Companies Flee Greece

The Greek economy is a disaster and collapsing. Unemployment is at 24 percent, which is just 1 percent less than the U.S.'s peak unemployment during the Great Depression of the 1930's, there have been runs on the Greek banks and now companies, a vital provider of jobs, are fleeing.

The latest to flee is Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Co., the biggest company in Greece. They are moving their headquarters to Switzerland and reducing their Greek operations to slash their exposure to Greece's rapidly mounting problems. Greece's problems will soon be duplicated in Spain and Italy but on a far grander scale, as European economies slide into collapse. When they do collapse, they will take the rest of us with them.

This European financial crisis is three years old and the principal action taken by the European Central Bank is to buy time by creating the illusion of large scale bailouts to come. Its current strategy is to print money to buy bonds from nations like Greece that can't afford to pay back those bonds, which in itself is a recipe for disaster.

What is needed is global action as we sacrifice together to rescue our Southern European brethren. And it will require giant banks with Southern European exposure to take huge write offs for having made unfortunate investments. It is the fiction that those loans have not already gone bad that has postponed a real rescue and left many men, women and children in Southern Europe living in desperate circumstances.

Dick