Monday, May 03, 2010

In this episode, U.S. taxpayers get shafted again: you and your kids are now funding Greek public sector unions in a futile effort to save the Euro

It's really quite simple: if you can figure out a way to rip off the American taxpayer, odds are this administration already came up with it. It's not enough that we wasted trillions of dollars on cash-for-clunkers, weather-stripping programs, massive welfare programs disguised as "tax credits", and the already-bankrupt Social Security and Medicare programs.

Now we get to fund the Greeks, who are engaging in riots as we speak, protesting the fact that they have to work more than 30 hours a week in their government jobs.

The doomed bailout of Greece is costing 110-billion Euro, of which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) ponies up $40 billion. U.S. taxpayers are funding about $8 billion of that amount.

The worst part, as Henry Blodget points out, is that our debt is junior to Greece's existing debt. Which means that the nimrods who funded Greece years ago will likely get their money back -- from us -- and we'll get nada. Bupkis. Zip.

To illustrate just how fraudulent a deal this is, consider this graph of Greek debt, courtesy Tyler Durden.

If you thought a Fed bailout is ugly, you ain't seen nothing yet: this is what a European bailout looks like... With Europe and the IMF explicitly funding the delta from the smooth inverted curve (it's inverted because the market knows too well the country will default) and with a bulk of Greek debt in the short-dated side of the curve, the implicit immediate loss borne by European and US taxpayers is about 6% on $145 billion of debt or about $10 billion, which investors in the short end are underwater by currently. We are not even accounting what the implicit cost for the broader parallel curve shift as a result of this intervention is, but something tells us it is in the tens of billions too. Yet somehow, we are certain that the ECB and the IMF will spin this as a massive victory for the bulls. We are confident the appropriate talents of CNBC in this regard have already been retained.

In short, Greece is headed right into the tarmac and everyone knows it.

But ten billion or more of our dollars are being spent, without our permission, to fund another episode of "extend and pretend". The world has kicked the can down the road as it pertains to Greece -- similar to how the Obama White House dealt with GM and Chrysler -- in the hope that the entire system won't implode until after the elections.


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