  • January 10, 1946. The first meeting of the modern United Nations, in London.
  • January 16, 1979. The Shah leaves Iran after mass protests led by religious clerics.

When it comes to US stocks, January has an even-money chance of being the best or worst month of the year when it comes to one key measure of expected near term volatility.  Since the start of the modern CBOE VIX Index in 1990, January has marked the high point for risk pricing in a given year 4 times.  Likewise, it has been the low point for expected volatility 4 times as well. 

A few details:

  • In case you aren’t up on your options math, the CBOE VIX Index is essentially the price of insurance against a sudden drop in the S&P 500. Mathematically it is the implied volatility imbedded in the options prices for near dated S&P 500 futures contracts.  But all you really need to know is that when the VIX goes up, stocks tend to go down.  The range on the VIX since 1990 is 9 to +60. Lower numbers indicate little current volatility and fear, while higher numbers correlate to periods of market turmoil.
  • The VIX has peaked during any given year in January four times since 1990: On the 14th in 1991, the 14th in 1999, the 20th in 2009 and the 27th in 2003.
  • The VIX has troughed 4 times for any given year in January since 1990: on the 28th in 1994, the 26th in 1996, the 22nd in 1997, and the 24th in 2007.
  • This shows that January has an abnormal number of VIX highs and lows; if the distribution were even through a year then January should have only 2 apiece (27 years, 12 months in a year).
  • The VIX has a very strong seasonal pattern, especially as it relates to annual low points. Just three months – January, July and December – account for 66% of the annual lows for this measure back to 1990 (when it shifted from measuring expected volatility on the S&P 100 to its current look at the S&P 500 index).
  • As a point of interest, January, August and October are high points for the VIX some 48% of the time since 1990. Only January is on the “Top 3” list for both VIX highs and lows.

Now, the obvious question is “Could the current CBOE VIX reading represent a low point for the year?”  There are 3 reasons why it could:

A reading this low is more than one standard deviation away from the VIX’s long term average of 20. Additionally, the VIX rarely goes below 10.  Statistically, it is an unusually low reading for the VIX.

 

 

 

The seasonal factors we outlined above show that the VIX often visits its extreme point, high or low, for the year in January. And since we know the current level is not likely to the high point for the year, it could well be a low.

 

Fundamentally, there are rafts of reasons why stocks may become more volatile as the year progresses. US large cap equity valuations are still high at 17x this year’s earnings for the S&P 500 of $130. President Trump’s agenda may be largely pro-business with tax cuts and less regulation on offer, but it comes with uncertainties over trade policy and tariffs.  And the timing and cadence of those changes is still a wild card even if the promised reforms do eventually come to pass.

When the CBOE VIX Index moves higher, stocks tend to go lower, so the next thing to consider is what sectors might be safe parking lots during a shift in risk appetites.  Assuming that whatever shock that drives equity volatility higher also puts a bid into Treasuries, the answer are dividend yield plays such as Utilities, REITs, and Consumer Staples.  Gold and silver may also be safe havens, especially if the dollar weakens.

As with any historical analysis, we should always remember the old saying about history rhyming more than repeating.  We do know January tends to show extremes of the market’s perceptions of near term risks, for good or for bad. And we know that at current levels the VIX highlights a complacent market.  Does that assure us that things will get choppier from here?  Of course not.  But to be boldly bullish here is to ignore the historical patterns.

And that seems riskier than staying aware of both history and current market dynamics.

Furthermore, as Gavekal Capital's Eric Bush details, given the level of economic policy uncertainty, VIX should probably be higher…

Global economic policy uncertainty is near 20-year highs while the VIX is nearing 20-year lows.

This is an odd configuration for these two series. Usually as economic policy uncertainty moves higher, the VIX moves higher with it. That is not the case today. In the scatter plot below which plots monthly data points for the two series going back 20 years, you can clearly see how the latest data is an outlier. The other three data points surrounding the latest data point are from June 2016, July 2016, and November 2016. Based on the level of the economic policy uncertainty in the world, a regression model would have predicted that the VIX would be pushing 30 instead of hovering around 10.

All in all, it would seems more likely to us that the VIX will climb higher to close this gap rather than a swift drop in economic uncertainty.

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Greece Is In Trouble Again: Bonds, Stocks Plunge As Bailout Talks Collapse; IMF Sees “Explosive” Debt

It may – or may not – shock readers to learn that Greece is once again on the verge of collapse.

10-year bond yields shot up and stocks tumbled on Friday, a day after euro zone finance ministers acknowledged the country’s fiscal progress but once again failed to break an impasse with the IMF over the country’s future bailout targets. Early on Friday morning, the greatest Greek nemesis alive, and surely in the afterlife, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Greece’s creditors won’t unlock further financial aid to the country unless the government meets its reform promises, which he said it hasn’t done yet.

Two years after its third bailout, Athens and the Troika, or is that Quadriga, i.e., its European and IMF creditors, are still at odds over the fiscal goals Greece can achieve after 2018, when its third rescue programme ends. According to Reuters, the talks have dragged on for months, hindering the conclusion of a bailout review that would help Athens qualify for inclusion in the ECB’s much desied bond-monetization programme and return to bond markets as early as this year.

And, yes, the ongoing disagreements have rekindled fears of a new crisis in Greece, which never really emerged from any of the previous ones, which was forced to sign up to another bailout in July 2015 in order to stay in the euro zone.

Worse, hinting that there may not be a 4th bailout simply because the Greek people will snap by then, the Greek parliament’s budgetary office warned on Friday that “the fiscal cost of the delays may prove bigger than the benefit of a deal”.

Greek 10-year bond yields rose by 21 basis points on Friday, while stocks were 3 percent down. Which means that in the Greek market where an occasional trade takes place once a week, someone sold an oddlot.

“The outcome was tougher than what the market had hoped for,” Beta Securities analysts Takis Zamanis told Reuters.

There was some good news for Greece, now in its 7th years of economic depression, when European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said that Greece outperformed its fiscal targets last year and was on track to meet its 2018 primary surplus target of 3.5 percent of economic output. But he added that more discussions were needed on the fiscal trajectory thereafter and on measures which might be needed and would be implemented only if Greece missed its targets.

In other words, back to square one.

The IMF, which participated in two Greek bailout programmes but is so far only an observer in the current one, says Athens can only achieve a surplus of 1.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2018 unless it adopts more measures now and is granted more debt relief.

The IMF also was the source of bad news, reporting that Greece’s debt is “highly unsustainable” and will reach 275% of GDP – this is after it has been “reprofiled” three times already – by 2060 unless the country’s loans are significantly restructured, according to a draft confidential review of the country’s economy. Without prior bailouts, Greek debt/GDP would be between 400% and 500% as of this moment.

The assessment, prepared ahead of an IMF board meeting on Feb. 6  and seen by The Wall Street Journal, was significantly more pessimistic than that of Greece’s eurozone creditors and underscores the difficulty of the fund moving ahead with a new bailout for Greece in the near future.

Under the draft review, which comes as Athens and its creditors once again failed to find an “austerity” solution, debt is projected to reach around 160% of GDP by 2030 but “become explosive thereafter.” Under the same scenario, debt is seen reaching as much as 275% of GDP in 2060.

The assessment presents a contrast with the eurozone’s own forecasts. An official eurozone analysis in May projected debt-to-GDP of 104.9% in 2060, under a baseline scenario in which Greece fully implements its bailout program. Eurozone governments are resisting the IMF’s push for more debt forgiveness that will come largely at their expense.

 

“Greece cannot be expected to grow out of its debt problem, even with full implementation of reforms,” the IMF says, adding that the country needs significant debt relief from its European partners to ensure the debt load is sustainable.

 

The draft review says that measures agreed by the eurozone in May to ease Greece’s debt load need to be further specified, and that “ambitious extensions of grace and maturity periods, a full deferral of interest on European loans, as well as a locking in of the interest rate will be needed” to put debt on a sustainable path.

Meanwhile, “The pressure is on for the Greek government following yesterday’s Eurogroup meeting, since it did not receive substantial support, not even by the supportive EU Commission,” Axia Ventures Group said in a morning note. Greece’s leftist-led government, which is sagging in opinion polls, is refusing to adopt more austerity measures, saying the country is delivering on its bailout promises.

And so, the impasse will go on until Greece either runs out of money again leading to the next social crisis and bailout, or until either China or Russia acquires it in bankruptcy auction, or the Turks invade.

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