Astonishing List of 71 Top Bankers Dead and No Natural Causes!

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I've recently stumbled across a list of top bankers that have been killed in cold blood, died in "accidents" or have allegedly committed suicide. In some of the cases, their deaths are so suspicious that the 'suicide' verdict is simply ridiculous, as you will see.

While searching for news reports documenting their deaths, I've managed to find a lot more cases of high ranking bankers that have been found dead in suspect circumstances. I've added the cases to the list and included the appropriate reference links.

The fact that none of them died of natural causes is absolutely stunning.

Before proceeding to the list, I suggest you reading the following piece: 'Suiciding' the Bankers and Billionaires -- Do You Know Why?

1. Nov - Shawn Miller, 42, Citigroup managing director - found dead in bathtub with throat slashed. Murder weapon is missing. - Reference.

2. Oct - Edmund Reilly, 47, a trader at Midtown's Vertical Group, threw himself in front of a speeding Long Island Rail Road commuter train. - Reference.

3. Jan - William 'Bill' Broeksmit, 58, HUNG/POSSIBLE SUICIDE - Reference.

4. June - Richard Gravino, 49, Application Team Lead, JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown/pending

5. June - James McDonald - President & CEO of Rockefeller & Co - apparently self-inflicted, GUNSHOT WOUND

6. May - Thomas Schenkman, 42, Managing Director of Global Infrastructure, JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH, cause unknown/pending

7. May - Naseem Mubeen - Assistant Vice President ZBTL Bank, Islamabad, SUICIDE jumped

8. May - Daniel Leaf - senior manager at the Bank of Scotland/Saracen Fund Managers, FELL OFF A CLIFF

9. May - Nigel Sharvin - Senior Relationship Manager Ulster Bank manage portfolio of distressed businesses, ACCIDENTAL DROWNING

10. April - Lydia (no surname given) 52, France's Bred-Banque-Populaire, SUICIDE jumped - Reference.

11. April - Li Jianhua, 49, Non-bank Financial Institutions Supervision Department of the regulator, HEART ATTACK

12. April - Benedict Philippens, Director/Manager Bank Ans-Saint-Nicolas, SHOT

13. April - Tanji Dewberry - Assistant Vice President, Credit Suisse, HOUSE FIRE

14. April - Amir Kess, co-founder and managing director Markstone Capital Group private equity fund, CYCLIST HIT BY CAR

15. April - Juergen Frick, 48, Bank Frick & Co. AG, SHOT Dead

16. April - Jan Peter Schmittmann - former CEO of Dutch Bank ABN Amro, (Possibly suicide, SHOT)

17. April - Andrew Jarzyk - Assistant Vice President, Commercial Banking at PNC Financial Services Group, MISSING/DEAD

18. March - Mohamed Hamwi - System Analyst at Trepp, a financial data and analytics firm, SHOT

19. March - Joseph Giampapa - JP Morgan lawyer, CYCLIST HIT BY MINIVAN

20. March - Kenneth Bellando, 28, (youngest) former JP Morgan, SUICIDE, allegedly jumping from his apartment building. - Reference.

21. Feb - John Ruiz Morgan Stanley Municipal Debt Analyst, died suddenly, NO CAUSE GIVEN

22. Feb - Jason Alan Salais, 34, Information Technology specialist at JPMorgan, FOUND DEAD outside a Walgreens pharmacy

23. Feb - Autumn Radtke, CEO of First Meta Bitcoin, a cyber-currency exchange firm, "Suspected SUICIDE" - Reference.

24. Feb - James Stuart Jr., Former National Bank of Commerce CEO, FOUND DEAD - Reference.

25. Feb - Edmund (Eddie) Reilly, trader at Midtown's Vertical Group, SUICIDE

26. Feb - Li Junjie, JP Morgan, Alleged SUICIDE after jumping from the JP Morgan HQ in Hong Kong - Reference.

27. Feb - Ryan Henry Crane, 37, Executive at JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown - Reference.

28. Feb - Richard Talley -- A coroner's spokeswoman Thursday said Talley was found in his garage by a family member who called authorities. They said Talley died from seven or eight self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head. -- Reference.

29. Jan - Gabriel Magee, 39, JP Morgan employee, dead after allegedly jumping from the rooftop of JP Morgan HQ in Europe - Reference.

30. July - Julian Knott, 45, JPMorgan Executive Director, Global Tier 3 Network Operations, allegedly shot his wife multiple times, then shot himself dead. - Reference.

The villa where Julian and Alita Knott were found shot dead

 31. Jan - Mike Dueker, Suicide -- “Suicide” By 13 Meter Embankment (40-50 feet). He may have jumped over a 4-foot (1.2-meter) fence before falling down a 40- to 50-foot embankment.” - Reference.

Dueker worked at Seattle-based Russell for five years, and developed a business-cycle index that forecast economic performance. He was previously an assistant vice president and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. - Reference.

32. Jan - Carl Slym, SUICIDE

33. Jan - Tim Dickenson, Communications Director at Swiss Re AG, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown

34. Dec 2013 - Robert Wilson, a retired hedge fund founder, apparent SUICIDE leaped to his death from his 16th floor residence

35. Dec 2013 - Joseph . Ambrosio, age 34, Financial Analyst for J.P. Morgan, died suddenly from Acute Respiratory Syndrome

36. Dec 2013 - Benjamin Idim, CAR ACCIDENT

37. Dec 2013 - Susan Hewitt - Deutsche Bank, DROWNING

38. Nov 2013 - Patrick Sheehan, CAR ACCIDENT

39. Nov 2013 - Michael Anthony Turner, Career Banker, CAUSE UNKOWN

40. Nov 2013 - Venera Minakhmetova Former Financial Analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, CYCLIST HIT

41. Oct 2013 - Michael Burdin, SUICIDE

42. Oct 2013 - Ezdehar Husainat - former JP Morgan banker, killed in FREAK ACCIDENT when her SUV crushed her to death

43. Sept 2013 - Guy Ratovondrahona -Madagascar central bank, Sudden death - cause not confirmed

44. Aug 2013 - Pierre Wauthier, SUICIDE

45. Aug 2013 - Moritz Erhardt, SUICIDE

46. July 2013 Hussain Najadi CEO of merchant bank AIAK Group, SHOT

47. July 2013 Carsten Schloter, SUICIDE

48. July 2013 Sascha Schornstein - RBS in its commodity finance, MISSING

49. April 2013 David William Waygood, SUICIDE

50. Mar 2013 - David Rossi - communications director of troubled Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), SUICIDE

Lethal, but not fatal (more than one way to skin a banker)

51. Fang Fang - JP Morgan, China, DISGRACED

52. Nick Bagnall - Director at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, son accidentally killed himself while trying to re-enact a Tudor hanging

53. Robin Clark - RP Martin -Wolf of Shenfield City banker shot, SURVIVED

54. Kevin Bespolka - Citi Capital Advisors, Dresdner Bank, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, Seriously injured and son dead

55. Robert Wheeler, 49, a Deutsche Bank financial advisor, DISGRACED

56. Chris Latham - Bank of America, ON TRIAL, Murder for Hire

57. Igor Artamonov - West Siberian Bank of Sberbank, Daughter found dead (POSSIBLE SUICIDE)

58. Hector Sants, Barclays - resigned due to stress and exhaustion, after being told he risked more serious consequences to his health if he continued to work - a remarkable turnaround as the Church reportedly approached him two months later and was told he had made a full recovery.

More suspicious deaths 

59. April 21st Bruce A. Schaal, 63, died suddenly Banker in Twin Lakes for 35 years

60. April 20th Keith Barnish 58, Died Suddenly (Still working as Senior Managing Director at Doral Financial Corporation. Previously Bear Stearns, Bank of America Senior Vice President).

61. March 12th Jeffrey Corzine, 31, son of MF Global CEO and Chairman Jon Corzine involved in major banking crime was found dead in an apparent suicide.

62. Keiran Toman, 39, former banker who believed he was being stalked by a reality TV crew starved to death in a hotel room, after leaving the "do not disturb" sign on door for TWO weeks.

[Highly suspicious claims, as many of us probably know that the hotel cleaning staff will knock on the door after 24 hours and eventually enter the room if failing to respond].

An inquest was opened after his death in July 2010 but his family asked for a second hearing as they were not informed. Police found all of Mr Toman's possessions in the room, but despite documents mentioning his family, failed to tell them he had died. -- Reference.

63. Nicholas Austin, 49, A former bank manager from Hersden died after drinking antifreeze in an effort to "get high". was found in a coma by his wife Lynn at their home in Blackthorne Road on October 5. He died the same day. - Reference.

"I took special note of the last one - he died drinking antifreeze in an attempt to "get high"! Funny one that is, as if a banker would be stupid enough to try that. The list is shocking, I never saw so many suicides and car accidents. No gall bladder stones, cancer deaths, strokes, or simply falling ill, it is just a litany of action. That pretty much says it all." - Jim Stone Freelance

The list continues... 

64. Melissa Millian, 54, Senior Vice President at MassMutual Financial Group, stabbed in the chest near a jogging alley in Connecticut - Reference.

65. Karl Slym, 51, Tata Motors managing director - not a banker, but a top official that could be connected somehow to the others - discovered dead on the fourth floor of the Shangri-La hotel in Bangkok.

66. Geert Tack was a private banker for ING and managed portfolios of wealthy clients in Blegium. The cause of death was unknown at the time of the report, but he disappeared in mysterious circumstances, after driving his personal car to a garage from which he took a replacement car to an unknown destination. His body was found in November 2014 near the shores of the Ostend coast. - Reference.

67. Thieu Leenen, 64, Relatiemanager ABN/AMRO, Eindhoven, Nederland

68. Calogero Gambino, 41, Associate General Counsel and Managing Director at Deutsche Bank, America - Alleged SUICIDE by hanging - Reference.

69. Thierry Leyne, 48, banker at Anatevka S.A., Israël, "apparent SUICIDE"- Reference.

70. Tod Robert Edward, 51, Vice President of M&T Bank, Lancaster and Harrisburg Offices, and served as President of the Mortgage Banker's Assn - died on August 31st, 2014, on Grindstone Island, Clayton, NY, from injuries sustained in an accident. - Reference.

71. Therese Brouwer, 50, Managing Director ING, Nederland - Died in MH17 Crash - For me, this is absolutely HUGE, as I've spent weeks debunking the official story and, IMO, proving the false flag. - Reference.

If you stumble across more suspicious top banking deaths, please post the link in a comment down below and I will make sure to update the list. Thank you!

By Alexander Light, HumansAreFree.com; | Reference: Hang the banker;

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Hilarious Flight Attendant Safety presentation

I hope she works your next flight........a hoot. (IF YOU SAW THIS BEFORE. SEE IT AGAIN)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxNrizGdhtY&app=desktop

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video Hilarious Southwest Airline Safety Presentation (Open Captions)

Hilarious Southwest Airline Safety Presentation (Open Captions)

Americans have a duty to express unpopular opinions

Marquette University suspends a professor for arguing against classroom speech codes, a conservative writer blames liberal “hate speech” for the murder of two cops (echoing liberals who do the same again and again) and Sony shuts down a movie because of vague threats.
This all culminates months of colleges chasing away those with unpopular views, and social media mobs getting people fired for holding unfashionable opinions.
The pattern is this: The U.S., and the West more broadly, is becoming intolerant of expression that offends an angry minority or the elite sensibilities.
This intolerance shows itself in many ways, ranging from government censorship (mostly in Europe), to institutional censorship (in the American academy), to wild freakouts or blaming “hate speech” and “incitement” when a madman commits a murder.
Let’s look at two recent instances: Marquette and the New York Police Department.
“Hate speech leads to hate crimes,” Ira Straus wrote in National Review Online after a unstable man murdered two New York City cops. Straus doesn’t write about anyone who advocated cop-killing. Instead, he grouses about liberal academics and media elites who seem to blame Western civilization too much. Straus calls for prosecution of millions of Americans for the crime of “incitement.”
“It is vitally important that America find a way to stop its political and media leaders from continuing to incite hatred.”
I share Mr. Straus’s love of the West, and here’s one thing that makes the West so great: Mr. Straus is totally free to publicly share his censorious totalitarian dreams. Thankfully, almost nobody on the Right agrees with Straus. On the Left, there seems to be a little more comfort with blaming “hate speech” when someone commits a killing that smells a bit of politics.
When pro-life protestors began picketing outside an abortion clinic in Albuquerque in 2013, Salon writer Jill Filipovic warned that anti-abortion protests were a precursor to violence.
She blamed the “rhetoric” of pro-life groups for the murder of an abortionist: “They use offensive, overhyped language to impress upon their … followers the urgency of the situation….”
New York Times blogger Paul Krugman blamed the Tea Party when a psychotic young man killed six and wounded congresswoman Gabby Giffords in January 2011, saying the shooter merely took Tea Partyism “to the next level.”
Meanwhile, academia — exalted in the 1960s as havens of free speech — has become the least-free place for those who don’t walk the politically correct line.
Campus speech codes, kicked aside after a brief 1990s flare-up of political correctness, have returned with fury. Condoleezza Rice, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Christine Lagarde have been chased out of graduation-speaking gigs by delicate students who can’t bear opposing views — and enabling baby-boomer professors who have apparently lost their youthful zeal for dissent.
And this month, Marquette professor John McAdams was suspended after he publicly objected to one colleague’s in-class speech code. A teaching assistant had explained that in her class “homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.” Among the “homophobic comments” banned was anything opposing gay marriage. This would prohibit any articulation of Catholic teaching on marriage, or quoting President Obama’s views on gay marriage from before the 2012 election cycle.
The TA’s view is ignorant and intolerant — but that’s the nature of politically correct efforts to narrow the bounds of permissible dissent.
While American universities value free speech less and less, it’s mostly in Europe and Canada where government itself aims to snuff out offensive speech.
Those on the American Left and Right advocating more U.S. censorship always compare the speech they hate to the idea of “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” They may not realize what an odious precedent they are invoking.
Oliver Wendell Holmes used the “fire in a crowded theater” image to illustrate the limits of the First Amendment. Government, Holmes argued, was free to curtail speech that posed a “clear and present danger” to government interests.
The dangerous speech in question in that case? A socialist opponent of World War I was passing out leaflets encouraging young men to resist the draft. President Woodrow Wilson, of course, prosecuted such dissenters with vigor. Holmes and his court colleagues said Wilson was right to do so, and Congress right to prosecute him.
This is where we end up when free speech is eroded: the powerful use censorship to silence or imprison dissenters.
Growing intolerance of unpopular opinions ought to worry all who love freedom and debate, and all who worry about abuse of power.
It’s said that protecting one’s rights requires exercising them at times. Today, that means all who have unpopular opinions, and who have the ability to express them cogently and publicly, may in fact have the duty to do so.
Timothy P. Carney, a senior political columnist for the Washington Examiner, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. This column is reprinted with permission from washingtonexaminer.com.

It’s not just the economy devastating working-class families

The first step required to confront a problem is to get out of denial, and realize that you have a problem. Thanks to the work of scholars like Sara McLanahan, Isabel Sawhill, June Carbone, Naomi Cahn, and Andrew Cherlin, a growing number of family scholars, policymakers, and journalists now realize that we have a family problem in America. It is this: there is a growing marriage divide that leaves millions of men, women, and children in poor and working-class communities without ready access to the stability, emotional security, and financial resources marriage affords.
That this is a problem is no longer debatable. The retreat from marriage in working-class and poor communities across the United States hinders educational and economic opportunity, helps drive the crime rate higher in these communities, and exacts a serious social and emotional toll on children. It also—as Robert Lerman and I argue in a new report, “For Richer, For Poorer”—seems to account for almost one-third of the growth in family income inequality since the late 1970s.
To understand how to fix America’s family problem, we need an accurate diagnosis of it. Here, Andrew Cherlin’s magisterial “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America” provides a cogent, concise, and largely compelling account of why marriage is floundering in working-class communities, and flourishing in more affluent, college-educated ones. His account shows that conservatives “who insist that family changes are wholly a matter of cultural shifts” are as wrong as progressives who insist that America’s family problem is simply a “matter of economics alone.” Instead, Cherlin deftly points out how shifts in the economy and the culture have together combined to undercut the health of marriage and the stability of family life in working-class communities across the country.
The Decline in Working-Class Jobs Has Genuinely Hurt Marriage
“Labor’s Love Lost” contends that progressives rightly insist that the decline of stable, good-paying jobs among less-educated Americans has played a major role in fueling the nation’s growing marriage divide. In particular, I was struck by the close empirical connection Cherlin draws (see his Figure 1.1, above) between the parallel fortunes of manufacturing jobs and marriage among the working class; as these jobs have risen and fallen, so too have marriage rates in the working class. Cherlin also eloquently describes how steady employment has afforded working-class men a sense of dignity and channeled their “behavior onto constructive paths.” Without access to decent-paying, stable jobs since the 1970s, working-class men are much less likely to be seen as attractive candidates for marriage, to act in ways that make them attractive candidates for marriage, and to stay married. So, score one for the Progressive view that “it’s the economy, stupid.”
Cherlin also suggests that “economic inequality” and “marriage inequality” may be causally linked, and here he is less convincing. That’s because—according to his own Figure 1.2 (see above)—the nation’s retreat from marriage began in the late 1960s, before income inequality started to surge in the late 1970s. Let me underline the point here: the causal ordering is off, since the retreat from marriage was well underway before dramatic increases in income inequality began. Indeed, the temporal ordering of these events is more consistent with the idea that the retreat from marriage helped to fuel the upsurge in income inequality in America.
A Morality Shift Has Also Hurt Marriage
But the story of “labor’s love lost” is not just about money. It’s also about mores. Here Cherlin tells a largely conservative story. He notes that the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s—i.e., the sexual, feminist, and therapeutic revolutions of this tumultuous era—played a key role in making divorce, single parenthood, and nonmarital childbearing more acceptable to the public at large. Without the shifts in mores ushered in by these revolutions, the United States might have seen a decline in marriage rates in the last half-century, but it would not have seen the dramatic increase in family instability and single parenthood among the working class that it did. The Great Depression is instructive here, as Cherlin notes: “Despite a terrible job market in the 1930s, there was no meaningful rise in nonmarital childbearing because cultural norms had not changed.” So America’s family problem is not just about money, it’s about changes in mores that have weakened the links between lifelong marriage and parenthood.America’s family problem is not just about money, it’s about changes in mores that have weakened the links between lifelong marriage and parenthood.
Another argument that is both explicit and implicit in Cherlin’s book—and that is both economic and cultural—is that the ties between masculinity, marriage, work, and providership have remained strong over the last century. Without necessarily endorsing it, Cherlin nods to an argument made by the anthropologist David Gilmore that prosocial masculinity has been connected in many cultures to marriage and providership, and has imposed a valuable “structure and discipline on men’s lives.” For working-class men in the United States, the routines and responsibilities of work and marriage, and the status of being a breadwinner, have afforded them an important sense of identity as men. By contrast, denied access to work that allows them to be good providers, men have often fallen prey to a kind of toxic masculinity—on full display in Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’ book, “Promises I Can Keep”—that is marked by behaviors like infidelity, substance abuse, or violence.
What’s more: I think the value of breadwinning continues to be salient for men and women down and up the class ladder in ways that stand in tension with another idea advanced by Cherlin, as well as by Carbone and Cahn, that one reason better-educated Americans are doing better is that they embrace a more egalitarian approach to life. Because, although college-educated Americans are more likely to embrace egalitarian family ideas in theory, in practice they typically live what might be called neo-traditional family lives that are about as gendered as those of their less-educated fellow citizens.
Notes: Based on data from the American Community Survey. Sample is restricted to married-couple households with at least one child under the age of 18.
Take breadwinning. In married families, in 2012, college-educated men with children in the home earned 70 percent of their family’s income, on average (see figure above). In less-educated homes, married men with children earned 72 percent of the income—not much of a difference in practical terms. Of course, in actual dollars, college-educated men bring a lot more to the family than do their less-educated peers: in 2012, on average they earned about $90,000, compared to the $41,000 that less-educated men earned. In both cases, in the average married family, men typically lead in providing for their families. Furthermore, even today, a recent study tells us that within “marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline.” All this suggests marriage remains quite connected to gendered patterns of breadwinning, down and up the social ladder.
Notes: Based on data from the American Community Survey. Sample is restricted to married-couple households with at least one child under the age of 18.
What Government and Cultural Institutions Can Do to Help Working-Class Families
From all this, I draw three important conclusions about the “fall of the working-class family” chronicled in “Labor’s Love Lost”: this fall has been driven by declines in stable, decent-paying work for less-educated men, larger cultural shifts away from a kind of marriage-centered familism, and the erosion of a kind of working-class prosocial masculinity connected to providership. This diagnosis, in turn, suggests the need for a range of policy and cultural initiatives to renew the fortunes of working-class family life in the twenty-first century.
On the policy front, the federal government should reinforce work and marriage in at least four ways, all of which would strengthen the economic foundations of marriage and family life in working-class communities:
It should subsidize wages (through the Earned Income Tax Credit or a new approach not connected to household size) to boost the returns to work for less-educated Americans;
It should eliminate the marriage penalties embedded in many of our transfer programs;
It should boost the child-tax credit to $3,000 per child and make it applicable to income and payroll taxes; and
Along with state governments, it should increase funding for vocational and apprenticeship education—such as Career Academies—that raise adolescents and young adults’ odds of finding good-paying, middle-skilled jobs.
Given the cultural character of the problem, we cannot limit our thinking to government solutions. On the cultural front, civic, religious, and cultural leaders and opinion makers should seek to renew marriage and family life in working-class America in the following three ways:
1. Launch a civic campaign—modeled on the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy’s successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy—to encourage working-class young adults to put marriage before parenthood, value fatherhood, and slow down their romantic lives, both for their sake and especially the sake of their children;
2. Encourage secular and religious civic organizations—from soccer leagues to churches—to actively engage less-educated Americans, who are now much less likely to be involved in such groups than are college-educated Americans; and
3. Forge a new model of masculinity that encompasses not just breadwinning but also fatherhood and civic engagement—e.g., coaching—in ways that are attractive to ordinary men, especially working-class men, and draw them into the lives of their families and communities.
Efforts like these may seem quixotic. But without them, the possibility of reviving lifelong love in the laboring classes will be lost.
This article grows out of a symposium sponsored by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth on Andrew Cherlin’s new book, “Labor’s Love Lost,” and is reprinted from the Institute for Family Studies blog, with permission.
W. Bradford Wilcox directs the Home Economics Project at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies.

The Year was 1955

Did you hear the post office is  thinking about charging 7 cents just to mail a letter? If they raise the minimum wage  to $1.00, nobody will be able to hire outside help at the store. When I first started driving, who  would have thought gas would someday cost 25 cents a gallon? Guess we'd be better off leaving the car in the garage. I'm afraid to send my kids to the  movies any more. Ever since they let Clark Gable get by with saying "DAMN" in GONE WITH THE WIND, it seems every new movie has either "HELL" or "DAMN" in it.  I read the other day where some  scientist thinks it's possible to put a man on the moon by the end of the century. They even have some fellows they call "astronauts" preparing for it down in Texas.  Did you see where some baseball  player just signed a contract for $50,000 a year just to play ball!? It wouldn't surprise me if someday they'll be making more than the President... I never thought I'd see the day  all our kitchen appliances would be electric; they're even making electric typewriters now. It's too bad things are so tough  nowadays. I see where a few married women are having to work to make ends meet. It won't be long before young  couples are going to have to hire someone to watch their kids so they can both work. I'm afraid the Volkswagen car  is going to open the door to a whole lot of foreign business. Thank goodness I won't live to  see the day when the Government takes half our income in taxes. I sometimes wonder if we are electing the best people to government.  The "Fast Food" restaurant is  convenient for a quick meal, but I seriously doubt they will ever catch on. There is no sense going on short  trips anymore for a weekend. It costs nearly $2.00 a night to stay in a hotel. No one can afford to be sick  anymore. At $15.00 a day in the hospital, it's too rich for my blood. If they think I'll pay 30 cents for a haircut, forget it. Know any friends who would get a kick out of these, pass this on!  Be sure and send it to your kids and grand kids, too.

Greece’s threat to the European economic recovery

Image Credit: shutterstock

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Greek government’s failure today to secure sufficient votes in parliament to choose a new president for the country. Since such a failure not only forces Greece to hold snap elections by the end of January, which could see the coming to power of a radical left-wing government. It also raises the real possibility that Greece will be forced to exit the Euro in 2015 that would be a major blow to the prospects of a meaningful European economic recovery.
On the basis of current electoral polls, the Syriza Party, headed by Alexis Tsipras, should win the parliamentary elections now scheduled for January 25. Judging by Syriza’s consistent electoral promises, if elected one must expect that Syriza will roll back the austerity policies imposed on Greece by the IMF, the ECB, and the European Union (the so-called “troika”). Syriza must also be expected to reverse many of Greece’s recent structural reforms in the labor market and in the area of privatization policy. In addition, it will more than likely insist on substantial official debt relief from the ECB, the IMF, and its European partners.
The prospect of a Syriza government taking office is already sending shudders through the Greek financial markets and is undermining confidence in the still very depressed Greek economy. One must expect that the election of Syriza will put Greece on a collision course with both the troika and the German government. Since it is difficult to see how the troika and  the German government can accede to Greece’s request for either debt relief or for additional budgetary financing at a time that Greece’s economic policy would be going in a direction clearly unacceptable to its European partners. For its part, it is difficult to see how Syriza can quickly make a policy U-turn from a position that it has been consistently espousing these past few years.
To be sure, a month in Greek politics is a long time and Syriza is by no means assured of electoral victory. However, it would seem that even in the best case scenario of a New Democracy win, it would fall well short of the votes needed for forming a majority government. With a deeply divided PASOK Party highly likely to be decimated in the elections, New Democracy will have difficulty in forming a stable coalition government. It is also likely that in the election campaign, New Democracy will emphasize that if re-elected it too will take a tough line with the troika, from which line it will be difficult to withdraw after the elections.
Greece’s already battered economy can ill-afford a prolonged period of political uncertainty, and much less a radical government, especially without the backstop of a troika financial support program. For not only does Greece have substantial official debt amortization payments to make in 2015 — it is also vulnerable to a run on its bank deposits. This would especially appear to be the case in light of the recent Cypriot experience, where Cyprus’s official international lenders insisted on a large write-down of bank deposits in return for their financial support to the country. Without a troika program in place, Greek banks would not be in the position to access the European Central Bank’s rediscount window in the event of a bank run that would almost certainly lead to the further collapse of the Greek economy.
European optimists argue that, unlike in 2010, any spillovers now from a Greek crisis to the rest of the Eurozone would be limited. However, in so doing they overlook Europe’s very poor economic and political fundamentals, which make the Eurozone all too susceptible to renewed contagion from the Greek crisis intensifying. After all, Europe is on the cusp of yet another economic recession and of a prolonged period of Japanese-style price deflation. Meanwhile, its economic periphery remains highly indebted and throughout Europe support for its political elite is crumbling at a time that parties on the extreme-left and the extreme-right of the political spectrum appear to be on the march.