How you are cast discreetly in the role of the sucker

Your Savings, Our Money, Their Folly

By  George Handlery

Remarkable things are imposed on you and you might not even notice. It begins with the currently frequent helping intervention of politics in economic matters. There are three questions regarding the disbursed, supposedly stimulating, gifts of politics; Are you getting your due, are you receiving what someone else has created, or are you paying a lot for the little you get. The growing burdens of the existing system are real while the long-term consequences promise devastation. For the tort, you will not even be able to attain official victim status. That position is already occupied. The game we play is to take it from someone to benefit so-and-so. Especially if you think otherwise, you are in this game the one from whom it is taken to give the loot to someone else.

If the foregoing suggests that, the generalized “you” mean you as a person, then you are, regrettably, terribly right. The consolation is that, you know what is being done to your kind. Most of those who, regardless of their location, are damaged by their government’s policy, do not realize that they are losing blood and that in the funeral home of economics, their reservations are confirmed. 

Behind all this hides a complicated matter. Therefore, its treatment is rather simple. The contradiction is only apparent. The threat to the economic base of our civilization comes from elements that abuse us by hiding the peril through distortions. This hurdle has less to do with the real case and much with selling snake medicine. The hope is that the PR pitch cows the addressee into submission. The laming is to provide time for a miracle to unfold and for the flow of natural regenerative juices to revive the patient. And while this goes on, bad debts are combated by a bath in more government red ink.

While the news about the economy writes the headlines, everyone that lives in a modern economy is paying the price. Especially striking is the gyration of stock markets that react to unpredictable political news. Averages rise and fall dramatically. Wrongly, those that own no stock directly ignore the spectacle. We are all, at least indirectly, through retirement funds, owners of stocks. Yes, there might be an ironclad promise to make regular payments. However, such commitments are only as good as the economic health of the contracting party. In case of the demise of our guarantor state or of a fund, the unaware hold something in nothing. 

The question arises, what has happened, what is going on, and what might come.

The past, it shapes the present and is projected into the future, has been defined by life above the available means. Your country is an exception if, during the good years, it avoided a deficit and used the surplus to reduce the debt. Regarding the present, a number of national bankruptcies are a fact. This is smoothed over by concealment. The RX is to throw good money after wasted assets. Unless a good fairy intervenes, the future could bring the default of those that are still sufficiently well off to lend to lost causes money that cannot be paid back.

In the forefront is the case of Greece. The concentration on her implies a derailment of concerns. Greece is a small example taken from a larger picture. The significance of the case is that, even regarding that economic midget, fighting debt by creating new liabilities fails. The major players nurturing the virus are likely to suffer the same death.

The project of rescuing Greece through a reform has failed. That is so, even if the “sedators” of the gullible persevere to administer greater doses of the failing medicine. Accordingly, more credits and the repeated write-offs of Greek debt is recurring news. We are reminded of Lenin who is stored in Red Square. To the visitors of the mausoleum exhibiting the morbid oddity, “the object” (as it is called), might be rather alive. Those that know realize that he is “anything but”. 

The newest is that, expectedly, the decay continues under the mummy’s façade. The revised prognosis for 2020 assumes a debt of 146% GNP instead of the original 117%. Now then, that last figure justified the flow of a river of money into the rivulet of Athens. Again, the Eurocrats are bending their rules, which have always been dubious. 

The apparent good news of rescue is really the bad news. Reverses are faced by appeals to hold the front with decimated regiments after the lines are broken. Yesterday (07.27) Mario Draghi has announced that the IMF will combat high-risk interest rates on loans to insolvent governments. Next day, united in the bailout of all, the German-French leadership affirmed that stability is guaranteed; they will prop up the insolvent. The promised salvation that is predestined to have a bad end. However, it made markets rise and the celebrants served themselves with the meat of the golden-egg-laying goose. 

Indebted governments that produce deficits like a pasta maker spaghetti, guarantee failing banks by buying their bad debts with unsubstantiated collateral. These assets are then booked as holdings with a value. That fiction justifies the printing of slips of paper they call “money”. Is money printed to overcome the shifted around debt, designed to serve as means to inflation away the debt? The magic works until people discover that they have been duped. At the tail end of the process stands Greece. By the terms of its obligations towards its rescuers, that country can never repay what she owes. In all fairness, this debt is not singularly the fault of the rightist and leftist that bribed their voters into a pit. The example of the profligate North, and the credits extended in the name of “solidarity” with the assurance that, no matter what, the cavity being dug will be filled, have encouraged the madness.

The international economy, the national political systems and their financial habits, need to change course. Bribed political clients that are too innocent to notice that, the gifts given to them are their own money borrowed against collateral they are to pay for, need to wake up. Here “Indian givers” is a good comparison. They bring a present and then take it back. Not more, nor less than that. But the classical “Indian givers” did not pluck empty the host’s “long house” nor did they torch it before leaving. Taxing the rich to give to the poor, as Hollande promised to France, might win an election. The show ends when repressed reality reveals that, through reallocation all have become as poor as the state has grown mighty. To those that need a translation: an atrophy of society’s strength is accompanied by the growth of muscle-bound state power.