European finance ministers will meet today to finalise the terms for Greek debt restructuring.
Resolving the issue of the Greek debt swap is considered key to keeping the Euro going for another few weeks. Under the terms of the deal, private investors will swap their current, unrepayable, Greek government bonds for some equally unrepayable bonds of lesser value. Private investors are expected to take a so-called "haircut" of between sixty and seventy percent.
While we wrangle with our respective public or private employers about what pensions we might receive in the future, French pensioners are already having payments withheld.
At the end of December, almost 300,000 retired employees of SNCF, the French railway company, discovered that they had only been paid a third of their normal amount. The remainder was due to be paid yesterday.
The rather worrying reason for this, was that Credit Agricole, one of France's top three banks, which has responsibility for passing the necessary cash to the agency that distributes it, refused to do so.
The last forty years have seen record levels of insanity in the financial sector. Drunk on the possibility of "making money", individuals with no thought to the impact on the lives of the real human beings on this planet, have demonstrated a willingness to do anything to make a quick buck. "I wish they'd get this war started," one such person said to me just prior to Blair's invasion of Iraq.
Over the decades we have seen bubble after bubble expand and burst. We've seen currencies attacked. We've seen banks collapse as a result of fraud, and the taxpayer bail them out, as a result of treason.
And today, we see the stock market back up over the 6000 mark, despite the fact that the real economy is dead, and Britain produces a mere fraction of its historic output. How can this be?
