Hats off to Greece!

Quote from Ivanovich:

The only hat I will tip to Greece is the one that allowed them to trick the EU (and Germany) into throwing them 80B euros. You might as well have had a giant bonfire and set it all ablaze for the good it will do.

You think some politician derived austerity package is going to change hundreds of years of Greek behavior?

MARK THIS POST (and all others who are saying it). This money will do nothing but push the problem down the road and we'll have to revisit Greece.

Also, keep an eye on contagion. This will not contain it.
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Oh now this is helpful. So what you are saying is that people can't change? Interesting because you have just started a very slippery slope argument.

I have witnessed several countries where people did change even though they did not initially want to.

I want to spin this in another direction. So what do you think is the answer? Let the Euro zone collapse? Let it burn down? Ok let's do that shall we. Then the contagion will spread to the UK, and the US.

Then fiat will begin to crumble, and all of those people like Rogers are cheering a big yahoo. But you forget this collapse will make the Lehman's collapse look like a pinprick.

Think you will invest in gold, great, but how many years can you survive? Can you survive a decade? Remember the great depression was a decade long. Can you outlast a decade? You will need enough gold to last a decade. If you think that you will grow your own food well, guess again. That food needs seed, it needs electricity, and a whole host of things that cost money.

Our entire system is built up on leverage, and if the countries collapse everything will collapse! You only need to take a good look at what happened to Germany. Germany was the result of a system that said, "screw Germany".

So if you say mark my words I say mark my words tell me what the alternative is! Because otherwise you are just pouring oil on the fire!
 
what is the alternative? the alternative is to let the economic cycle flush out the excesses.you flush out the excesses and then u rebuilt. your solution is not a solution. it only delays the consequences and then the pain will even be greater. the solution is to cut government spending. lay off government workers and/or cut their salaries by 50%. they will march and riot in the streets until they are hungry. then they will negotiate an agreement.

then u have to provide the proper environment in which the private sector will want to invest. the US is going in the opposite direction with more rules, regulations and taxes. that action is pouring oil on the fire.

as to the US and the UK they are both already basically bankrupt countries.
 
Quote from christianhgross:

Oh now this is helpful. So what you are saying is that people can't change? Interesting because you have just started a very slippery slope argument.

I have witnessed several countries where people did change even though they did not initially want to.

I want to spin this in another direction. So what do you think is the answer? Let the Euro zone collapse? Let it burn down? Ok let's do that shall we. Then the contagion will spread to the UK, and the US.

Then fiat will begin to crumble, and all of those people like Rogers are cheering a big yahoo. But you forget this collapse will make the Lehman's collapse look like a pinprick.

Think you will invest in gold, great, but how many years can you survive? Can you survive a decade? Remember the great depression was a decade long. Can you outlast a decade? You will need enough gold to last a decade. If you think that you will grow your own food well, guess again. That food needs seed, it needs electricity, and a whole host of things that cost money.

Our entire system is built up on leverage, and if the countries collapse everything will collapse! You only need to take a good look at what happened to Germany. Germany was the result of a system that said, "screw Germany".

So if you say mark my words I say mark my words tell me what the alternative is! Because otherwise you are just pouring oil on the fire!
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Repentance has nothing to do with it. The dye is caste. The money, already spent.

If every G20 stopped the bleed tomorrow and balanced the budget, we'd collapse overnight. It's the debt machine that's keeping this world on life support.

The Greece bailout just pushed the inevitable down the road another 5 months. That's why the IMF upped its emergency fund to half a trillion - preparations to buy another 2 or 3 months after a Spanish collapse.

Best thing for the G20 right now: default on all debt held by Foreign and Domestic Central Banks, honor private equity, call in all emergency loans to banks, let the system crash, honor FDIC accounts for personal and business, increase unemployment to 1 Trillion (United States), cut everything else by 70%. System should bottom and correct within 18 months. America and most G20's will reemerge as 2nd world countries. Nothing can stop that now.
 
Looks like the damage caused by profligate political parties is fast catching up. So now we all have to suffer - just great !!

To all those fools who voted in socialist give-aways and liberal over spending, rioting and threats of violence is their next step besides blaiming others.

Tough times ahead imho
 
Quote from christianhgross:

I have witnessed several countries where people did change even though they did not initially want to.
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Examples please. And fairly substantial and recent examples if you would be so kind, no "The country of Gomerton banned booze in 1865" or somesuch. World history is replete with examples of a significant and serious resistance to hard change. My example would be Detroit, Michigan. No matter how bad things get, they do not want to do the things that would help their economy. Been a bad place for 50 years, and they have absolutely no plans to move down the road to prosperity.

Clearly there are some people who can see the path to a better life and are willing to choose it and some who do not or can not. The question becomes, which side has the critical mass to carry the group? I believe that the Something For Nothing Crowd is larger - and not just in Greece but in most of the world.

I think we're very much on the path supposedly spelled out by Alexander Tyler, although he did not actually write this:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
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http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north484.html

And that is why Greece is so interesting. It holds a test of the future that awaits most every country in the West.
 
Ok you are DREAMING....

18 months to right the system after a crash...

Try 10 years! If the G20 were to default on all debt the entire system would grind to a halt.

This is what I always see when people say, "oh just let the die fall where it may". They think they will be ok, but having had a family that lived through the German crisis and the European crisis you are only dreaming.

I would love to say "I told you so" if all of this were to occur, but if this were to happen I know you would understand the error in your ways.


Quote from achilles28:

Repentance has nothing to do with it. The dye is caste. The money, already spent.

If every G20 stopped the bleed tomorrow and balanced the budget, we'd collapse overnight. It's the debt machine that's keeping this world on life support.

The Greece bailout just pushed the inevitable down the road another 5 months. That's why the IMF upped its emergency fund to half a trillion - preparations to buy another 2 or 3 months after a Spanish collapse.

Best thing for the G20 right now: default on all debt held by Foreign and Domestic Central Banks, honor private equity, call in all emergency loans to banks, let the system crash, honor FDIC accounts for personal and business, increase unemployment to 1 Trillion (United States), cut everything else by 70%. System should bottom and correct within 18 months. America and most G20's will reemerge as 2nd world countries. Nothing can stop that now.
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CDS exploding in Europe right now.

Europe is done. Germany needs to get out while it can. Take any and all bailout money it was going to give to Greece and use it to bailout the exposure their banks have to Europe. They're going to need it.

The EMU, while an admirable experiment, is finished. Drop euros if you got 'em.
 
Quote from TGregg:

Examples please. And fairly substantial and recent examples if you would be so kind, no "The country of Gomerton banned booze in 1865" or somesuch. World history is replete with examples of a significant and serious resistance to hard change. My example would be Detroit, Michigan. No matter how bad things get, they do not want to do the things that would help their economy. Been a bad place for 50 years, and they have absolutely no plans to move down the road to prosperity.
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1992 Canada was straddled with a HUGE debt.

http://www.ceocouncil.ca/publicatio...ing_Debt_Crisis_And_How_It_Can_Be_Avoided.pdf

Read the first paragraph. Read how Canada was struggling with a horrible debt problem. One of the highest in the industrial world.

Canada managed it back through tough cuts to its social programs, and fiscal discipline. The commodity boom was around 2002-3 and it caused a boom. But the fiscal discipline was well under way.

Want another change?

Singapore

http://www.singstat.gov.sg/pubn/papers/economy/op-e12.pdf

Just because Detroit does not change does not mean other can't change. And I just gave you a significant example of a country that can change.

What you are following is something Taleb highlighted in his Fooled By Randomness. You are seeing what you want to see and hence you are following surviorship bias. You are not looking at all of the numbers.
 
The most recent IMF-engineered examples I know of are Turkey and Latvia. Turkey's fiscal position was worse during 2001 and, arguably, it's now in a much improved state. Improved enough to consider helping Greece with their issues.
 
There is one remaining viable option that Europe has. And only one, outside of default or disintegration of the Euro.

It's gold. I know, many of you are laughing. But hear me out.

The Euro area in total, has the most gold reserves of any other currency/region. Over 10K tons. Greece has more reserve gold per capita than China - 14x more. The PIGS alone have more gold per capita than the US.

Allow gold to rise, and I mean a rise that would be unrecognizable - and the balance sheets of Europe change.

Sounds crazy? What's crazy is that for the first time in world history, we have a global debt-based international paper standard. And even though it is collapsing, people still speak and act as if it is the only viable global monetary system. And it's merely 40 yrs old! A blip in human history!

Now that's crazy.`
 
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