vineri, 6 aprilie 2012

Why Website Owners Should Be Using Pinterest Graywolf's SEO Blog

Why Website Owners Should Be Using Pinterest Graywolf's SEO Blog


Why Website Owners Should Be Using Pinterest

Posted: 06 Apr 2012 09:30 AM PDT

Post image for Why Website Owners Should Be Using Pinterest

A lot has been said and written about Pinterest in the past few weeks and months, from how marketers can use use it to drive traffic to how affiliate spammers are using it to generate income. However, I’m going to take a slightly “bigger picture” view of Pinterest.

How Should Web Publishers Use Pinterest

…if you really want to taste the sweet nectar of knowledge, you personally have to pick the fruit straight from the tree and take a bite…
 There have been countless articles about how to extract short term value and traffic from Pinterest. Just as many social media gurus playing dulcimers while sliding down rainbows will point to companies like Chobani who use it to “connect with their fans” (although how anyone can meaningfully connect with thousands of fans in excess of Dunbar’s Number remains a mystery to me). But what marketers and publishers should be doing is using Pinterest to understand and research their customers not to force things down their throats–and especially not to pollute the web with more useless infographics.

The Marketing Lie … Attention Does Not Equal Customers

The truth is the one thing modern online marketing “professionals” seek more than anything else the praise and recognition of their marketing peers. That praise and recognition gets THEM a dose of pseudo celebrity, which, if they are smart, can be turned into getting themselves customers and generating billable hours. The needs of their clients and the effectiveness of their campaigns for getting new customers are secondary matters.  The primary goals are perpetuating fame and ego stroking. The success of their campaigns usually comes from riding on the pseudo celebrity status and the “reach” of the guru, which is measured by some meaningless statistic like Klout Scoure, and the sheer number of their lemming like followers. This isn’t just about online marketers. Real world offline marketers rarely “connect” with their intended audiences or demographic. If you don’t believe me, read this article on why marketers are having a hard time reaching generation “Y”

Young people do not want what the title photo shows, a Sonic done up like "The Fast and the Furious" circa 2002. Young people would rather get herpes than go to the "Sonic Lounge" at the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas. Ask Ford how their "Fiesta Movement" worked out, and I mean sales to young people, not just "social media impressions". Car companies that indulge in these silly campaigns are like an obese person trying to lose weight by switching from Coke to fruit juice when what's really needed is hard physical exercise and most importantly, self-discipline.

How Website Owners Should Use Pinterest to Understand Their Customers

Dana Todd Tweet

Why Are You Doing A Wedding Dress Collection on Pinterest

Earlier this week Dana Todd asked why I (a forty something, married male) had a Pinterest board dedicated to Wedding Dresses. My initial response was that it contributed to that special brand of crazy, which I have been carefully cultivating over the years. Truth be told, there is more than a kernel of truth to that statement. However, the real reason is slightly more nuanced. IMHO to be a successful marketer, you have to immerse yourself in the world of your customers. You have to do so from their point of view and their perspective, not from yours in the ivory tower of the corporate boardroom, trapped behind a bunch of slide shows and power point presentations filled with carefully crafted and manipulated data. To really understand your customers you have to walk in their shoes, breathe their air, feel their situations from a first hand perspective. Sure, it may sound like bunch of voodoo zen fortune cookie wisdom, akin to the concept that to really know what it’s like to be in a forest you have to “be the leaf,” but there is some truth to the practice.

If you run a wedding site, you should be following and watching what types of wedding dresses are people pinning and reacting to. Yes, celebrity weddings will influence what brides want to wear, but if you really want to taste the sweet nectar of knowledge, you personally have to pick the fruit straight from the tree and take a bite … not wait three weeks until it’s sitting neatly packaged in the produce aisle of your local supermarket and has lost most of it “nutritional and informational value.” Yes, I understand you’re “management” and your job is to guide the process, to make sure things get done, but don’t underestimate the value of getting your hands dirty once in a while. There’s a good chance you’ll learn something … maybe even something worthwhile.

So what are the takeaways from this post:

  • If you have the time to get involved in social media, be on the lookout for ways to do it that let you see real data from real consumers, not manipulated data in a PowerPoint
  • Marketers in every area are almost always like insurance salesman trying to sell you a whole life insurance policy … also known as the one that financially benefits them the most
  • Embrace criticism from your customer–don’t fear it. 99% of the time that customer is telling you what’s wrong with your product or service and how to fix it (looks squarely at Google+ team and Vic Gundotra for the gross incompetence in how PAYING Google apps customers are still being treated as second class citizens on Google+ with the lack of migration tool)
  • Don’t be a short sighted marketer and strip mine Pinterest for traffic, filling it with spam to the point that it’s useless. Take a long term view and use it as a rare, unfiltered window into what your customers aspire to or think is awesome.

photo credit: BigStockPhoto/alenkasm

Tags:
Auto link pinterest

tla starter kit

Related posts:

  1. How Website Owners and Publishers Can Use Foursquare While some people consider Foursquare to be nothing more than...
  2. The Dangers of Having Multiple Website Versions With the proliferation of smart phones of varying screen sizes,...
  3. How to Do A Content Audit of Your Website If you have a website that’s been around for a...
  4. How To Silo Your Website: The Masthead One of the more powerful tools an SEO can use...
  5. How To Silo Your Website: The Footer This post is part of a series on How to...

Advertisers:

  1. Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
  2. BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
  3. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
  4. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
  5. Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
  6. LinkWheel SEO - Get Web 2.0 Backlinks
  7. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
  8. Article-Writing-services.org - Article Writing Services creates quality content for websites and blogs at no cost to site owners.
  9. Link Building Services - Hire WeBuildLink.com for well-planned advanced link building campaigns. Very affordable. Contact us now for a FREE evaluation.
  10. Join 500+ top agencies & publishers who rely on The HOTH every day. US based, enterprise-grade support. High quality, contextually relevant links. 100% money back guarantee. Try it now.
  11. Professional website designs - Get a unique brand image with website designs that sets you apart and convert your visitors into customers. Make a brand, not just a website
  12. Krystal Glass Whiteboards - Glass writing boards for offices, boardrooms, and classrooms.
  13. Performance-Based White Label SEO
  14. SEO Cockpit

Advertisers:

  1. Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
  2. BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
  3. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
  4. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
  5. Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
  6. LinkWheel SEO - Get Web 2.0 Backlinks
  7. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
  8. Article-Writing-services.org - Article Writing Services creates quality content for websites and blogs at no cost to site owners.
  9. Link Building Services - Hire WeBuildLink.com for well-planned advanced link building campaigns. Very affordable. Contact us now for a FREE evaluation.
  10. Join 500+ top agencies & publishers who rely on The HOTH every day. US based, enterprise-grade support. High quality, contextually relevant links. 100% money back guarantee. Try it now.
  11. Professional website designs - Get a unique brand image with website designs that sets you apart and convert your visitors into customers. Make a brand, not just a website
  12. Krystal Glass Whiteboards - Glass writing boards for offices, boardrooms, and classrooms.
  13. Performance-Based White Label SEO
  14. SEO Cockpit

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Why Website Owners Should Be Using Pinterest

How to Stop Over Optimizing and Start Creating for SEO - Whiteboard Friday

How to Stop Over Optimizing and Start Creating for SEO - Whiteboard Friday


How to Stop Over Optimizing and Start Creating for SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 05 Apr 2012 01:44 PM PDT

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

Is your website hurting because of over optimization? It's a question every SEO faces at one time or another. Over optimization penalties have been around for awhile, but Matt Cutts recently announced Google will soon crack down harder on sites that take SEO too the extremes. How do you know when you've gone to far? In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we explore what happens when certain SEO techniques stop delivering value, and when you should switch your strategy to more productive activities.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus. I'm an associate here at the world-famous SEOmoz, coming to you from the Death Star Studios. Have you ever seen the Death Star Studios? I'll put a picture in the post below. Not as cool as Rand's personal bat cave, which only five people have ever seen, but it's still pretty cool.

Today I want to talk about over-optimization. I spend a lot of time in the SEOmoz Q&A. I see a lot of people asking questions which indicate that when you're beginning your SEO, you have a tendency to maybe take the optimization a little too far. This is becoming really important today. If you've been doing SEO a while, you've seen over-optimization penalties sort of creep into the algorithm over the past couple of years. Two weeks ago Google announced, through Matt Cutts, he kind of let it slip in a conference that Google was going to start cracking down even harder on overly-optimized sites, sites that use SEO a little too much in an effort to sort of level the playing field. So this is what I want to talk about.

When you're just getting started in SEO, and we've all been there, we've all done this in every one of our - at least once - to any website. You're starting off, and let's say this is your Google Analytics and this is your traffic, and you start learning SEO. You start optimizing the title tags. You fix your 404 errors, and your traffic starts increasing. Then you start getting into more nitty-gritty. You get your canonical tags just right, you decrease your overly long URLs, and after a time, your traffic instead of increasing, it starts to level off. Your ROI, your return on investment for the optimization that you're putting in sort of tends to taper, and you're not getting these dramatic results anymore.

Death Star SEOmoz

When you're just starting out, I believe there is a huge dividing line between the beginner SEO and the intermediate SEO, and that line is found right here. When you start reaching those diminishing returns on investment, the beginner SEO will just keep pounding away at it. They'll just keep optimizing and optimizing and optimizing, and they get a little bump in their traffic or a little decrease and it fuels them like a slot machine, like they're winning or they're losing. They just keep playing that game without creating any new value to their website. A lot of times you hear from beginner SEOs that, "Oh, you know, I don't want to create new content because it's a small gardening site for my local gardener, and there's not really much content to create, and I can't build links because no one wants to link to my content. So I'm just going to keep playing with the title tags to try to fool the search engines into sending more traffic."

But today with these over-optimization penalties on the way and the fact that these tactics not only are low ROI, but the penalties can make them negative ROI, that by over-optimizing, you're actually going to see a decrease in your traffic. We've seen these for a while, a lot that we are familiar with and a lot that we can guess at.

One of the most common over-optimization techniques that you want to avoid obviously is keyword stuffing. There are a lot of places that you can stuff your keywords that we are familiar with, in the text of the body, in the images, in the navigation links. There are three in particular that we see that Google seems to pay a lot of attention to when done in combination, and that's the title tag, the URL, and inbound anchor text. When all three of those are at harmony with each other on a really over-optimized basis, we tend to see a decrease in rankings. That's just from personal experience, not scientifically based by any means. But in this example, if your title tag exactly matches your URL and you have a huge amount of inbound anchor text, say 80% of your anchor text also matches those two things, you're probably over-optimized. You're probably doing a little too much SEO to that site, and it does not look natural.

The other areas of over-optimization that you want to avoid are your linked profiles. We've particularly seen this in the past few weeks with Google cracking down on linked networks, low quality links. They announced that they are going to be devaluing more administrative links. By administrative links, we mean sites that are related to each other. So if you own a network of 50 sites and you're interlinking all of those to each other, the value that you are getting is over-optimizing. They are going to be diminished, and you could face a penalty. If you do it too much, you could face de-indexing, like we've seen Google do with the linking indexes. Also, going back to the low value links, the directory links, the comment links, you want to balance link profile, because any technique that you take too far is going to be over-optimized. You're going to get diminishing rate of returns.

Now, if you're beginning SEO and you want to advance to the intermediate SEO, right here I urge you to make the other choice. Don't go to the dark side. Don't go the over-optimization route. Go with the light side. Choose new creation. If you're beginning SEO, if you want to make this jump to intermediate SEO, the best thing you can do to get high ROI is start creating content today. Starting today, create a content calendar. If you look back in the archives of this blog, go back to like 2005, 2006, you'll see what Rand did when he was here basically by himself.

Everyday SEO

Rand Fishkin had a content calendar that was every single day, 2005, 2006. Not all those posts are groundbreaking SEO masterpieces, but that guy wrote every single day, and he built this blog into what it is now. Now you don't have to write every day for your content calendar, but set a schedule and stick to it, whether it be daily, weekly, or monthly. When you do that, you open up all these new areas of SEO that you haven't been exploring when you're over- optimizing.

The first thing you're going to do is create all these new long-tail opportunities. So here your ability to rank is just for the same 10 pages, 100 pages, 1000 pages of your website. You're never creating any new ranking opportunities or new long-tail opportunities. You're not building those for yourself. With the content calendar, you're now an intermediate SEO, you're creating all those new opportunities every day when Google crawls those pages.

You're also creating new freshness. I did a blog post a few months ago about freshness factors. When you add new content to your website, you're giving Google all these freshness signals that say, "My site is still relevant. It still matters. Crawl me more, index more of my pages." And just by having that freshness, you'll see this line increase. That is a high ROI SEO activity. But also when you create new pages, you kind of get a double freshness benefit because you have the opportunity to link back to your old material, your old, stale, 10-page, 100-page website. By creating that new content and linking back to yourself, you're telling Google these pages are still relevant. Yes, they've been on my site for 5 or 10 years and nothing has happened to them, but they are still important. I want you to crawl them. I'm linking to them now. It's not as strong a signal as external links, but it still gives you that opportunity.

Freshness Factors

Finally, back here you weren't creating any links because you didn't have those link assets. Who wants to link to your sites? This gives you the opportunity to create those link assets, to build the content that people want to link to. If you're coming into an old website, if you're taking it over, they are your client and it's just something that is unattractive, this gives you the opportunity to create something that people actually do want to link to. This will take you from here to here.

That's it for today. Tell me what you think in the comments below. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Additional Resources:


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

West Wing Week: "Spring Break Edition"

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, April 5, 2012
 

West Wing Week: "Spring Break Edition"

This week, the President hosted a summit with North American leaders, addressed the Associated Press, signed his economic report, the STOCK Act and the JOBS Act, and held an Easter Prayer Breakfast.

Check out footage from this week:

Watch West Wing Week

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:

The Employment Situation in March
Overall payroll employment rose by 121,000 jobs in March and the economy has added private sector jobs for 25 straight months.

The JOBS Act: Encouraging Startups, Supporting Small Businesses
For the first time, Americans will be able to go online and invest in small businesses and entrepreneurs, which will allow small and young firms to expand and hire more quickly.

President Obama Drops By Personal Finance Online Summit
President Obama drops by a meeting at the White House to speak with journalists and editors from a range of personal finance and financial news sites. 

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

10:20 AM: The President delivers remarks at the White House Forum on Women and the Economy WhiteHouse.gov/live

6:30 PM: The President and the First Lady mark the beginning of Passover with a Seder at the White House

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates that the event will be live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

Get Updates

Sign up for the Daily Snapshot

Stay Connected

This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com
Manage Subscriptions for e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com
Sign Up for Updates from the White House

Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy

Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House

The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

 

Seth's Blog : In the palm of your hand

In the palm of your hand

A successful project might very well lead to having your customers, your vendors or your employees eating out of the palm of your hand--aware of your wishes and eager to to do what you ask.

Now what are you going to do?

This is always a temporary state. Abuse it and it's over, fast.

I think it comes down to whether you ask them to do things that are good for you or good for them.



More Recent Articles

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Don't want to get this email anymore? Click the link below to unsubscribe.




Your requested content delivery powered by FeedBlitz, LLC, 9 Thoreau Way, Sudbury, MA 01776, USA. +1.978.776.9498

 

joi, 5 aprilie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Massachusetts Health Care System: A Model for Failure

Posted: 05 Apr 2012 01:56 PM PDT

Here is an interesting email from reader "George" on his experiences with Romneycare.
Hello Mish

Here is my personal experience with socialized medical care in Massachusetts.

I've spent the last three years traveling the globe. Prior, I worked at State Street. I was working on an overly complex billion dollar swap fund which contained every paper asset known to mankind. Thus, it lost money. I hated the office, the office politics, and the sheer stupidity of mega corporate America.

I quit and decided to travel the globe for three years or until I found something I was passionate about. It was also a period for self-actualization, and personal growth.

I would have no income for the foreseeable future. I had 70K saved up. As a Massachusetts resident I am required to be insured meeting criteria X,Y and Z, or you face tax penalties.

However, I didn't need, or want the one size fits all insurance schemes in Massachusetts. I needed a high deductible, low premium "disaster," plan in case I had cancer or other life altering sicknesses.

I wanted to couple that with my travel insurance plan (Medex Assist). For minor things, broken legs, swimmer's ear etc, my travel insurance would cover it all.

Health care, in other parts of the world is much, much cheaper. You can pay cash for everything and it doesn't affect your bottom line. For example, a brain MRI at a luxurious five star hospital in Bangkok (think Hilton or Ritz Carleton) is only $50.00. Moreover, many of the doctors are trained in the West. To top it off, Eastern medical schools are catching up very quickly.

My lifestyle was not very synergistic with the one size fits all mandated health insurance schemes in Massachusetts. The light bulb went off and I considered purchasing the coverage in Florida where I could buy coverage tailored to my specific needs.

However, under Massachusetts law, I wasn't allowed to purchase health care across state borders, as I was a MA resident. However, I can purchase plans covering me in other places, Thailand, Costa Rica, the Bahamas, even Cuba.

I've used private health care clinics in Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, Costa Rica, South Africa, and The Bahamas and Texas. I return to Boston periodically to see family and friends, change my travel gear, supply up, passport pages etc. When I come back I often get a general checkup.

The health care in Massachusetts is so distanced from reality it's awe inspiring. There is no such thing as a cash price, or cash discount. The prices and services rendered have almost no correlation.

The "socialized" system in MA is now extremely overloaded. Doctors are overloaded with the "free" patients. They have no time to relax, listen or learn. It's a slow but fundamental degradation in doctor-patient time, and quality. This leads to an increase in misdiagnosed patients, maligned regulation and never ending state and federal imposition towards your personal health care, via policy, regulation and mandates.

Ironically it's all named in the effort to better care and reduce costs. It's absolutely amazing, that the worse things become, the more irrational the solutions, and arguments become.

The millionaires of the world no longer travel to America for care. They go elsewhere. Where don't they go? Socialized systems like Denmark, Canada etc. They go where service, value, and quality are held highly. Where markets are free of onerous regulation.

Traveling the world has broadened my perspective immensely, to the point where I, unfortunately, may not call American soil my home anymore. The barriers to entry from a bureaucratic standpoint are endless for small budding entrepreneurs. I'd much rather setup shop here in the Bahamas, not that, that in itself isn't loaded with it's own set of problems.

There are simple and effective solutions to bringing costs down. Ideas like allowing consumers to purchase insurance across state lines. Allowing foreign competition into the drug market increases domestic efficiency and lowers cost. There's a long list of rational and logical ways to fix the market. Let it be. Health care is not a unique market.

However, as usual, Washington, lobbyists, and the powers that be don't want real structural change that will improve long term conditions. Thus the US system will remain a complete failure across the board.

George
1st Row in front of the Conch Shack
The Bahamas
One thing for sure is our current system does not work, Obamacare does not work, and Romneycare does not work. Of course Obamacare and Romenycare are the same thing.

Please see Obama Delivers Warning to Supreme Court on Healthcare; If Obamacare Goes Down Who Is To Blame? Who Loses If Not Struck Down? Mathematically Speaking, Obamacare Cannot Survive for further discussion.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List


Another Bad Day for Spanish Bonds, 10-Yr Yield Hits 5.85%, Settles at 5.75%

Posted: 05 Apr 2012 09:50 AM PDT

Spanish government bonds are taking another dive today with yields rising again.



Chart from Bloomberg.

Place your bets on when yields soar above 6%. I suggest it will not be long.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List


Crunch Time for Greece (Case for Bank Holiday and Eurozone Exit Now): Disbursements to Greece by the EFSF and IMF "Conditional on Compliance with Conditionality"

Posted: 05 Apr 2012 12:12 AM PDT

If the second half of the title to this post seems silly, it is because it is silly. However, "disbursements to Greece by the EFSF and the IMF will still be conditional on compliance with conditionality" is an exact quote from The Second Economic Adjustment Programme for Greece, March 2012 by the European Commission.

I advise not attempting to read the document. It is a mere 195 PDF pages long. However, a tip of the hat to reader Brett who did manage to slog through the entire document to discover that gem on PDF page 55.

Brett also discovered some rather interesting facts regarding Greece's inability to make needed bond rollovers.

Brett writes ...
Hello Mish

I have spared you having to read the attached 195 page sleeping pill and I have discovered a major problem.

The first disbursement to Greece was on March 20. Disbursements are paid quarterly and no sooner, which effectively means that June 20 is the earliest next disbursement due date. Greece was originally supposed to receive 74 billion in the first tranche,(Page 56 on the document), it received 7.5 billion. Someone needed to put the decimal point one place to the right.

We know Greece is insolvent and it raided University accounts held at the Bank of Greece to effect the March bond swap. We know the bond swap offer (450 million Euro) for issue XS0147393861 was rejected and is payable on May 15 (6 Weeks to go). Somehow it has to pay this before the next tranche.

Of the 7.4 billion it received in the first tranche a Greek government official stated that "Greece would use this money to pay 4.66 billion euros to the European Central Bank and other eurozone national central banks for the capital amount of a three-year bond that expired yesterday".

This leaves 2.74 billion over 3 months to survive with. Even if you believe the 1% deficit for 2012 forecast (complete nonsense on page 99) Greece is in arrears 1.25 billion per month. This consumes entirely the remaining distributed money from the EU & IMF. Plus there is 5.2 billion Euros of Treasury bills due in April and May.

Greece 26-Week T-Bills



Greece 13-Week T-Bills



Below is my favorite line from the document.

However, the disbursements to Greece by the EFSF and the IMF will still be conditional on compliance with conditionality.

Why even bother?

Regards
Brett
March Bond Swap

Greece did manage to make the March bond swap but only by raiding University accounts held at the Bank of Greece. I was aware of this but have not commented on it yet. Now is as good a time as any.

The Slog covered this on March 26 in EXCLUSIVE: GREEK GOVERNMENT ROBBED PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS TO COMPLETE BOND SWAP
The illegally denied default of Greece entered a dramatic new phase this afternoon with the revelation by mainstream Greek public health website Health News that, shortly before midnight on March 8th – the eve of Greece's psi completion on Friday March 9th – on average 70% of public utility funds in various large, interest-bearing accounts at the Bank of Greece were raided. These included most of the State's regional hospital budgets, various universities and (it is alleged) at least one utility company.

The shortfalls came to light late last week and this morning as various hospital purchasing cheques in particular began to bounce. The monies – estimated by one source to total some 1.4 billion euros – appear to have been used to pay off the tiny minority of private sovereign creditors who, under the original terms of their bond purchase, were entitled come what may to full payment of the bond's yield entitlement.

Setting aside the amoral audacity of this act, it does yet again raise the issue of a Greece so utterly lacking in any real funds in the real world, that to pay off a minute proportion of the bondholders it had to resort to such a desperate measure.
On March 28, The Slog wrote GREEK EMBEZZLEMENT UPDATE: SLOGPOST VINDICATED BY ATHENS NEWS REPORT.
From Athens News:

'Six of the country's universities say they face immediate closure after the recent bondswap reduced their assets to zero. An emergency meeting of university rectors on Tuesday heard that only 33m euros remained of 120m euros that 17 Greek universities had deposited with the Bank of Greece for their operating expenses, while six university accounts were now completely empty meaning they would soon be unable to stay open.'
What Assets Can Greece Raid Now?

I thought there was a strong chance Greece would declare a bank holiday in March. It did not happen. Easter, this weekend, is also a reasonable bet, but I will not go far as to say it is a likelihood.

Regardless, somehow Greece needs to come up with money for April 20 and May 12 redemptions.

Is there another rabbit in the hat? I really do not know, but I do know that hats cannot hold an infinite supply of rabbits. I also know that the last trade date on Greek 1-year bonds was at 1,143% way back on March 9.



That should not inspire confidence in Greece or in rabbits.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List