Sunday, July 8, 2012

Land of the Perpetual Crisis

On Friday, June 29th coming out of yet another summit Euro-zone leaders announced the ECB will be able to directly help banks (rather than funneling money through national governments) and over time a tighter monetary integration for the EU.  Markets around the world were up significantly immediately after the announcement - the Dow was up over 2%.

No problem was really solved.  The banks in Spain, Italy and Portugal (and many other Euro countries) need massive amounts of capital to remain solvent.  Furthermore Euro area countries continue to spend more than they bring in in revenue.

This most recent crisis primarily impacting Spain, Italy and Portugal may be past, however, the EU is on an unsustainable path and will face crisis after crisis until the fundamental debt problem is solved.  As the The Telegraph pointed out a couple of weeks ago all of the (now innumerable) bailouts and plans announced in Europe are simply loans in one form or another to one entity or another.  Loans that require the borrower to pay back with interest (though admittedly low interest).  What happens when those lending money begin to demand more for the risk they are taking?  What happens if the ECB truly turns on the money printing spigot and inflation really kicks in?

So the (badly dented) can was kicked a bit farther down the road.  While I am not optimistic hopefully governments around the world begin to recognize that spending money they do not have is not the way to build wealth and prosperity.  If they do not come to realize this on their own at some point the markets will force them to confront this reality.

Of course this discussion focused on Europe.  Arguably the US is in worse shape and at some indeterminate point in the future creditors will wake up to the fact that the U.S. has no chance of paying back its debts (or at least no chance with the dollar worth anything close to what it is today).

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