.jpeg)
Waiting for the Fed.
We did our Hamlet post for the ECB last Thursday and, like the Prince of Denmark, the dithering by the former Deutsche Mark crowd on whether or not to support the union of Mother Merkel and Uncle Nick, who killed the Fatherland in order to take their place at a new EU table – goes back and forth endlessly, swinging from pledges of bold action, right back to more inner monologs – where much is pondered by nothing is actually fixed.
In Hamlet, the action is moved forward by haphazard events, with Germany’s decision-making driven by fear of the hyper-inflationary ghost of past while a castle full of knaves and fools twist and turn along the path which fate will, inescapably, lead them all to.
Sadly, in Hamlet, pretty much everyone ends up dead (spoiler alert!), dropping off like flies, one by one as their little union falls apart and things spin out of control. In the end, Norway has to come and take over the ruined kingdom – presumably because they have all that oil money and a balanced budget….
It was Polonius (Ophelia’s Dad), who first said, “neither a borrower nor a lender be” (shame on your English teacher if you thought Ben Franklin didn’t steal it) and the continuation of that couplet is “for loan oft loses both itself and friend.”
The European Governments certainly aren’t making any friends with their drastic austerity measures and the program they came up with (see “The Rube Goldberg Solution“) simply guarantees a recession while doing virtually nothing to solve the debt – just another game of kicking the can down the road.
But what is the point of kicking the can down the road if you are doing nothing to improve your situation along the way? Does the EU really not understand the game? Businessmen punt all the time – when bill pile up and sales are down and times are tough – we restructure, we refinance – whatever it take to buy some time and improve our cash flow but THERE’S USUALLY A PLAN! You don’t just begin haphazardly shutting down operations while hoping your revenues randomly improve.
Austerity NEVER works! The UN’s Economic Think Tank, UNCTAD, in their September report, entitled “Post-Crisis Policy Challenges in the World Economy,” savaged U.S. and European economic policies and called for wage…
