Bark Bark Bark Bark. Bark Bark.
In case it's escaped your notice, the intent of efforts dealing with the worldwide financial crisis have not been to solve the situation, only to shuffle debt, forestall a kind of mathematical inevitability, and slow the fall.
This isn't entirely a criticism. You wouldn't like the kind of sudden, precipitous collapse we think of when when imagining the 1929 Crash of the U.S. stock market; America would look a great deal like rural Bulgaria a few months after that. It's human nature -- no one really wants to live in a Yurt and watch children play with toys made of dried animal dung.
However, if you actually look at what American and European financial mavens are doing, it amounts only to arresting the speed of the drop, because the underlying problem which created all this -- a gigantic bubble of debt, built right here in the USA -- is still there.
And frankly, having a pause, a slower rate of fall, is beneficial to those who have, more than those who do not -- because, bless their big peasant hearts, they don't have the exposure that the wealthy do. There's much less cushion between those who don't, and the hard asphalt of the street. They just don't have the headaches that come with ownership and wealth; they couldn't be expected to understand all of that.
However, it isn't a conspiracy. Businesses and financial institutions want to put off the day of reckoning as long as possible, as they frantically search for someplace to dump the debt, or slowly transfer it from corporations and banks to governments without anyone noticing.
And, naturally, those with money and property will take advantage of the pause to arrange their portfolios in anticipation of... whatever comes next.
No one knows precisely how much debt is hiding out there; some estimates are $50 to 60 Trillion Dollars. But, it's all bad paper owned by financial institutions, pension funds and banks -- investments with a claimed valuation hundreds of per cent more than they're worth. The banks can't admit how worthless they are, or allow them to be properly valued, because -- here, and in Europe -- those banks would fail almost instantaneously. Bang.
In America, $1.53 Trillion of that debt bubble has been transferred to the government, meaning the People. Some of the liability of the Banksters was transferred, deferred, and made to disappear. If you watch enough commercial teevee, the advertisements for cars and clothes and travel and The Good Life Waiting For Us All are supposed to soothe and convince most people that "everything's the same as it always was". Only, it isn't.
European banks, who were just as greedy and short-sighted as their American counterparts, can't do what they did. The debt bubble is still sitting on their books; it can't be transferred to the governments of a half-dozen countries as it was in the U.S. Those same half-dozen countries also spent themselves silly during the Go-Go, Lil' Boots Bush years, too -- Greece, Spain and Ireland are good examples.
The plan of the European banks and governments is to transfer the pain to their citizens: Austerity, slashing budgets; everyone will have to get along with less -- fewer police, fewer teachers; lower pay for public-sector jobs; more "Privatization" and more Opportunities For
And, the Europeans blame us... and they have a point.
At some point, Fate will bring us The Check -- probably in the form of a threat from the Chinese, or a financial crisis in some country like Bulgaria or Monaco which threatens to unravel the entire global banking system. A little like waiting for Franz Ferdinand's assassination to trigger a general European war: Some Damn Thing In The Balkans.
I recommend buying your wheelbarrows now, to transport bales of currency in, because the Hyperinflation accompanying a value collapse (this whole crisis is about value, you see) will make Germany in the Winter of 1922 look like a Debutante's Ball.
Think of Our Current Life as a bit like the Cold War -- Americans and Russians, aiming hundreds of missiles with nuclear warheads at each other, and the rest of the world. A brushfire war in one spot could end up triggering a Global Thermonuclear Exchange, and then we all end up living in radioactive Yurts watching mutant children play with toys made from old currency.
I'm starting to sound like a Leftist Glenn Beck, so I'll stop here before I begin barking wildly about giving money to a gold brokerage company.
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