As the Greek financial situation continues to deteriorate by the day, it is becoming increasingly likely that the threat is now posed not just to Greece but to the eurozone as a whole. By extension, there is now increased speculation that the United States and other global financial players may ultimately have to play a role in shaping a painful adjustment for the EU’s increasingly fragile financial credibility.
Greece’s request for a bail-out – an historic first for any nation using the euro – was ultimately triggered by disclosure of unexpectedly bad new audit figures about Greece’s finances. Amid intense market pressure on Greek government borrowing, the revelations left a bail-out as the only alternative to a Greek default on its sovereign debt. The episode highlights the recent history of shoddy national accounting about government deficits by Greece (and some other EU member states). Certainly in the Greek case it strongly undermined the government’s financial credibility.
“Net neutrality” and governments’ authority to regulate the internet, including service providers who provide the “pipes” for web postings, has risen in acute fashion in the U.S. This month a federal court ruled that the FCC had overstepped the bound of its authority when it sought to order Comcast, one of two big cable/telephone/internet providers that dominate the U.S. market, to stop slowing the delivery speeds of some clients that consume a great deal of bandwidth.
The 2010 British parliamentary election matters because:
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