It is happening right now

Protesting reality

Yes, Reality Sucks. Fantasy can be much more fun. Portugal is a perfect case in point: Portuguese unions launch austerity strike. Some Quotes:

"A general strike called by Portugal's two main trade unions brought the troubled eurozone nation to a virtual standstill on Thursday."    ....... 

"Complicating the drama was a decision by the ratings agency Fitch on Thursday to downgrade Portugal's debt assessment a notch to BB+ because of the eurozone nation's "adverse economic outlook."   ....... 

"The government of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho is trying to implement tax hikes and pay cuts agreed in May with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in exchange for a 78-billion-euro ($105 billion) bailout package. Portugal's previous Socialist government headed by Jose Socrates collapsed in June after failing to persuade parliament to adopt austerity measures."....... 

"To meet the EU-IMF bailout terms, Portugal is supposed to lower its public deficit, which stood at 9.8 percent of gross domestic product in 2010, down to 5.9 percent by the end of this year. A recent estimate of 8.3 percent has put that goal in doubt. The forecast for 2012 is no better, with the budget deficit supposed to sink further to 4.5 percent. Last Monday, Finance Minister Viktor Gaspar conceded that the economy would shrink next year by 3 percent, leaving little scope for fresh revenue.  Joblessness is set to rise to 13.4 percent."

Gee whiz, the banks won't lend them any more money to maintain a fake, debt-based life style. Why would they, if they know it cannot be repaid?

Some of these countries have been, in effect, ripping off gullible lenders just as much as people taking mortgages or student loans who know they can never really pay them unless they get very lucky. It's close to theft, or fraud, or something.

Related, and good from Anderson: The Eurozone Crisis Is Also a Governance Crisis — Isn’t It? A quote:

"One is tempted to conclude, at this point, that the political theory of the EU today is being written by financiers and financial analysts in their credit reports.  They are anxious, after all, only secondarily about markets.  They are primarily anxious about governance and structures of governance — because the markets are trying to figure out whether the institutions of the EU and its members are serious about their legal and political commitments, and in what ways and to what extent. The state of the markets depends upon the state of these several institutions. And the state of the institutions — given that the legal rules and their application is apparently deeply in flux, unless one simply assumes that the rule of law is whatever discretionary action European leaders decide upon this week — is a matter of conjuring forward the political theory of these institutions. 

So they, the financiers, are conjecturing the possible governance futures of the eurozone and the EU.  They are trying to assess political risk which, in this case, consists of making bets based in considerable part upon the theories of governance they ascribe to the EU, its institutions, and its member states.  They are market analysts reluctantly turned political theorists because it is political theory that suggests one path or another for the application of legal regimes that appear to be much less determinate than once thought.  For George Soros, the move from one to the other is natural and logical; for most credit analysts and hedge fund managers, this is a strange turn indeed."