Deposit withdrawals in Greece have been substantial over the past two years. However, the failure of Greece's politicians to form a coalition government has resulted in deposit withdrawals accelerating - click here and here for more on this. Depositors are rightly concerned about the exit of Greece from the euro and the subsequent devaluation of their deposits. The puzzle for me and many others is why are there so many deposits still remaining in the Greek banking system. One reason is that the Greek banking system is being kept alive by massive injections of money from the ECB. Will the ECB continue to support the Greek banking system in the face of a mass withdrawal of deposits? I doubt that there is the political will in Germany for this as the Bundesbank already has a huge exposure to Greece (as well as Spain and Italy) through the ECB's internal Target 2 system.
The Berkeley Earth Project , an independent study of global warming, has found that the earth has become a degree warmer over the past half century. However, the statistical uncertainty surrounding pre-1920 estimates makes it very hard to say much about long-term trends - click here for graph . This is one of my concerns with the global warming debate - we simply don't have trustworthy long-run data which looks at temperature changes over the last millennium (or two). My second concern with the global warming debate is that it is very hard to prove any sort of casual link between global warming and human activity. The scientists may be able to show correlation between global warming and our production of carbon dioxides etc., but correlation is not causation. My third concern with the debate is that those who are sceptical or agnostic are stereotyped as flat-earthers or intellectually-challenged crackpots. This only stifles debate and the progress of science itself.