RSS for Comments

RSS for Entries

More Bailouts for Greece? Back to the Drachma? Or a Spanking for Greece?

When you get third-hand reports of secret meetings about world leaders fumbling with the economy of Europe, you recall that politicians are actors too ugly for television and not smart enough for radio, and just barely able to understand the problems they are tasked with fixing, or real smart guys who get ignored because they lack charisma.

Either way, the economy in Europe is in trouble. And real people on the street knows for miles ahead when economic trouble is brewing. Politicians try to spray-paint over economic problems, because they know they’re in the same boat as the CEOs of publicly traded companies; if the company shows lousy earnings, they get the boot, and somebody else gets to try to fix the problem.

So when I read an article saying that European leaders are fighting “to contain a mounting sense of crisis” about the single currency, all I can think is that everybody knows that the damage is done, and we’re all just waiting for the announcement.

One thing politicians of all sorts are good at is pretending that it’s business as usual, and a lot of them probably have such short time-horizons that they believe it.

One other thing: I wouldn’t want to live in Greece today. Other countries are currently deciding the economic fate of the ordinary working man in Greece, not the Greeks themselves.

And as the South found out after the American Civil War, it’s a bad and unpleasant thing when somebody else controls your economic fate, especially if they don’t like you. The Germans discovered the same thing after World War I, and World War II.

And I’m currently hoping that we won’t get to discover that firsthand, here in the United States, but I’m fairly worried about our biggest creditor, Communist China.

Because Communist China doesn’t like the United States very much. Even after we gave ‘em “most favored nation” status. The ingrates.

p.s. the hoo-rah about the Euro falling apart got a lot louder when an article in Spiegel Online addressed the possibility that Greece may pull out of the Eurozone and go back to good old-fashioned Drachmas. The secret meetings were in connection with figuring out a carrot of sorts to keep Greece in the Eurozone; and Germany owns the stick, which appears to be its role in all of human history.

p.p.s. what does this have to do with you? Well, if the Euro unwinds, and folks go back to Drachmas and Liras and God knows what else, that would be a little like U.S. States deciding that it’s time to print their own money. At a minimum, figuring out the exchange rates would require supercomputers.

p.p.p.s. Now that I think about it, we may see something a little like the American Civil War in Europe, if countries try to escape the Euro, and are not permitted to escape. And that would be both bad, and very confusing. Who would I root for?

Similar Posts:

Share
«
»

Leave a Reply