Thursday 31 October 2013

How could it be any worse?

Lateral thinking is taking a situation and seeing it from the other side. So start with the result and look to how it happened, rather than create a situation and see how it plays out. Looking back allows you to follow exactly how something looks inevitable once it's already happened, while many people would at best get a slight twinge something may go wrong while the few who can are always dismissed as Jonahs. Like when Vince Cable said if the country kept on borrowing and allowing people to buy houses they couldn't afford the economy would break down. Which it did, and they didn't stop.

I will just use a single example here to illustrate the situation, which can be used to identify all others. After using massaged figures Greece and others like them joined the Euro despite technically not qualifying, borrowed billions and then discovered one by one of course (see my post on borrowing)  as they were never rich enough to have all the things they'd just finagled, they couldn't afford to pay them back. Europe being a bottomless pit of money (they print their own now you know, like America) meant it didn't really bother them too much financially, but although it put a slight dent in the lender's finances (read 'Germany'), they were happy to do what normal lenders won't, extend the debt so far it would never really be paid back but made it look better. They may even write some of it off next to make it look smaller as well (like printing money, but in reverse).

In fact there is a genuine solution to stop the lame ducks being in debt for the decades or even longer, and are all in deep lasting recessions as a result, and that is to pool the debts across the Eurozone, thus making every country equally responsible (a bit like communism). Naturally had the Germans wanted that all along (like the last two times when they lost) what would have been the best way to bring it all about? Allow some piss poor countries in deliberately guaranteed to abuse the system and then avoid mass defaults by taking on their debts through a total political union  required in order to pool the debts. It has been proposed and expected sooner or later, which couldn't have happened without such a huge debt problem in the first place.

Having illustrated an additional example of problem-reaction-solution, I will now introduce the next situation, turkeys voting for Christmas. Normally when a national policy (in this case joining the Euro) wrecks the economy, and is now expected to cause decades of further recession, they would drop it. Technically could Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Portugal ever have been worse off outside the EU itself or the Euro? OK, I'm no expert, but using the degree level (minor) politics and economics I do know, the answer is a definitive 'no'. Think about it, could it have been physically possible for at least seven countries to have been plunged into an indefinite depression as bad or worse than present had they not joined the EU or Euro? Look at the countries nearby who are not for at least a general clue and comparison.

Taking it as a given (humour me if you can't), if your own country were in this position, would the logical reaction, accurate or not, be to want a change? I'd say it should be, but in reality, not one single party on the continent thus affected has been elected as even an influential partner who wants to even leave the Euro.

That is mind control at its widest level, what else could explain it?

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