the great german giant dealt with as many bureaucratic ropes as they possibly could they have done it to this point i think it is an eminently unsuccessful attempt i cannot imagine that that german is working as hard as they do as many hours as they do saving as much money as they do find anything. of equal nature with the greeks who simply don't work as hard as they do don't save as much as they do and avoid taxes like they do so quite honestly i think at the core at the edges of this cloth the thread is being ripped and that cloth is finally coming apart jim singapore go ahead i was going to go to you anyway go ahead peter. peter the concept of a unified european currency is fabulous and the world needs something to replace or to compete with the u.s. dollar unfortunately execution has not been very good they brought in people like greece and and portugal and ireland who weren't paying they aren't paying their bills and weren't paying their bills and that's led to the problem i'm like dennis i cannot conceive of why honest hard working all austrians and dutch and friends

should have to pay for a bunch of greeks are sitting on the beach drinking too so and greek banks off and this is outrageous because if i go to you in washington ok we have two euro skeptics are you going to bounce around a little bit. i'll try to the bottom line is this this this this was a good project to begin with if the membership had been correct greece portugal ireland spain were never supposed to join and if it was a reasonable six countries bedded down we would have had a pretty successful project but in the you know we've got. in the eurozone at this point this is not healthy and i agree with them that this situation is now but it's done it's legalized and no one can step out and no other people can you know sort of change the rules at this point so the germans have to pay the piper they are in this document and this is the way for questions i don't know. how they want to do

it and they. are they going to figure for the germans the germans don't the germans don't have to pay the piper let greece go bankrupt it would be good for greece it would be good for the europe would be good for the world if greece went bankrupt and rosy how to pay their bills or stop lying then you would have everybody would know it's a strong sound currency based on a strong sound economy while i'm out and go bankrupt this isn't in our euro you know america we've had stage called we're going to be here in cities going bankrupt we've had characters go bankrupt it didn't in the united states and it didn't in the u.s. start ok. i'll tell you why because of the four hundred billion dollars of debt that greece has fifty percent is held by german and french banks and those countries don't want to take a second in the financial markets it's that simple. why should why should taxpayers bail out banks since when the taxpayers have to bail

out mistakes made by banks that taxpayers didn't make those mistakes when i make a mistake i can i come to you and let you bail me out next time i start losing money. well you should know u.s. government. no i absolutely agree with jim on this or in this instance why can't they allow them to go to go bankrupt we in virginia understand our rights as virginians compared to anybody else i think that you have the right if you are a country to opt out of that circumstance i think the germans have absolute the right to say we have given up we have watched this for a decade it has proven to be unworthy we are simply stopping the payment to the greeks we're going to stop payment to portugal they have to get their own act in order let them go greece will be far better off allow them to go back to the drachma make their economy stronger again let tourists move back go back to greece again we were talking about this beforehand it's too expensive to go and nobody is

there greek is a tourist spot and no tourists are there let them become a tourist but by going back to a devalued drug might tell you ok cyrus i do you know i think you brought up a very interesting point i think we have to go with it still here is that if this president the same with greece then you have this knock on effect of this contagion and it is about banks here i mean we can all we can all criticize the banks but i mean the banking system in germany and france wants to survive this is well i mean it's damned if you do damned if you don't that's the problem absolute favorite player this year is you know sorry it's under your first go bankrupt shares i'm going to. well the problem is that if you let them go bankrupt and if they default and this contingent spreads is probably going to skip over spain and hop right into italy where we're still grappling with it today then you've got a real problem this is not a domino effect in the eurozone this is a break for the rest of the world that's been thrown and it's definitely an effect on markets look the europeans can make up their minds hang on the europeans can

make up their minds over a two day conference we took eleven trillion dollars in the global capital markets for that and don't think we will get him here if he gets it and it's too big to fail at this point and used shares. have been going to hundreds of years when the time jeremy point dennis sherritt banks have been going bankrupt four hundred shares our banks have been going bankrupt for hundreds of years where we have made horrible mistakes over the past thirty or forty years in the united states we have made unbelievable mistakes in our financial situation so we've got to pay the piper a visually as dennis says when do you stop you're going to run this down for another five years of eventually the market's going to say you know they're you going to have a major crisis that you have to deal with at least if you have a crisis now you can organize it and let some people go bankrupt and by the way get as i wouldn't pull out of the euro if i were greece i'd just go bankrupt and reorganize i think the euro is good for greece you know they reorganize to stop the

craziness ok shares and if i can ask you. if you want to continue or head to head jurors are going to. no i just wanted to say you know clearly i think i agree. with jim that clearly greece's feature is within the eurozone but i'd like to ask jim and dennis both one other thing as americans if the u.s. government had not stepped in and then our one trillion dollar bailout where would you be right now you were so grateful that these guys stepped in because we were hemorrhaging the markets have frozen and everybody no. no no no no i was never a prayer of any of this bailout what are you talking about i would have let them all go bankrupt in two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine it is outrageous what we're doing people who tried this such as the japanese have now have lost two decades the japanese refused to let anybody fail they have somebody banks zombie companies and twenty years later their stock market is down seventy five percent this approach doesn't work americans already had one last decade we're

going to have two or three at the rate they're going. to want to jump in there one of the things i'd like to ask everyone here is that all these governments are going through austerity i mean including the as we speak right now and but can austerity create growth denise can you can you do you agree with that because i can't think of too many examples where i steer it is because if you want to pay back these loans you're not generating enough wealth i mean again it's a damned if you do damned if you don't approach we inside the eurozone austerity austerity doesn't create growth governments don't create growth low taxes getting government out of the way letting markets work that creates growth my favorite example of this is what happened in new zealand in the early one nine hundred eighty s. when they turned their back on everything that the i.m.f. it said they cut taxes across the board they did what they could to strengthen the new zealand dollar and the next thing you knew you were running budget surpluses you have a trade surplus as they went there fought the proper way of allowing the market to

freely function if we would do that we would get many of these problems simply subside. i don't go away so austerity i'm afraid is not the problem is not the problem it's a government is the problem getting in the way putting too many blocks in the way of people doing the things that in their own best interests serve everybody else ok what you think about that germany's austerity listen to your head in the early and the early in the early one nine hundred ninety s. scandinavia had the same problem huge problems and in scandinavia a lot of people went bankrupt they reorganize they had a horrible two or three years but since then scandinavia has been one of the great growth region so the country sweden is probably better off than most nations you know as we speak in two thousand and one south korea had the problem at the end of the ninety's people went bankrupt they had horrible pain but since then they've had a booming economy the list goes on and on people who've taken the pain accepted

reality done something about it and then started over this idea of doing what the japanese did doesn't work doing what the americans have done doesn't work ok shares on their take everyone's talking about a selective default i mean is that just double speak for when it comes to a country like greece i mean i just don't want to call it default is this selective i mean is because it's not built into the euro zone you can't have it happen and so are they just trying to kind of fake it and say it's a default but it's not a default. you know we're very close to the line the bottom line is if a restructure will happen and it's going to happen you can call it a default if a restructuring actually does happen the credit agencies have a different view on this they believe of private participants are involved they will consider it a default when you just step back for one second you know austerity needs to happen in a lot of these countries obviously too much austerity will stifle growth has got to be some balance here some some mechanism to grow down the road or there's no hope

you know unfortunately both examples jim and dennis are giving are in the past in the eighty's in the ninety's we're in two thousand and eleven the financial markets have mutated we're in a very different environment right now we have a crisis of fear and fear has no economic logic to it and once it spreads it spreads like wildfire and everybody looks like greece portugal ireland spain italy now and the consequences are quite devastating we destroyed the american middle class wealth our editors are now going to join them here and we. break your back you watch it or break out your break we continue our discussion of yours and. you. want to.

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dot com. welcome back to cross talk computor about to mind you were talking about the eurozone crisis. ok jim and i to go to you is this is the is it too expensive to lead thirty year old guy or is it too expensive to keep it going. well first of all i should tell you i own the euro for a variety of reasons but we'll come back to come back to that that in

a minute i want to go to share point. for hundreds of years hundreds of years we've had bear markets and when you have a long period of excess somebody has to clean out that exist you cannot just keep going and going and going and going and pouring money down a rat hole the world doesn't work that way nothing wrong with a bear market bear markets have been going on for hundreds of years they clean out the excesses in the system and you start over it's usually like a forest fire when you have a forest fire it's terrible but it cleans out the underbrush it cleans out the dead wood and then the forest can grow even better the same way with where sessions depression depressions and and even the bear markets ok but it sure isn't but it's very interesting i mean the analogy of the fall of the forest fire is nice but we're talking about people and governments and elected officials and this is where it gets really really sticky doesn't it ok as i was the baby are you going to have heat i don't want to pay for and i'm very happy with my situation right now ok sure

. the bottom line is you know a crisis is different than a bear market in a crisis you know it's like a victim that has just been hit by a bus and is hemorrhaging through a major artery on the road what you want to do is stem the hemorrhaging and then decide you know then take it to hospital and then decide what you want to do but you've got to stem the hemorrhaging because in that hemorrhaging you lose your middle class if you lose your middle class you have decades and decades of pain ok dennis you are if you can see if you want to jump in there go ahead. yeah i did want to jump in shares i brought up the idea that jim and i supported what happened in the united states and that's just not true jim and i may argue about one thing i think that what the united states government did in october of two thousand and eight when when the financial system really was about to seize up the central bank acted as central banks are supposed to do through history supply reserves in excess in order to accommodate that circumstance and get you past that two or three week or two month period of time what we've done since then however by by continuously

allying the central bank to expand its balance sheet and supporting that expansion of those monetary observes i take issue with that i think we needed to have stopped quite some time ago we did the right thing and in october two thousand and eight applying liquidity to the system but continuously doing it and supporting industries that probably shouldn't be supported by supporting businesses that probably should have been supported gets in the way of progress gets in the way of allowing those businesses that really need that new capital that will be created to move forward so i take exemption we need to do the right thing at a at a that a period of time of panic but panic is ended panic is done now you need to tell the greeks great stat i think just pay the taxes i think is right it is actually just beginning and it's coming back in with the fury right now shares and if i can ask you a question well no if we look at what's going on with italy and then we can look at spain and then it gets worse and worse and worse and it's perceptions it's a very important shares and if i can ask you this monetary union it's monetary

there's no fiscal side to it is that what's needs to be done to fix this because i think well maybe all of us would agree that you just can't keep pouring money into a system that doesn't structurally change it's not fixing the problem you're just dealing with the element of the of the moment and it's called fear. that's right and i think that what you've got you hit it on the head right here it's about perception the problem has been that the european leadership has been so bad that they have mangled the process for the last eighteen months clear decisive action would have calmed the markets a long time ago and we wouldn't be talking about bailouts in ireland or in portugal and talking about financial crisis hitting italy at this point so the problem is there's no clear decisive action lot of domestic politics going on and when you have a union like this you can't behave like this that's that simple you invite disaster to your shores now you're right this is not a fiscal union but they are fiscal constraints when you join this union and i think

that they're now coming aware that the fiscal part of this is war critical than the mark report at this point ok jim you want to look like you want to hear is our jurors are going to let him go first i want to as peter and share as i want to as peter ensure as who's going to pay for all of this who's going to pay you know america's the largest debtor nation in the history of the world right now you know who's going to pay for europe to be bailed out all of the west who's going to pay for all of this are you sure are you peter the germans with the germans or. the germans giving. all the time so that brings up a very interesting point and looking at dennis i mean at one point the germans are going to say enough is enough and i think everyone would feel that's justified that's the danger we have here. what are you sure it was down then it's going to. yeah it sure is a when you say decisive action what sort of decisive action should have been undertaken decisive action on the part of government always frightens me what sort

of decisive action would you have said would have been proper. it's a clear message that clear message to the market that a fund has been created the bailout will happen the restructuring will happen everybody's aware that we cannot pay the money back instead of saying you know what one year from now they're going to go back in the private markets that was not going to happen even today the european central bank is not talking about restructuring they don't want private investors involved in this plan and the bottom line is everyone knows it has to go that way so the delay the confusion the different talking heads are not helping the situation and creating more confusion in the market when the market gets confused it starts to panic when you think about that jamie shares i mean everywhere you go everyone can jam. every one of the italy greece portugal spain and belgium arlan all of their debts are going up over the next few years none of those countries have declining debts are causing deficit

this is just getting worse it's not getting better and five years from now we're going to look at each other and say my god now the world is coming to an end because the debts are too staggering for anybody to deal with you know shares on one of the biggest problems that have been one of the biggest criticisms of the of the euro zone is that it doesn't really promote a lot of fiscal responsibility because you can there's moral hazard out there or you could just see you know just wait for the for the lifeboat to be you know do to rescue you because you don't have to be responsible i mean is this something that needs to be changed where people are meeting held accountable because like you said when the middle class is gone who's going to be paying taxes. look you're absolutely right you know they they believe that peer pressure and public pressure could keep these countries in line but it didn't work and i had bill and it was is presumptious that that we thought it would work and this market failure the markets believe it could work and you know what what possessed the markets to believe that greek risk would be the same as german risk so there was market failure here

clearly now there are calls for for example the european central bank is calling for a european finance minister and the purpose of this finance minister is really not to represent all of the eurozone countries but to basically watch over the bailed out countries so it would be like a mini i.m.f. within the euro zone for conditions attached to countries that are bailed out and that's coming there's no question ok jim how much that's what brought the one of the things the germans are saying for more bailouts when looking at greece particularly their most private sector has to get involved in this the i.m.f. is agreeing with that but there's not a lot of other there's not a lot of consensus across the eurozone on the how much should the private sector be involved in bailing out these governments i happen to agree with the private the private sector made the mistakes the private sectors made the loans to the greeks made the loans to all these people take your losses i mean you made the mistakes the taxpayers in finland austria didn't make the mistakes why should they have to

pay for all of this i mean this is this is terrible economics and it's horrible morality not the politicians care about morality that's for sure. you think about that but how much of the private sector i mean all in this i made a bad. well i made a bad trade yesterday and crude oil shares are would you help bail me out please oh no i think i'll go to the germans and ask them to bail you know i don't have a leader that is the same it's the same idea you and i had a legal agreement if you and i have been married that i didn't hear us on that we're not sure is are you bring up an interesting. this is a very different kind of leverage of the euro zone is ok go ahead jim go ahead hold on that's exactly what i meant hold on guys there is a little you know there was a legal agreement with the european union's call the mastery treaty you were supposed to keep your debts with your deficits under three percent you were supposed to run a sound to contract a sound economy these guys violated the law they violated the treaty and now you expect me to bail them out oh please are you going to let they all know you're

going to bail me out of here i have righted. the bottom line is you're absolutely right they're violated there's no question they violated the cheated on the books they did all sorts of things that were not kosher but here's the catch a legal contract was signed between the seventeen countries and now it's a catholic marriage they can get out of fit ok it's interesting i mean where you minute wait you know jim let me ask you a question here i mean again you know we focus on these national economies ok but really it's go back to really where it goes it's the banks that want these bailouts they want they want governments to bail out these countries so they can pay banks money that oh them so it's really not about people is it it's about making sure banks can get their money back private individuals in many cases peter maybe i mean isn't so clear i would make the banks take their losses i would make them suffer they're the ones who made the mistakes you know that made you jim a dance with the great. wall street was bailed out because everyone we were all told that we need

a banking system so that we're getting the same thing going to play now we're in the banking system much the rationale i'm not saying i agree with it. you said the operative words we were told yes you know who told us that the banks the banks who were panicking they called up and said save me save me save me come on let them i want to repeat banks have been going bankrupt for hundreds of years it's not the end of the world it may be a depression but you know if we let more people go bankrupt in one thousand and two thousand and eight we probably have it behind us by now other countries have it's been three years we would have had a horrible three years perhaps but you know and i in two thousand and eight out there in oklahoma in texas they were doing fine it was only on wall street that you had these staggering problems ok shares i'm going to give you the last word what's the future of the euro five years from now. five years from now i think you then have a two tier year as there has been the have nots ok dennis what do you think should

it be would you would you like to see it around in five years i think it will disappear in five years i think shares out is right i think there will be a northern cisco a responsible euro and i think in the southern states that have proven themselves to be fiscally irresponsible they will all go their own way and we'll be back to the eschewed oh we're back to the drachma we'll be back to the lira all right let's see what the future holds for the euro many thanks to my guests today in virginia washington and in singapore and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember of cross talk rules. if you. still. want.

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say don't need to go and. read this in the kennel was her tone as a treat. over thirty countries including the u.s. officially recognize the libyan rebel council as the legitimate governing authority . calls for gadhafi and his family to give up power. as the u.k. phone hacking scandal puts the future of the murdoch media around part risk questions arise as to why it's taken so long for action to be taken despite police knowing about many of the allegations for years. and public outrage in italy the latest country to be hit by the financial crisis as expected approval of a stereotype budget there enters the final straight.

with news and comments from around the world this is r.t. live in moscow with you twenty four hours a day the u.s. along with more than thirty other nations has decided to recognize libya's rebels as the legitimate government of the country the libyan contact group convening in turkey at the moment there's also colonel gadhafi to give up power going to church khan has more from washington bureau. hillary clinton has announced washington now accepts the transitional national council as a legitimate government governing authority of the libyan people and diplomatic recognition of the council means that the u.s. will be able to fund the opposition with some of the more than thirty billion dollars in khadafi regime assets that are frozen in american banks but it's not only that the obama administration has provided overwhelming military and political support for this transitional council the head of the council has recently traveled to washington showed his gratitude asked for more support analysts say it's no surprise that he's being propelled to power in levy a by washington. who has studied in the u.s. for years he has talked to the u.s.

so he is quite well connected with the united states but how it often comes with strings attached and some say the leader an opposition leader is sure to get instructions from washington on how to return the favor so to say but some experts also point out that in an attempt to propane certain people to a power the west supports the rebels and the rebels are not a homogenous group there are all kinds of people there are some radical elements as well of former jihadist who we now see his. two thousand says he estimates one thousand we had is are among the rebels in libya one believe in rebel commander has openly admitted his fighters have to leave and even a u.s. military study three years ago said previously that the second largest group of jihad is seen in the world right after saudi arabia so analysts say the support for this very diverse group which is the libyan rebels could backfire but washington doesn't seem to care as long as they have someone loyal very empowered to deal with . going to check on reporting that you'll with all its the lawyer for the most cruise.