The Banking System, System Collapse: The Big Fat Greek Bank Run Episode 3

""It appears times up for the Greek Trojan Horse that has been parked outside of the European Central Bank for years, slowly but steadily bleeding the euro-zone dry of now in excess of Euro 360 billion (E240 billion bailout + E120 billion banking system support), as the euro-zone bureaucrats and politicians are finally starting to understand what many have understood for the past 5 years that Greece just cannot function within the Euro-zone, it should never have been allowed to join with bogus economic statistics and subsequently should not have been bailed out again and again and again.

BBC Newsnight briefly reports that at a meeting of european finance ministers on Thursday a senior official of the ECB was asked will the Greek banks be able to open tomorrow (Friday), he said yes, but I don't know about Monday.

Greece Bank Run Going Exponential

The Greek banking system has been bleeding deposits all year, having seen at least Euro 40 billion withdrawn this year, leaving behind approx Euro 120 billion. However, as the end game approaches (Varoufakis is apparently an expert on Game Theory) the rate of withdrawal has accelerated to over Euro 1 billion per day, up from approx Euro 200 million a day of a week ago, and could keep doubling every other day, which is despite ECB support on a DAILY basis without which Greece's banking system would have collapsed 5 years ago! Which means Greek banks are paying withdrawing depositors with funds from the ECB that to date totals approx Euro 120 billion because the Greek banks have been bankrupt for some time!

Even Greece's central bank panicked by opening warning the Syriza government that Greece was heading for a catastrophic crash out of the euro-zone.

So the worry for depositors is that one day, perhaps Monday, the ECB fails to provide enough liquidity to prevent a banking system collapse when the Greek banks make the call for more money and as Northern Rock illustrates, for already worried savers it only takes a media report of queues outside of banks to trigger an out of control panic reaction that no matter what the politicians state or promise has no effect on panicking savers, fearing that they will only get back a fraction of the value of their original euro deposits after Greece prints its own devalued currency.

My yesterdays article covered the dynamics of the Greek debt crisis that have their roots in the fact that Greece wants a permanent subsidy from other euro-zone member states to subsidise the Greek life style as illustrated by the fact that Greeks can retire as early as from age 26 with most retiring before age 55. Something that many other eurozone member states such as Germany cannot stomach, especially after having sunk Euro 360 billion already into the Greek black hole (read -GREXIT - Greece Wants to Become Scotland, Seeks Permanent Subsidy from Euro Tax Payers.)

It does look like that Greece is galloping towards a GREXIT, in which case that will put pressure onto the other PIIGS member states as the question will be asked who will be next, as I wrote yesterday :

The Big Problem is PorExit, SpaExit and ItaExit.

Greece in economic terms is a flea on the back of the Euro-zone elephant that could easily survive a GREXIT. But the real problem is who would be next, for soon the pressure would mount on the other PIIGS, with Portugal, Spain and Italy vying for who would be next to EXIT the euro-zone, something which the Euro-zone would not survive. Therefore that remains Greece's 'Ace in the hole', which is why they are still in the eurozone, so probably suggests that some sort of fudge will be arrived at that would only DELAY GREXIT for the fundamental reason Greece is BANKRUPT!

A GrExit would also make a BrExit more probable, whilst Putin would be dancing in the Kremlin.""

Greece to Enter ECB Torture Chamber:

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article51133.html 

X-ray'd Ancient Scroll Documents Blackened by Mount Vesuvius Near Pompeii Readable at Last

""The 79 A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius is most famous for burying Pompeii, spectacularly preserving many artifacts—and residents—in that once bustling town south of Naples. The tumbling clouds of ash also entombed the nearby resort of Herculaneum, which is filled with its own wonders. During excavations there in 1752, diggers found a villa containing bundles of rolled scrolls, carbonized by the intense heat of the pyroclastic flows and preserved under layers of cement-like rock. Further digs showed that the scrolls were part of an extensive library, earning the structure the name Villa of the Papyri.

Blackened and warped by the volcanic event, the roughly 1,800 scrolls found so far have been a challenge to read. Some could be mechanically unrolled, but hundreds remain too fragile to make the attempt, looking like nothing more than clubs of charcoal. Now, more than 200 years later, archaeologists examining two of the scrolls have found a way to peer inside them with x-rays and read text that has been lost since antiquity.

"Anybody who focuses on the ancient world is always going to be excited to get even one paragraph, one chapter, more," says Roger Macfarlane, a classicist at Brigham Young University in Utah. "The prospect of getting hundreds of books more is staggering."

Most of the scrolls that have been unwrapped so far are Epicurean philosophical texts written by Philodemus—prose and poetry that had been lost to modern scholars until the library was found. Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who developed a school of thought in the third century B.C. that promoted pleasure as the main goal of life, but in the form of living modestly, foregoing fear of the afterlife and learning about the natural world. Born in the first century B.C. in what is now Jordan, Philodemus studied at the Epicurean school in Athens and became a prominent teacher and interpreter of the philosopher's ideas.

Modern scholars debate whether the scrolls were part of Philodemus' personal collection dating to his time period, or whether they were mostly copies made in the first century A.D. Figuring out their exact origins will be no small feat—in addition to the volcano, mechanical or chemical techniques for opening the scrolls did their share of damage, sometimes breaking the delicate objects into fragments or destroying them outright. And once a page was unveiled, readability suffered.

"Ironically, when someone opened up a scroll, they would write on a separate sheet what they could read, like a facsimile, and the original ink, once exposed to air, would start to fade," says Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who specializes in digital imaging. What's more, the brute-force techniques usually left some pages stuck together, trapping hidden layers and their precious contents.

From 2007 to 2012, Seales collaborated with Daniel Delattre at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris on a project to scan scrolls in the collections of the Institut de France—former treasures of Napoleon Bonaparte, who received them as a gift from the King of Naples in 1802. Micro-CT scans of two rolled scrolls revealed their interior structure—a mass of delicate whorls akin to a fingerprint. From that data the team estimated that the scrolls would be between 36 and 49 feet long if they could be fully unwound. But those scans weren't sensitive enough to detect any lettering.

The trouble is that papyri at the time were written using a carbon-based ink, making it especially hard to digitally tease out the words on the carbonized scrolls. Traditional methods like CT scans blast a target with x-rays and look for patterns created as different materials absorb the radiation—this works very well when scanning for dense bone inside soft tissue (or for peering inside a famous violin), but the method fails at discerning carbon ink on blackened scrolls.

Now a team led by Vito Mocella of the Italian National Research Council has shown for the first time that it is possible to see letters in rolled scrolls using a twist on CT scanning called x-ray phase-contrast tomography, or XPCT. Mocella, Delattre and their colleagues obtained permission to take a fragment from an opened scroll and a whole rolled scroll from the Paris institute to the European Synchrotron in Grenoble. The particle collider was able to produce the high-energy beam of x-rays needed for the scans.

Rather than looking for absorption patterns, XPCT captures changes in the phase of the x-rays. The waves of x-rays move at different speeds as they pass through materials of various density. In medical imaging, rays moving through an air-filled organ like a lung travel faster then those penetrating thick muscle, creating contrast in the resulting images. Crucially, the carbon-based ink on the scrolls didn't soak into the papyrus—it sits on top of the fibers. The microscopic relief of a letter on the page proved to be just enough to create a noticeable phase contrast.""

Read Second Half of Report:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ancient-scrolls-blackened-vesuvius-are-readable-last-herculaneum-papyri-180953950/?no-ist