> Sort of seems like every week that Greece is collapsing, there were pretty
> intense riots a year or so ago, and the reports were that the govt might
> fall apart. Might be the financial endgame, who knows, but it really does
> feel like there are constantly articles about this.

yeah, this is the end game. its pretty obvious at this point. when you
start seeing the price of insuring debt going up 20% per day its
pretty much the final call. same thing happens whether its sovereign
debt or corporate bonds. the way the numbers are, this is like the
week before lehman collapsed. if the germans are now not honoring
greek collatoral and bond investors are fleeing (with bank deposits)
its game over. barring some sort of miracle (the chinese put up $20
billion) then i don't really see how this is going to end well.

> Does the EU have a bailout system ? Shifting the debt around in
> financially difficult times, without currency issues, was supposed to be
> part of the sale wasn't it ?

well, there are rules about things like running a deficit, but they
are ignored. additionally, there's no legal mechanism to deal with
this so the powers that be in europe are pretty hamstrung. in addition
to greece, there's portugal, spain, ireland, and italy which are also
(as far as the numbers go) in equally a bad position. and, if
stratfor's analysis was right last week, the dirty little secret is
that france is also effed. in reality, the only power in any position
to fix this is germany... and in reality, they don't have the muscle.
they are a big power, and arguably the biggest economy power in
europe, but they don't really have the pockets to deal with this.
Also, you really need to take into consideration of the fact that
germans, culturally (due to ww1, weimar inflation) are very, very
conservative when it comes to taking risk.

the only caveat is that when everything believes something will happen
in the market - it doesn't. everyone seems really sure this is all
coming apart, so, we'll see...

so, even if someone bails out greece, then what? who bails out the
next 6 countries?

i dunno... this is all starting to look the way things looked right
before lehman...