Friday, January 30, 2015

Yep, the Greek bailout was - partly, and only partly - a fudge to save French banks, mostly (because the French being incapable of saving their own), and some German banks (Angie could have saved her own, but did not want to, and was possibly blackmailed by Sarkozy) - but the then Greek government was in - and could have refused. They did not, because they got more money from the EU, as they got untold and unmentioned billions of "structural funds" since the 1980ties. And they all vanished into the bottomless pit that is Greece, a rent-racketeering installation run by a couple of dozen of families..... highly corrupt to this day, without a land-register and other de minimis amenities of a functioning first world country. None of the 209 reform steps are successfully implemented, some in part, one hears; according to Bloomberg the “chief of tax collection” tried to look at the tax of 300 high-net Greeks and was promptly fired over the summer…. And so on, and so forth. Unmitigated disaster is a diplomatic, circumspect way to describe what is going on. And now, with the last bailout money being used up, and the populace badly suffering, they want “more gifts”. Which puts the Troika into an unenviable position – let the Greeks go bust – to avoid moral hazard in Paris, Rome, Madrid, Dublin, the lot – and implode the euro this way; or – to fall over time and again, and thus rendering the “austerity path” into a figment of imagination (the pipe dream it always was), or better a nightmare, Berlin edition. I guess it is time to pull the plug, now that the chicken have come home to roost, or in other words – nobody can defy gravity forever, and the delusion of “everybody gets rich without working for it, while creating a world reserve currency out of thin air into the bargain” will fall apart. The irony and saddest aspect – all the fear mongering from Brussels and Berlin tell me only one thing – nobody seems to have grasped the gravity of the situation – the markets are not alone in their oblivious ignorance. Unfortunately for us all. Rant over.

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