Eurovision

I refuse to allow it to sully the cultural tone of this blog, but if you really want to hear (and I strongly advise you against) the UK's entry, sung by some old guy (even older than I) you can access it here.

And no I have not and will not listen to it.

 

Quote of the day

The Telegraph analyses the lure of a box set:

“A box set, for a middle-class person, seems to offer a huge amount more personal – not monetary – value than you get from just watching episodes on television as and when they come on,” adds [Maddie] Yorke.  [Who she?  Dunno] “That maximises the sensation of being defined by, or gathering some sort of self-worth from, a television show that you love.”
A box set – the right box set – is more than a few hours’ entertainment. It is a symbol of our values, a totem of our class and, at best, a subtle form of one-upmanship.

Hey I admit it.  I'm an addict.  Off to Spain tomorrow with the final series of Spooks and the first series of Game of Thrones.  (Spiral 1, 2 and 3, doncha know, is so last year ...)

Oh Lord!

I won't sleep for worrying.  The Independent identifies a problem with gay and lesbian marriage:

The Coalition's plans for gay marriage provide a once-in-a-parliamentary-lifetime opportunity to remedy a situation that penalises a long-suppressed minority and fosters unacceptable gender inequality. I refer, of course, to the grossly unfair status of husbands of titled wives.

You see, the joining-together of two men or two women in matrimony leads to a number of tricky issues of law and etiquette. One of these relates to the partners of peers and knights. What, exactly, would be the correct status of the wife of a lesbian baroness? If Sir Elton John and Mr David Furnish were to marry, what would that make David?
At the moment, only women acquire their husband's status through marriage. If Miss Josephine Bloggs marries a king, she becomes Queen Josephine. If her husband becomes a knight, then she becomes a lady. But if Mr Joe Bloggs is joined in matrimony to a titled female, or his wife acquires an honour, he's still plain old Joe.

For all the obvious reasons, this is unlikely to be of personal interest.  But, for some people, these things actually matter ...

It will be a success this time?

So there's a wee surprise.  The Tories want to privatise the roads.  City AM reports:

ROAD PRICING and greater use of toll roads could become a reality as the government seeks to find ways to entice the private sector to invest more in infrastructure.
David Cameron will today launch a new study into the financing and ownership of Britain’s roads, arguing the country “urgently” needs “to repair the decades-long degradation of our national infrastructure”. He will call for privately built roads but insist there will be no tolls on existing roads.
The National Association of Pension Funds is already working with the government to find a suitable model to tempt its members to invest some of their £800bn of assets in infrastructure – the long-term nature of such investment could provide a steady income stream matching pension funds’ liabilities.

You might have thought that they would have learned a lesson from the railways or the energy industry.  Obviously not.  And it is unlikely to make motorists happy.

 

Music of the week

Leonard, of course, turning tricks:

I've got the blues

Look, the Six Nations is mostly played in various parts of Northern Europe.  It rains sometimes.  If RBS wants to sponsor the Six Nations, well and good.  But please, please, please, if you must paint your logos on the pitch, invest in some waterproof paint, so that the players and their clothes avoid the appearance of having painted themselves in woad.

As others see us

Edinburgh is Europe's new capital of cool.  So suggests The Observer:

Heavily reliant on banking and public sector jobs, Edinburgh had seemed badly placed to withstand the recession, but while the economy teeters, the city is busily securing its place as Europe's capital of culture and is increasingly a magnet for tourists. Last week it was announced that the much-hyped new film from Disney-Pixar will have its European premiere at the usually lacklustre Edinburgh film festival. Brave will bring stars to the city and introduce a generation of children to the romance of Scotland, albeit with a Brigadoon-style approach to reality.
The past eight months have seen two major openings: the refurbished National Museum of Scotland, which won enthusiastic reviews, 1.5 million visits in its first six months and a shortlisting last week for the Art Fund Prize; and close on its heels, an impressively expanded Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
The portrait gallery's senior photography curator, Duncan Forbes, said the city had been transforming itself. "It may be the independence debate but there's a real interest in our history, arts and culture at the moment. Galleries are free, which is key, and certainly the coming of the parliament impacted on confidence, but I think there's a new wave of thinking that's ahead of politics, a sign of cultural confidence."

Yeah well.  It will not remain the capital of cool unless they do something about all the roadworks which are imposing gridlock on city centre traffic.  And it's not just the trams; the end-year financial freedom means that roads are being dug up right, left and centre.

The party of the rich

Why is Osborne so keen to gratify the fatcats?  OK, so the 50p tax rate brings in only hundreds of millions, rather than billions, but that is surely not to be sneezed at.  And it only applies to those earning more than £150,000 a year, and then only to the amount earned which exceeds £150,000.  Furthermore, if it is so easy for the fatcats to avoid, why bother removing it?  (Or better, tighten up the rules.)

It's all very well for the LibDems to argue that the government can take it off the rich in other ways, but why can we not retain the 50p rate, as well as eliminating their other shortcuts to paying fewer taxes?

What kind of message does it send to the poor OAPs, struggling to keep their houses warm, or the low-paid public sector workers, facing consistent reductions in living standards?

Romney jokes

There are times when one almost feels sorry for the Republicans.  Then you remember that they are the baddies.

In any event, The Guardian is celebrating:

The race has produced no end of laughs, most recently multimillionaire Mitt Romney's attempts to come across as a regular Joe. The latest was his admission that, while not himself a fan of Nascar racing – a sport that plays big in the white, male, lower-income demographic – "I have some friends who are Nascar team owners". Earlier he had sought to ingratiate himself with a Detroit audience by boasting that, as a good patriot, he drove American cars and that his wife even drove "a couple of Cadillacs". Short of wearing an "I am the 1%" T-shirt, it's hard to know how he could have got it more wrong.
Still, the best Romney joke is not by him but about him, taking aim at the ideological contortions the limping frontrunner has performed in his bid to win the Republican nomination: "A conservative, a liberal and a moderate walk into a bar. The bartender says, 'Hi, Mitt.'"

Doggy business

Would you elect this man to be president?   From The New York Times:

The story took place in 1983, when the Romney family made a 12-hour pilgrimage from Boston to a vacation home in Canada. Romney, his wife, Ann, and five sons were in the station wagon. Seamus was in a crate, or kennel, on the roof.

At some point — possibly in response to the excitement about being passed by tractor-trailers while floating like a furry maraschino cherry on top of the car, Seamus developed diarrhea. And Romney, who had designated all the acceptable rest stops before beginning the trip, was forced to make an unscheduled trip to a gas station. Where he kept the family in the car while he hosed down the station wagon and the dog, then returned to the highway. 

It's the designation of acceptable stops before departure which is chilling, though putting the mutt on the roof of the car is also worrying.

It's tough at the top

My heart bleeds.  Bloomsberg reports:

The 20 richest people on Earth lost a combined $11.3 billion yesterday as global markets fell after European economic growth slowed and investors weighed Greece’s chances of getting bondholders to accept a debt swap. 

Unless you are Michele Ferrero (he of the chocolates):

... whose $22.5 billion fortune makes him the world’s 18th-richest person. Ferrero owns the world’s fourth-largest chocolate maker, Ferrero SpA (FERR). The company’s products include Ferrero Rocher hazelnut chocolates and Nutella. His net worth is up 6.6 percent this year.

Not a lot of people know that.

Quote of the day

I say!  This is definitely not the sort of thing one expects to read in The Telegraph (here):

I have no problem whatsoever with Cameron's £4 million plus property portfolio, nor to Gideon "Despicable" Osborne's vast wallpaper inheritance, nor yet to Nick Clegg's estimated £1.9 million net worth; still less do [I] have any issue with the fact that they were all superbly educated at Eton, St Paul's and Westminster. But what I do seriously object to is the effect this cushion of comfort has on their policy-making. As [Nadine] Dorries correctly observes – and no matter how many ludicrous photo shoots Cameron arranges in order to be caught shopping at the fish counter of his local supermarket for sea bass, just like all the ordinary folk do – Cameron and Osborne (and, though she didn't mention him, Clegg) simply have no idea how badly this recession is treating those struggling middle class families who constitute their core vote.
Dorries is also right about this: they really do not care.
As far as Cameron is concerned, the only problem with his wealth and entitlement has to do with negative image. That's why he did his best to bury Horsegate, why he persists in being so embarrassed by that Bullingdon photograph and why he has been so slow in defusing Gordon Brown's time bomb, the 50p upper band tax rate. For Cameron (as you'd expect from a PR man) it's all about surface, about perception, not about doing the right thing. He could easily, very early on, have made the simple case that needlessly high tax rates cause revenues to fall not rise and that they jeopardise economic growth and deter mobile entrepreneurs from setting up shop in Britain. But he didn't because he couldn't bear the idea of the Conservatives being tarred as the party of the superrich.
But the Conservatives ARE the party of the super-rich. Not because David Cameron went to Eton or has an incredibly rich father-in-law or because Osborne goes on yachting-n-birch-twig-flagellation cruises with Russian oligarchs, but because this is the effect their policies are having.

Ooh-err ...

  

In Vince's house, there are many mansions

So Saint Vince is prepared to sacrifice the 50p tax rate for a mansion tax.  The mansion tax would be directed at those with houses with a value of over £2 million and, as houses cannot be hidden in offshore accounts, the tax should be relatively easy to collect.

Well yes and no.  The mansion tax would first of all require a database of all houses worth over £2 million.  The Inland Revenue do not have such a database; nor do local authorities.  It would therefore have to be compiled from scratch, a fairly mammoth task which would require the commissioning of a multitude of surveyors and valuers.  It would also be necessary to identify the owners of the houses concerned, and of course to enable them to appeal the valuations where appropriate.  All this would require primary (and probably secondary) legislation.  So it would take at least a couple of years to implement.

I'm not saying that this should not be done, only questioning whether Vince and his ilk have thought it through.  By comparison, the abolition of the 50p tax rate is utterly straightforward.

  

The dangers of statistical correlation

The reduction in premature births is very welcome but the attribution of cause is a bit iffy.  The BBC website reports:

Scotland was the first country in the UK to ban smoking in public places, followed by Wales, Northern Ireland and England in 2007.

After the legislation was introduced in Scotland, fewer mothers-to-be smoked - 19% compared with 25% before.

At the same time there was a significant drop in the number of babies born prematurely or with low birthweight.

The investigators believe both are linked to the smoking ban, even though these rates started to go down some months before the ban was introduced and smoking incidence started to creep up again shortly after the ban. 

The facts that premature birth rates started to go down before the ban and that smoking crept up after the ban cast doubt on the link to the smoking ban.  As does this additional finding:

... the reduction in premature births was both in non-smokers and women who continued to smoke when pregnant, which they say suggests passive smoke exposure is likely involved.

Is passive smoke exposure involved?  Evidence?

Or are the researchers so determined to link the health improvement to the ban that their own evidence to the contrary is simply dismissed?  More research needed, I suggest.


And, yes, as a smoker, I'm biased.  But non-smokers may also be biased.

That's torn it

The ink is barely dry on the Eurozone's fiscal compact, designed to impose budgetary discipline on the unruly Mediterranean mob.  But, already, the peasants are revolting.  The Telegraph reports:

The Spanish rebellion has begun, sooner and more dramatically than I expected.
As many readers will already have seen, Premier Mariano Rajoy has refused point blank to comply with the austerity demands of the European Commission and the European Council (hijacked by Merkozy).
Taking what he called a "sovereign decision", he simply announced that he intends to ignore the EU deficit target of 4.4pc of GDP for this year, setting his own target of 5.8pc instead (down from 8.5pc in 2011).

If the fiscal compact is a dead letter, whereto now for the austerity advocates?

Our panglossian First Minister

Perhaps the First Minister is being slightly ambitious in his quest.  According to The Guardian, Mr Salmond stated:

"I think it is important when we come to the referendum in 2014 people will have an exact proposition on independence, which I pledge to give. All of the questions [will be] answered to people's satisfaction.

Aye well, that would indeed be nice.  But, instead, we will be asked to vote on independence without knowing the full terms and conditions which will apply.  We may know what Mr Salmond's starting position on the negotiations would be, for example on the repartition of the UK's national debt but we will not know the outcome of those negotiations.  Similarly, Mr Salmond may assert that, as a successor state to the UK, Scotland would retain its EU membership.  But that is far from guaranteed, so there will remain uncertainties, not least because, successor state or not, a new EU Treaty would be required, demanding the unanimous agreement of all the other member states.

That is not an argument against having a referendum on independence, merely an acknowledgement that not all of the relevant questions will have been answered.

Horsegate continued

The media continues to have fun, now that Cameron has admitted riding Raisa.  The Telegraph pictures the scene:

One perception ratified here is that of the Chipping Norton set comprising the smuggest elite corps of jeunesse dorée available at the time to humanity. It is all too easy to imagine them revelling in their own resplendence in the Brooks kitchen one Christmas evening. Picture this everyday story of country folk as the then Leader of the Opposition chops the onions, and Rebekah warms her buns against the top oven of the Aga. Matthew Freud and Elisabeth Murdoch are spreading the beluga they brought in lieu of a bottle of merlot over the Ritz crackers, while Jeremy Clarkson jingles his jester’s bell with some side-splitters about why Mr Cameron should nuke Belgium and reintroduce child slavery on his first day in No 10. SamCam presents a personalised Smythson black leather-bound diary to James Murdoch, whom Jeremy hilariously berates as “a great big poof” for driving a Prius, and the chatter turns to matters equestrian. “David, why won’t you ever join me on a hack?” Rebekah coquettishly asks. “I’d love to,” he replies, “but I’m hopeless and petrified of being thrown.” “Well, I’m sure I heard someone talking about retired horses at the Sun Police Bravery Awards,” says Rebekah. “One of those would be perfect. I’ll get my PA to ring John Yates. Yatesy’ll sort it. It’s not as if he has anything else on his plate.” How they all chuckle at that. 

 How like our own Christmas experiences (or not).

   

Music of the week

Dave, Raisa and Rebekah

I'm so glad that this has been cleared up.  The Independent reports:

Prime Minister David Cameron today denied that he had ever ridden the horse which was lent by police to former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks.

So no closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. 


Actually, The Guardian has a quote from No 10:

"The prime minister does not wear pyjamas on the back of a horse"

Good to know.

Ljubljana blues

As we are playing against them this evening (no, as far as I can see, it's not on telly), I thought that football fans might want to know:

Slovenia's economy shrank by 2.8% on a year-on-year basis in the last three months of 2011, data just released showed.  That follows a 0.5% contraction in the previous quarter, making Slovenia one of several eurozone countries in recession.

Shame.  Nice place, Slovenia.  I once spent a happy long weekend in Ljubljana ...

  

29 February

Hey, you work an extra day, you get paid for it, yeah?

Not if it's a leap year ...

 

Ach, it's only money

Look, it may sound crazy (though not as crazy as Rebekah's horse), but it's not that complicated.  The Guardian explains:

The European Central Bank will on Wednesday step up its campaign to stabilise the euro, forestall a new credit crunch and shore up troubled banks by flooding the markets with hundreds of billions' worth of easy money for the second time in two months.
The offer of three-year loans to banks at the cheap interest rate of 1% represents a boon for the banking sector in the troubled eurozone periphery, and is broadly seen as a masterstroke by ECB president Mario Draghi of Italy (pictured), who launched the policy in December in one of his first moves as president.
Analysts speculate that the take-up of what amounts to a eurozone policy of quantitative easing could reach €1tn (£850bn) when the funds are made available, the expectation is that the borrowing will roughly equal the first round of lending in December when more than 500 EU banks netted €489bn.

So the ECB lends vast amounts to the banks at a paltry interest rate who then proceed to buy up the sovereign debt of peripheral countries, yielding a much better rate of interest.  So everyone's happy: the banks make a tidy profit, the peripheral countries sell off their debt more cheaply than would otherwise be the case and the ECB is lauded for bringing aboout financial stability.  It's just like magic.

There's a flaw there somewhere, however; I just haven't spotted it yet ... 

Zero credibility

The Independent provides us with an improbable tale:

Warnings that police were investigating fraud allegations involving Emma Harrison's company were not passed to David Cameron before he appointed her as his "families tsar", Downing Street said yesterday.

It sought to distance the Prime Minister from the controversy as it stressed he was unaware of the inquiry into the alleged misuse of public money at her firm, A4e. The Department of Work and Pensions is understood to have been told by the company about the investigation in November.
But it appeared not to have relayed that information to Number 10. A month later, Mr Cameron appointed her an adviser on helping problem families get off benefits and into work. She was unpaid in her post, but A4e won further Government contracts worth £400,000.

Did Cameron not consult DWP before appointing Ms Harrison?  If not, why not?  If so, why did DWP not tell him about the fraud allegations?  Is the government that dysfunctional?

Graph of the day

From The New Statesman (here):

And it will get worse before it gets better ...

Grace under pressure

Beer, the curse of the political classes:

Naivety

The Telegraph is wondering if the game is worth the candle:

In my view, the greatest threat to the euro is that Greece will make a success of default and devaluation. Something like it has happened several times before, notably with Argentina in 2002, when it defaulted and devalued. The country went from an appalling financial crisis to growing by 11pc in the space of 18 months.
Suppose that once the new drachma has fallen by 30pc to 50pc, Greece begins to show signs of growth. How would it then be possible to persuade the electorate of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and even Ireland, that there is no alternative to years of misery? It is all very well building firewalls to stop financial contagion, but how do you build firewalls around the voters? 

Firewalls round the voters?  Silly question.  You impose technocratic administrations on those countries which fail to perceive the benefits of austerity and then you send in the Brussels bureaucrats to run their economies.  Who cares about the voters?  Ask the Greeks ...

Quote of the day

Katharine Whitehorn (a lady whom I revere for her Cooking in a Bedsitter) in The Observer (here):

I love it when academics turn their erudite brains to everyday subjects. My favourite is the study by Tania Sanchez, whose institute spent years of research on perfume to discover what scent most drives men wild: "We discovered," she said, "it is bacon."

  

Bad Dobbin

Mmm, horses.  Dangerous things.  Nevertheless, The Observer seems to approve of them:

Now the psychological benefits of working with horses are being recognised by growing numbers of therapists who work with autistic children, young people with behavioural problems, adults with depression or celebrities with addictions.
"The horse is the perfect mirror, they are very emotional beings; we're only starting to realise how intelligent they are," said therapy counsellor Gabrielle Gardner, of Shine For Life, watching the horse dance around his pen at a farm in Blackstone, a village a few miles north of Brighton.

Didn't do Lorraine Kelly any good, did it?

   

Pots and kettles

I seldom dip into the world of international diplomacy but I was intrigued by this analysis in The Telegraph:

Speaking after a Friends of Syria conference, held in Tunisia, Mrs Clinton said that Russia and China must join international condemnation of President Assad's regime. "It's quite distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto while people are being murdered – women, children, brave young men – houses are being destroyed," she said.

"It is just despicable and I ask whose side are they on? They are clearly not on the side of the Syrian people." 

Now, if you take Mrs Clinton's statement and substitute "Palestinian" for "Syrian", you may find that it is a rather different permanent member of the Security Council which has, over the years and not infrequently, been using its veto.

 

Gender and sex

A French lady (am I allowed to say that?) writing in The Guardian:

The freedom of women in France is very much a matter of words, and I think it is intimately related to language. As with many Latin languages, the masculine form trumps everything when it comes to grammatical agreement of adjectives and so forth. We say Un Français et trente millions de Françaises sont contents; those 30 million French women have to be contents in the masculine form as dictated by their one male companion, rather than contentes as they would be without him.
A lot of men tell us that we are fighting the wrong battle, that we should fight first for wage equality, or against the glass ceiling. But words matter. Let's imagine unmarried men having to tick the box Mon Damoiseau, the medieval equivalent of Ma Demoiselle. The boys soon stopped allowing people to call them bird, with its insinuation of virginity. Whereas I, at the age of 43, still get called "Mademoiselle", literally "my little hen". Charmant, non?

I would normally place myself with those who consider that there are more important things in life.  But Madame puts her case most elegantly.

We're all in this together

Comment is superfluous.  The Independent reports:

Taxpayer-backed Royal Bank of Scotland remained at the heart of the row over bankers' pay today as it unveiled total losses of £2 billion for 2011 at the same time as paying £785 million in bonuses to its staff.

RBS, which is 82% state-owned after receiving a £45.5 billion bailout at the height of the financial crisis, said the bonus pool included £390 million for its 17,000 investment bankers. 

  

The wicked witch

Just cos she paid herself over £8 million last year and cos she owns a £5 million neo-Gothic mansion in the country and a £3 million mews property in town, does not mean that she's a bad person.  Admittedly, she made her pennies out of exploiting helping the unemployed, and her company has been repeatedly investigated for irregularities in implementing contracts from the Department of Work and Pensions.  And, OK, the police are involved in investigating fraud on the part of some of her employees.

But Cameron appointed her as his back to work tsar.  So everything must be all right, yes ...


  

The nasty party

Truth will out.  They pretend to be nice, but then the wind blows up their skirt and you see the cloven hoof.  And there is that disgusting whiff of sulphur.

The Independent reports:

Controversial plans to make it easier for companies to "hire and fire" workers may be revived by George Osborne in next month's Budget.

It won't actually do anything to improve the UK's economy, but it will keep the Tory backbenchers happy.

Graph of the day

Don't expect petrol prices to come down soon.  And worry about whether inflation will continue to fall.  And watch the Chancellor's strategy (such as it is) go up in smoke.


  

Music of the week

This guy's not bad as a singer, but he should probably stick to the day job:

Good news for feminists?

The Y chromosome, which carries the traits of maleness, may be on the way out.  The Guardian reports:

"In the end, males are uncertain little creatures and the way they are made is very different in mammals, birds, insects and worms," said Steve Jones, author of the book Y: The Descent of Man and professor of genetics at University College London.
"In the long term we are all dead, and that is certainly going to be true for the Y chromosome, which is rather an arriviste on the evolutionary scene. It may take a long time, but I am pretty confident that the Y machine will, one day, be replaced by something else. Quite what that will be, you will have to ask me in a hundred million years."

Not exactly comforting.   But this "uncertain little creature" is far from down-hearted; after all, a world of females would not necessarily be a Bad Thing.  I think ...

Quote of the day

From the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, a Mr Charlie Bean (here):

"Someone with a £100,000 pension pot, who could have expected that to yield an annual pension of a little under £7,000 three years ago, would now get just under £6,000. That is a rather substantial income loss. But it is only part of the story," he said.

"Those pension funds will typically have been invested in a mix of bonds and equities. The rise in asset prices as a result of QE also raises the value of the pension pot, providing an offset to the fall in annuity rates."

He added that pensioners should not expect to be immune to the downturn. While savers have been hit by record low interest rates, working households have been squeezed by a 7.5pc fall in real incomes, compared with where they would have otherwise been, as well as rising unemployment.
"Real household income declined a total of 2.5pc in the two years after output troughed, whereas in normal conditions it might have been expected to rise about 5pc in that time," Mr Bean said.
He added: "Savers have every right to feel aggrieved at losing out; after all, they did nothing to cause the financial crisis. But neither did most of those in work, who have seen a substantial squeeze in their real incomes. And unemployment, particularly among the young, has risen. There have been few winners over the past few years." 

Well I can think of a few winners, notably those damn bankers who despite having caused the problem did very nicely on their bonuses.

But Mr Bean should reflect on his attitude.  Reductions in income, whether of pensioners or workers, are not an academic exercise in distributing the pain.  They cause real misery for many people.  Not that Mr Bean would understand ...

 

Where's the celebration?

Don't they believe in this, ahem, wonderful euro agreement?  The UK, French and German stock markets are all down this morning, while the euro-dollar exchange rate is more or less unchanged from yesterday.

Or have they learned the hard way that euro deals are apt to disintegrate after a day or two?

  

Rubbing their noses in it

Yes, it's the big day for Greece when the Eurozone finance ministers will (probably) agree to the bailout.  But don't get too excited; it will only be a provisional agreement, in that the Dutch, Finnish and German parliaments have to endorse the arrangements over the next week or two, before it can be put into effect.

What will be interesting will be the attempts of Brussels (and Frankfurt) to maintain control of the situation in Greece.  The escrow account deal seems certain to be adopted, thus ensuring that there will be no hanky-panky once the funds have been transferred.  There are also likely to be demands for a permanent Troika presence in Athens whose purpose will be to keep the Greek government's nose to the grindstone.

Thus the EU will have established its first colony ...

The snake in the tunnel

Ms Pagano in The Independent thinks that there may be a plan B in the offing:

... the markets are convinced that the politicians are working out a managed default that would allow Greece to devalue but stay within the euro, a new "soft" euro band; for those with long memories, not unlike the old exchange rate mechanism. This would allow Greece to devalue by up to 25 per cent and continue using the euro note, but a Greek one stamped with its insignia, thus keeping pride intact too.
It's impossible to know whether such a plan is being hatched, but the markets are usually pretty good at smelling these things out; if it happens, August is the most likely month. No one is going to admit to a Plan B as it would have to be conducted in secrecy with the other eurozone central banks over a weekend, and announced first thing on a Monday to avoid a flight of capital out of the country. The Greek banks would have to be recapitalised, a floor would have to be put under corporate and household debt. Such an arrangement has the benefit of allowing Portugal and Spain to opt out too into a more flexible band, should they need to. And hey presto, you then have a northern "hard" euro area of Germany, Austria, Finland, Netherlands – maybe France and Italy – and trading can start competitively. 

Sensible idea.  But far too sensible for the muddle-headed bureaucrats in Brussels and Frankfurt?