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Does Anyone See the Humor in This?
From The Daily Capitalist
Last week's G-7 meeting was appropriately held as far away from civilization as you can get: Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada. There the happy financial ministers of the increasingly irrelevant G-7 met to do their behind-doors-smoke-filled-rooms skulduggery. "The G-7 has recently become overshadowed by the larger Group of 20, which also represents large emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil."
Some quotes:
- "We expect and are confident that the Greek government will make all the necessary decisions." European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet. [Ha, ha, ha. You've got to be kidding.]
- "There are differences between individual countries regarding how they have dealt with this issue so far and how the current conditions are in terms of [banking regulation]." Japan Finance Minister Naoto Ka on U.S. financial regulation efforts. [He's a funny guy too. Japan has nothing to add to this conversation.]
- "We always complained about the dollar not being strong enough ... That is clearly an improvement." French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde on the rising strength of the U.S. dollar.[So, Christine, it's good that investors are fleeing the Euro for the dollar? Half-full glass girl here.]
- "[Haiti's] debt should not be an additional burden." Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty on the G-7 forgiving bilateral loans to Haiti. [He knows they would never repay anyway]
- U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said European financial leaders were clear with the G-7 that they would manage the Greece situation with great care. He struck an optimistic tone about the economic recovery, despite mixed signals about the U.S. recovery. "The recovery came more quickly and stronger than expected," he said. [Maybe it's just me, but Timmy always speaks as if he doesn't really believe what he's saying.]
Well, at least this summit didn't see any protesters :
The G-7 meeting in Canada's northern territory 1,300 miles north of Ottawa was decidedly different. Police presence was low-key. Security personnel at the Frobisher Hotel, where some of the delegations were staying, stood guard alongside native Inuit who were selling seal brooches and stone carvings to hotel visitors.
Around town, locals put on igloo demonstrations while children played in the snow near G-7 meeting facilities, some of them jumping off 20-foot cliffs into snow drifts. Japanese Finance Minister Naoto Kan delayed his closing press-conference Saturday so he and his aides could go dog sledding on frozen Frobisher Bay. And unlike other meetings of world leaders, protestors did not make their way to Iqaluit, which is located on isolated Baffin Island and can only be reached by air in the winter.
Minister Kan is such a fun loving guy. Who would have known. He'll be gone soon.
Maybe they will book the Falklands for their next meeting.
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Maybe congress can go there, and we can fuel the jets with just enough fuel to get there.
Reasons G7 gang chose meeting in Canadian Far North town of Iqaluit near Arctic Circle.
1. Any G7 finance minister who refuses to fall in line with gang can be set adrift on Arctic ice floe.
2. No need to refrigerate vodka. Reduces carbon footprint of G7 meeting.
3. Iqaluit's weekly newspaper, Nunatsiaq News, has no global finance reporter, no economic reporter, no stock market reporter, and no crime reporter.
4. Lisa Gregoire, who worked as a reporter in Iqaluit in the 1990s, said she thinks Iqaluit was chosen to avoid protestors, who won't be able to afford round-trip airfare ranging from $1,500 to $2,300.
5. G7 chose Iqaluit to avoid protestors who would not feel welcome in an area where hunters kill some 35,000 seals annually in the Nunavut Territory.
6. The G7 finance ministers chose Iqaluit to enjoy stress relief rest and relaxation of clubbing baby seals. The G7 finance ministers need to revive their animal spirits so they can return refreshed to continue clubbing taxpayers.
7. The G7 chose Iqaluit because the gang is on the run, as reported on last Saturady's America's Most Wanted TV show:
"Tonight we need your help. Interpol warns that the G7 gang has fled into Canada's Far North to plot their next robbery of taxpayers. The heat on this gang is so bad they must meet under cover of 24 hour darkness.
"The G7 is a notorious gang of international money launderers, counterfeiters, loan sharks, Ponzi princes, short changers, three-card Monte operators, turnstile jumpers, pension robbers, widow rapers, and multi-level marketing operators.
"We ask our viewers in the Canadian Arctic to be on the look-out for the G7 gang. But do not approach any of these desperadoes. Hide your women, children, and sled dogs.
"Please be alert for the smell of roast pig. Tips to our hot line say the G7 will feast on roasted PIGS. If you smell roasted PIGS, please phone the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or AMW's hot line. I know I can count on my Inuit friends in the frozen Arctic to do the right thing."
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/pack-your-parkas-finance-ministers-2010...?
turnstile jumpers +100
8) The G 7 gang were out of of high power rifle range long enough to have a meeting.
The bankers had the "secret meeting" in Australia last week, notice how we Aussies had no recession? No protesters, riots, etc.
Flarety's a moron who's trying to do to the Canadian housing market what Barney Frank et al did to the US housing market.
They should have left them there.
I can hardly imagine a less forgiving environment, somehow an appropriate counterpoint to the attitude of forgiving all these financial blunders (at least those made by corporations, if not those of natural persons).
Just think how much money we the people would have saved in the long run... No need to buy pitchforks, rope, tar, feathers, or the like...
A Deckhand
Breaking story on Denninger:
"Gee, it's all going to be ok and Germany is going to come to everyone's rescue!"
Nope.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, mounted stiff resistance tonight to any swift bailout of Greece, as a rift opened up between European capitals over how best to tackle the risks posed to the euro.
Despite a show of Franco-German unity on the crisis and the first statement from EU leaders pledging to safeguard the currency's stability, hopes on the markets of a German-led rescue plan to shore up Greece's critical public finances were dashed by Merkel, who repeatedly emphasised that Athens would need to put its own house in order and brushed aside all questions of financial support.
"See, I told you so. Twice."
Someone forgot to tell the market pumpers (along with those who started buying Euros and Pounds against the dollar) that Greece is a bit player in this mess.
What 'ya gonna do about Ireland - a nation that has enough out there in bank debt to make Iceland look like a Girl Scout picnic? Or Spain? Portugal, which has had an actual failed bond auction already?
and
One would hope that Merkel and friends in Germany aren't really stupid enough to implement such a transfer of a peripheral nation's problem to the EU's core, but then again we have seen time and time again that "can-kicking" is the mantra of the world since this crisis began. Rather than deal with the underlying problems - excessive leverage, naked swaps that the seller can't possibly pay, various forms of fraud and gamesmanship in securities issue and similar - governments have instead decided to lift up the corner of the carpet and sweep, time and time again.
Should the EU implement this with Greece they may indeed set a precedent that could easily destroy the European Union over the next couple of years. Faced with Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, all of which are huge problems compared to Greece both in terms of the debt outstanding and the size of their economies Germany will find itself unable to backstop all four nations - yet it will have to, once the die is cast with Greece.
It appears that unlike Barack Obama and Ben-d-you-over-the-table Bernanke, who doesn't much care about the formalities of what's supposed to be on The Federal Reserve's balance sheet, Angela Merkel has both a brain and she clanks when she walks!
Read more: http://market-ticker.denninger.net/
Please hold the next G-7 in my town. I need the cab fares.
why not have it in Seattle next time, that's a peaceful city right ?
RNC strategerizing in Hawaii is a wee bit more Alanis.
The further away the better....
Too bad they did not stay there....
They were checking out one of the few safe places they can go in the future....
How apropos. At great expense, travelling harrowing distances to an isolated, inhospitable location in order to appear necessarily important when issuing vague, functionally useless prognostications on meaningless topics which have been based upon irrelevant assumption sets concluding in comically self-important but nonetheless futile gestures.
Ranks right up there with Gore's Internet invention destroying his own personal global warming crusade.
The European officials will at least have a glimpse of the people they are impacting with their proposed ban on seal products, while they feast on seal meat served raw, sit in seal skin upholstered chairs, and receive seal skin mittens and vests as parting gifts. The Eskimos would be so gosh darn cute if they weren't so barbaric. Killing animals for food and clothing. God forbid.
Zombies prefer the colder temperatures, as do vampires, and wolves.
in the far north ... somewhere to go to keep the merkins at bay
The Tiring Nature Of Media PropagandaPosted: Feb 11 2010 By: Jim Sinclair Post Edited: February 11, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Filed under: General Editorial
My Dear Friends,
Doesn’t it get tiring to hear the propaganda of government and business over the airwaves telling us exactly what isn’t correct?
I started this morning on the note of the Fed going to drain one trillion by negotiations with money funds which I know is absolute bunk. Then I see two events today of blatant QE
the fairy tells continue
Isn't a "merkin" one of those fake patches of pubic hair... haha.
"Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty on the G-7 forgiving bilateral loans to Haiti. [He knows they would never repay anyway]"
Are ya sure about that one? Only these idiots would lend to someone that they know won't pay them back.
I guess these people are the finacial genuises they're all puffed up to be, or why else are we sitting on the precipice of economic armageddon.
I think the next meeting should be held on the polar ice caps of Mars, talk about isolated and no damn Inuit trying to sell you some cheap trinket. (When your this important you don't want to be reminded of the little people, and as luck would have it, there's no Bastille to storm.)
Perhaps it is time for them to enjoy the Gulag Archipelago in Siberia.
2 thumbs up on that one
Oh yes. I'm not completely sure whether this was the G7 going to ground to lose the protestors, or just Canada being patronising to its most specialist provincial capital.
> most specialist
I meant 'most *specialest*', of course. My apologies for the typo.
cruel people deserve cruel treatment especially if they are hiding something from the rest of the world..
Baffin Island in February... That's just cruel! Even if they ARE Finance Ministers!
great smoked arctic char. Nuthin like it.
That's just where they told you they went. In reality they were soaking up the sun in Cuba.
I was there.