- Andreas and Emilia Karabalis, both 80, had €80,000 taken from island home
- Billions of euros hidden in cupboards and under floorboards across nation
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Warning: Greeks are being urged to keep their money in the nation's banks and not to stash their cash at home (file picture)
Greeks are being urged to keep their money in the nation's banks and not to stash their cash at home - as thieves continue to profit from the country's economic uncertainty.
Police say brazen burglars are making off with hundreds of thousands of euros, on an almost daily basis, as they raid homes where money is hidden in cupboards or under the mattress.
Andreas and Emilia Karabalis, both 80, are just one of the many victims targeted by unscrupulous robbers.
The couple took out €80,000 and hid it in their home, on the island of Lefkada, because they thought their bank would collapse. But days later thieves came in the night.
Emilia said: 'We were sleeping. The two masked burglars came to our bed and tied us up. They hit us. They robbed us - they didn't leave anything, it was torture.'
Husband Andreas added: 'Our life is black now. They took our life's savings. We lost everything.'
No-one knows exactly just how much cash lies stashed in Greek homes, secreted in cupboards, at the back of the ice-box, beneath the floor or under the mattress.
But by any guess it is well in the billions, and burglars are after their share of loot which is both highly portable and virtually impossible to recover.
Greece's debt crisis has plunged it into five straight years of economic contraction, thrown half of its young people out of work and may see it ejected from the eurozone.
Civil disorder: As well as the targeting of homes, there has also been violence on the streets of Greece in recent months
In the past two years, Greeks have withdrawn from banks more than €72billion - or close to €7,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. And much of that has been taken in cash.
Police say gangs who may have once eyed 'hard targets', - like the banks themselves, or jewellers - are now going after homes of ordinary people, where there is far less risk and often large stashes of cash freshly withdrawn from savings accounts.
'Many people have withdrawn their money from the banks fearing a financial crash, and they either carry it on them, find a hideout at home or in storage rooms,' said national police spokesman Thanassis Kokkalakis.
He said: 'We urge people to trust the banking system, leave their money there, or at least in a safe place, not hide it at home, where they must anyway take the basic security measures.
Little wonder: But with shares in Greek firms plunging, and the nation's banks having to be bailed out, many think keeping their money at home is the sensible option
'Some people don't even lock their doors and windows.' The unexpected bonanza is attracting foreign crime networks, he said, including two from ex-Soviet Georgia which police dismantled in recent months, blaming them for 300 burglaries.
Crime is just one hazard for people storing unusually large hoards of cash, most of which are not insured.
GREEKS HIT BY UNCERTAINTY OF ECONOMY, AND NOW BY THIEVES
Carpenter George Psychogios, 30, withdrew his savings of €8,000 and kept them in his house at Arta, a small town 200 miles from Athens and known principally for its Byzantine stone bridge and a 13th-century church.
He said: 'I hid the money in two different places before leaving for a trip. When I came back it was all gone. They broke into the house through a balcony door and they took it all.
'We used to sleep outside with the doors unlocked. Now we don't feel safe even when we lock up. They break into homes, shops, businesses. There is a surge in robberies here.'
In Iraklion, a working class neighbourhood of Athens, local people say some thieves have become so brazen they often prowl in broad daylight, even when a family is in.
'We were sitting on the front veranda chatting when they jumped from the roof to the back yard and got into the house,' said pensioner Mattheos Michelakakis, 61.
Before he realised what had happened, they had made off with his family's gold.
'Burglars hear that people are scared and withdrawing money and they hit homes randomly hoping they will be lucky,' he said.
'I feel like I've been naive. We always used to leave all the doors open; we had nothing to worry about.'
There are tales of savings going up in smoke in fires or, as in one case, being lost when a pensioner withdrew his life savings - then died suddenly, before telling his family where they were hidden.
Theft, though, seems the biggest risk and the crime wave has spread far beyond the big cities into rural areas where robbery was little known.
According to the central bank, Greeks withdrew €72billion from bank accounts between January 2010 and March 2012, leaving just €165billion behind.
Since then, withdrawals have accelerated further after an inconclusive May 6 election led EU leaders to talk openly of Greek exit from the single currency.
Some of that money was wired abroad and some spent, but much of it was hidden in homes, either in cash or converted to gold. If Greece leaves the common currency area, any money left in Greek banks would probably be turned into drachmas worth a good deal less. Euros stashed in a box at home would still be euros.
'People have already taken their money out of the bank. The rest are doing it now because they are afraid we will be kicked out of the eurozone,' said one police officer.
Among cases he said he had come across in the past week: a man reported €30,000 in cash and gold stolen from a storage room next to his house and an elderly woman had her life savings of €100,000 stolen from her apartment.
That woman's home also happened to be packed full of cartons of long-life milk and boxes of pasta - in case, she explained, the economic crisis led to food shortages.
Stashing cash is as old as Greece. The countryside is dotted with archaeological sites where the ancients squirreled away their silver drachmas to hide them from marauding armies.
Greek museums are rich in treasure whose owners never made it back.
'Hiding valuables - small or larger amounts of coins, golden, silver, even bronze - was very widespread in antiquity, especially in times of war, crisis or difficulty,' said George Riginos of the Association of Greek Archaeologists.
'Sometimes the owner would perish and this is how they reached us, hidden in the ground, in holes in the wall, small vases under the floor or leather bags.'
Future archaeologists may yet stumble on some of the buried treasure of the euro zone crisis of 2012. A senior banker tells the story of a family on the island of Rhodes who recently visited their local branch, trying desperately to figure out how much their late father had withdrawn before he died.
Not trusting the bank, the old man had taken out his life savings. But he hadn't told anyone where he hid it. His children were searching everywhere, tearing down walls in the house trying to find it, but with no luck.
FOREX-Euro wallows at 2-year lows as EU worries rattle markets - Reuters UK
* EUR option barriers at $1.2500; stops at $1.2480
* Break of $1.25 targets June 2010 low of $1.1876
* USD/JPY supported by importers, short-covering
* DXY at its highest since Sept 2010
* Sell-off in Asian currencies weighs on Aussie
By Antoni Slodkowski
TOKYO, May 25 (Reuters) - The euro wallowed at two-year lows against the dollar on Friday and was poised to end the week two percent weaker, weighed down by weak German manufacturing data and worries about a messy Greek exit from the euro zone.
The risk-sensitive Australian dollar dipped 0.2 percent to $0.9741, coming close to the six-month low of $0.9690 hit on Wednesday as a sell-off in emerging market currencies picked up steam.
Rattled by worries over lack of growth in the euro area, the fragile situation of the region's banking system and a potential messy Greek exit from the single currency bloc, the euro is poised to chalk up its biggest weekly loss since the first week of April.
Macro funds and real money investors have ramped up selling of the currency, which is now down more than 5 percent in May, as concerns about Greece leaving the zone rose after an inconclusive election that heightened the risk of its bankruptcy.
Greeks are voting again on June 17, with polls showing a close race between parties supporting and opposing terms of the its international bailout, keeping markets on tenterhooks.
The euro fetched $1.2535, a stone's throw from $1.2516, its lowest level since July 2010 plumbed the day before. Against the yen, it recovered from a four-month trough of 99.37 yen to last stand at 99.90.
"The pace of the euro's fall has been very quick and the market is looking for a level to consolidate around - it may well be around 1.25," said Teppei Ino, currency analyst at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ.
"U.S. markets are closed on Monday, and that too is likely to prevent traders from any excessive risk-taking," Ino said.
But with the euro zone economy in dire straits and its politicians openly talking about a Greek exit, traders said that the common currency would sooner or later have to yield to the pressure and pierce the nearest support at $1.2500.
A break of that level would target the June 2010 low of $1.1876 with not much in the way of technical support this side of $1.2000. For now, traders cite a formidable option barrier at $1.2500 with large stop-loss orders looming around $1.2480.
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Global manufacturing PMIs: link.reuters.com/byv24s
German IFO and GDP: link.reuters.com/bum65s
Asset performance since Greek elections:
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DARKENING PICTURE
Darkening the picture further, European Central Bank data showed 35.4 billion euros of net direct portfolio investment flowed out of the euro zone in March, as investors shunned the region's assets.
Investor skittishness is well-reflected in the options market, where euro/dollar one-month at-the-money implied volatility spiked to 13.13 percent, its highest in more than four months.
With the euro on the backfoot, the dollar has been the big winner with its index against a basket of major currencies edging up to 82.411, its highest since September 2010.
Against the yen, the greenback was 0.1 percent higher at 79.67 yen, supported by Tokyo importers and short-covering ahead of the long weekend in the United States. Sell offers around 80.00 yen are poised to cap any further gains, traders say.
The dollar muscled in on the Korean won 0.2 percent to 1,183.2 won, at one point pushing it to the lowest level since October last year, and 0.5 percent on Indonesian rupiah, pressuring it to 9,300 - the lowest level since May 2010.
"The rupiah is really taking the beating today. More than repatriation by European banks, I think this is a simple 'risk off' move as investors look for safety in the dollar," said a trader for a Japanese bank.
The move is reminiscent of September 2011 when emerging market positions were slashed en masse as investors lowered their exposure to the region's bonds -- an asset class that has until now been resilient to swirling global risks.
Barclays Capital said in a report citing EPFR Global data that in the week to May 23, emerging markets-dedicated bond funds saw $478 million in net outflows, the first net redemptions in 19 weeks. (Additional reporting by Hideyuki Sano in Tokyo and Masayuki Kitano in Singapore; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
Money-lender jailed and told to pay back £60,000 - jarrowandhebburngazette.com
AN illegal money-lender was today jailed for eight months in prison and ordered to pay back thousands of pounds of criminal cash.
Stuart Bell, of Newcastle Road, South Shields, will have to pay £60,000 following a confiscation hearing under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
At Newcastle Crown Court on Tuesday, April 24, Bell pleaded guilty to engaging in activity requiring a licence between January 2005 and June 2010.
Today, he was sentenced to eight months in jail for prividing unlicensed loans and ordered to pay back the cash.
He was given 28 days to pay the £60,000, or he will face 19 months in prison on top of his sentence, as default.
Bell was arrested in June 2010 after an investigation by Northumbria Police and the North East Illegal Money Lending Team into his illegal money lending activities.
His home was searched and a number of items relating to illegal money lending, including hand-written repayment schedules, were seized.
A confiscation order is based on the value of the defendant’s assets at the time it is made.
The benefit figure is the amount of profit the court decides the defendant has ‘earned’ through crime.
Detective Inspector Paul Knox of Northumbria Police’s Serious and Organised Crime Unit, said: “We are pleased with the outcome of the confiscation hearing.
“Financial outcomes can be as much of a deterrent as going to jail.
“Anyone found making money from any type of crime will be caught and will be dealt with appropriately by the courts.
“This confiscation order clearly demonstrates that crime does not pay.”
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Print this pageAccusations that climate science is controlled by money are mistaken - Wired.co.uk
One of the unfortunate memes that has made repeated appearances in the climate debate is that money isn't just influencing the public debate about science, but it's also influencing the science itself. The government, the argument goes, is paying scientists specifically to demonstrate that carbon dioxide is the major culprit in recent climate change, and the money available to do so is exploding.
Although the argument displays a profound misunderstanding of how science and science funding work, it's just not going away. Just this week, one of the sites where people congregate to criticise mainstream climate science once again repeated it, with the graph accompanying this story. That graph originated in a 2009 report from a think tank called the Science & Public Policy Institute (notable for using the serially confused Christopher Monckton as a policy advisor).
The report, called " Climate Money: The climate industry: $79 billion (£50.4 billion) so far -- trillions to come" (PDF) and prepared by Australian journalist Joanne Nova for the Science & Public Policy Institute, claims to show how money has distorted climate science. There are several aspects to this argument, but we'll start with the money itself.
Who's got the money?
Many discussions have focused on the fact that businesses with a
large carbon output (like fossil fuels extractors) have funded PR
and lobbying efforts that, in part, have attempted to undercut the
scientific case for human-driven climate change. It notes that
there is now significant money being made by companies that build
carbon-neutral energy sources and energy efficient technology, some
coming from tax incentives and subsidies. In addition,
carbon-trading markets are predicted to grow rapidly over the
coming decades. Combined, the report asserts, this money provides
an incentive to keep the spotlight focused on carbon.
In short, some of the green industries are now in the same position as their fossil fuel counterparts, in that they have an incentive to shape policy and the public support for it. There's a definite element of truth to this, although there are clearly reasons other than climate change -- ocean acidification, energy security, extending the lifetime of finite resources -- for promoting efficiency and green energy.
But the key thing here is that, at best, these companies can influence things like public perception and policy responses. They don't influence the underlying science because almost none of them are paying any scientists to gather data. So, although a focus on the income of various companies might tell us something about public opinion, it doesn't really say much about the science.
The false assertion that money is distorting the science comes, in part, from a spectacular misreading of the graph that accompanies this article.
The graph ostensibly shows how the US has gone from essentially funding nothing in the way of climate research to spending over $7 billion (£4.47 billion) a year. But the vast majority of that money is in the form of "Climate Technology," and a careful reading of the report indicates that this goes to things like wind and solar power, biofuel production, and things of that nature. None of that money goes to the researchers who are actually generating the results that point to anthropogenic warming, so it can't possibly provide an incentive to them.
The money that is actually going to climate science is on the bottom of the graph, in purple. And, as that shows, funding has been essentially flat since the early 1990s. (Funding has gone up slightly in recent years, but is still in the neighbourhood of $2 billion (£1.2billion) annually.) A lot of that money doesn't actually go to scientists, either, as it pays to support everything from some of NASA's Earth-monitoring satellites to land and ocean temperature monitoring.
The other issue with this graph is that it gives the false impression that funding shot up from nowhere around 1990. The truth of the matter is that the US has been funding climate science for decades. It's why we have things like a record of CO2 levels that goes back to the 1950s, temperature records that span over a century, and a detailed history of periods like the ice ages. People didn't just suddenly start studying this stuff in 1990 -- and much of the work from before that date was funded by the government. What changed was the accounting. There are over a dozen different branches of the government that fund some sort of science, but it wasn't until 1990 that the government formed the Climate Change Science Program, which started aggregating the expenditures across agencies.
There has never been any sudden boom in government funding for climate research that is luring people onto the research track, much less inducing them to support the consensus view. If anything, many years of flat funding would provide an incentive for people to look to getting out of the field. The graph, held up as evidence that climate scientists are being led around by money, actually shows the exact opposite.
Where's that money going?
But maybe that money is somehow being directed in a biased manner,
distributed in a way that ensures the current consensus is
supported. "Where is the Department of Solar Influence or the
Institute of Natural Climate Change?" Nova asks, elsewhere
claiming, "Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a
connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly
any have been funded to find the opposite."
This displays an almost incomprehensible misunderstanding of how science research works. Thereare institutes that are dedicated to studying the Sun -- the Naval Research Laboratory has one, as does NASA. But those institutes are focused on learning about what the Sun actually does, not squeezing what we learn into some preconceived agenda. For decades, solar activity has been trending downwards, even as temperatures have continued to rise. It's not that the researchers are being induced or compelled to some sort of biased interpretation of the data. Reality just happens to have a bias.
The same thing works in other areas as well. A number of countries have spent large sums of research dollars to put Earth-monitoring satellites in orbit, not with the intent of finding anything in particular, but because monitoring the Earth can tell us important things. This hardware has imaged the Greenland ice sheet -- again, not because of some sort of bias, but because the sheet is very big and very significant. Most of these studies have suggested that ice loss is accelerating, but a recent one concluded, "sea level rise from Greenland may fall well below proposed upper bounds."
The researchers weren't from some sort of "Institute to discover a stable sea level." They were from departments focused on polar research and Earth sciences. What Nova doesn't seem to get is that the people who study the planet actually pay attention to what the planet tells them, not to what their institute may be titled.
(Incidentally, this paper is also a clear indication that research that indicates things aren't as bad as they could be not only gets published, but makes it into very prestigious journals.)
Like many other self-proclaimed skeptics, Nova also has the bizarre idea that research normally proceeds by "auditing" existing studies. "Auditing AGW research," she writes "is so underfunded that for the most part it is left to unpaid bloggers who collect donations from concerned citizens online." But nobody audits the JPL to see if it's handling the Cassini probe properly; geneticists aren't being asked to open their books so that other scientists can see if they're fudging the numbers.
Science simply doesn't proceed through audits. The Greenland paper linked above provides a much more typical picture of how things work. The researchers behind it didn't simply reanalyse what others had done; they got new (and, in many ways, better) data that addressed the same issue and provided a more comprehensive picture of what was going on at the ice sheet's glaciers.
In short, you generally don't make an impression on science by auditing past data; you do it by coming up with better data.
It's pretty strange that people find in the graph (which shows research stuck in neutral for decades) evidence of a flood of money into climate science that distorts its conclusions. But it's unfortunately typical that an argument focused on climate science leaves the facts behind from the start.
Source: Ars Technica
Be doing that here when the charges come in!! Lol!!.
- jallen, dingwall, 25/5/2012 19:54
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