Posts Tagged ‘European Central Bank’

The Silence of the PIIGS

Sunday, February 6th, 2022

Let’s talk about the European Debt Crisis.

[The sound you hear is the countless multitudes clicking off to another blog.]

Way back last decade, dispatches on the ongoing crisis were a regular staple of the blog. To summarize the crisis for those who weren’t paying attention back then:

  • A bunch of countries joined the Eurozone without following the requirements outlined for membership, including limiting budget deficits to 3% of less of their GDP, and overall debt-to-GDP ratio of 60% or less. How were they able to join? Simple: They lied and the Eurocrats turned a blind eye, because EU.
  • Foremost among those running into trouble were the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain). (Cyprus and Malta also had serious issues, but their tiny size meant they presented no systematic risk for other nations, and Cyprus relieved its problems by becoming the dirty Russian money laundering capital of Europe.)
  • Ireland was probably the most incongruous of the five, since their debt only spiked when the Irish government nationalized Anglo Irish Bank to prevent it from collapsing.
  • In all other cases, the cause of of the problem was obvious: Each ran huge budget deficits to underwrite generous welfare state programs for countries with below replacement birth rates, and they were allowed to get away with it for a while because they used Germany’s credit rating in lieu of their own thanks to the Euro.
  • The problem finally came to a head after the SubPrime Meltdown in 2008 made various banks and regulatory agencies actually scrutinize balance sheets and realize just how broke the PIIGS were.
  • Greece was the worst, being the most dysfunctional, and absolutely refusing to slow down spending on their own. There followed a reoccurring farce where various Euro regulatory agencies (including the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank, collectively known as “the Troika”) demanded Greece end their ridiculous high levels of deficit spending, Greece refused, the Troika threatened to cut off the tap entirely, Greece promised to be better, the Troika reluctantly extended them another loan, and then Greece continued to spend recklessly, setting up the next round of the farce.
  • A bunch of Eurozone countries then implemented “austerity,” which involved not cutting spending to balance their budgets, but merely reducing the deficits slightly.

    None of these “austerity” measures eliminated deficit spending, and none addressed the issue that’s driving all of Europe (and us) bankrupt, namely unwillingness to carry out structural reforms of the welfare state. The few tiny reforms that have been undertaken have been, as NRO’s Michael Tanner notes, ridiculously timid, and even those have been heavily weighted in future years. “So far, European governments haven’t even been willing to take a penknife to the welfare state, let alone an axe.” Plus a huge round of tax hikes…

    Actual austerity would mean (at a minimum) reducing spending to the amount of money actually taken in. As best I can tell, none of the PIIGS, or France, or the UK has undertaken such real austerity. That “severe” Greek austerity that just caused a change in government? It reduced Greece’s official deficit spending from 9.0% of GDP to 7.5% of GDP. They didn’t even want Greece to stop digging a hole, they just wanted them to dig more slowly.

    Austerity did not fail, it was declared difficult and left untried.

  • Eventually growth in the Eurozone picked up just enough, and the Troika managed to install enough of their own functionaries in various PIIGS positions to ensure that their half-assed, anemic austerity programs were actually followed that, along with Brexit and the Rise of Trump, it got Eurozone debt crisis off the front page and back under the rug.
  • So fast forward to today. Has the European debt crisis been solved?

    Hah! Of course not. Does the EU ever really solve anything? European debt grew during the pandemic, but this time they get to blame Flu Manchu rather than slow growth, high taxes, declining births and a bloated welfare state.

    Spain, Italy and Greece have all continued their PIIGS-ish ways. The UK, under ostensibly conservative Tory governments for the entire pandemic and constant attack for “austerity,” and they’re still piling up debt like one of the PIIGS, though the double-whammy of Brexit dislocations and idiotic lockdowns are more to blame than increased spending per se.

    Ireland, with the lowest deficit for the period, seems to have proved that their membership among the PIIGS was transitory.

    What then of Portugal? Have they improved? It turns out only slightly and relatively. Their debt increased by 13.9% for the period, making them better not only than Spain, Italy, Greece and the UK, but also France, Cyprus, Malta, Hungary and Slovenia. They evidently managed a balanced budget in 2019 (at least on paper). Their Flu Manchu deficit spending is still unsustainable, just slightly less unsustainable than many of their fellow Eurozone grave-diggers.

    Ireland seems to have escaped PIIGSdom, but the others as are still very much in trouble, with debt-to-GDP rations at or above 100%:

  • Greece: 174.15%
  • Italy: 133.43%
  • Portugal: 119.46%
  • Spain: 95.96%
  • Ireland is down at 62.42%.

    We don’t have much standing to condemn others, as the United States ratio stands at 106.70%. Donald Trump had numerous virtues as President, but he was no deficit hawk, and Biden would crank up deficits even higher if the Senate let him.

    We can see the fruits of this orgy of deficit spending in the worldwide inflation we’re seeing. (Feel free to argue whether government budget deficits or central bank quantitative easing is more at fault.) Inflation may ruin nations, but it’s the deficit-spender’s friend, letting him pay off debt on the cheap with now devalued currency. And it’s the working poor whose lives are most impoverished by it.

    Robbing Peter to pay Paul has always been a popular proposition to get Paul’s vote, but we’re now robbing Peter and Paul’s unborn grandchildren to delay financial reckonings until after the next election cycle.

    It will not end well.

    What’s Happening to Italy’s Banking System?

    Wednesday, July 6th, 2016

    Yesterday’s Brexit roundup mentioned that Italian banks account for nearly half the bad loans for the entire Eurozone.

    Italy is now the heads-on favorite as the most likely instigator of the next global economic crisis. Some analysts are calling it a perfect storm:

    Italy’s bank bailout fund might not be enough to beat back the Brexit. More key Italian financial services firms are under pressure and face the potential need to raise capital, leaving Italian government officials and its banking system trying to steer clear of a crisis.

    As Italian bank bonds and share prices are seeing their value slammed in the face of rising uncertainty, banks with substantial bad loans are facing greater pressure, with rates around the world slipping into negative territory.

    And, of course, they’re blaming Brexit rather than all the myriad problems with the EU that caused the Brexit.

    Italy’s bank bailout fund might not be enough to beat back the Brexit. More key Italian financial services firms are under pressure and face the potential need to raise capital, leaving Italian government officials and its banking system trying to steer clear of a crisis.

    As Italian bank bonds and share prices are seeing their value slammed in the face of rising uncertainty, banks with substantial bad loans are facing greater pressure, with rates around the world slipping into negative territory. It’s an anxiety some in Italy and throughout the European Union may have been hoping would be eased by the Brexit vote last month — but then the U.K. referendum delivered the opposite outcome from the one they had sought.

    “Market volatility following the U.K.’s EU referendum result hit the Italian bank sector particularly hard because it is one of Europe’s weakest,” Fitch Ratings analysts said in a July 4 report. “Asset quality pressure is a main driver for the negative outlooks on several large and medium-sized Italian banks.”

    The Brexit vote, which calls for the United Kingdom to abandon a European Union that has careened for years from one crisis to another, could hasten weak Italian banks’ downfall. It was widely expected that European and U.K. banks will suffer the brunt of the vote in late June, and while British banks have been hard hit by the news — which brings with it tremendous regulatory uncertainty — EU banks have suffered as well.

    Many banks in Italy, including its largest, UniCredit SpA, have seen share prices pounded; its stock is down more than 60 percent so far this year. A staffer at UniCredit could not provide comment when contacted.

    Already, Italian officials and executives appear to be pulling out all the stops to stave off banking sector contagion. The lingering question for banks is whether they can continue to support lending operations at a time when creditors face potential losses and as some of the country’s leading financial services firms could be subject to shotgun M&A marriages by regulators.

    Italian financial services firms earlier this year established a multi-billion dollar fund called Atlante to buy non-performing bank loans. But the fund, which is in the 4-billion euro to 6-billion euro range ($4.43 billion to $6.65 billion), one analyst said, is far too small to cover all the non-performing loans held by major Italian banks. However, the fund could still be leveraged in order to support loan purchases.

    “The authorities need to get banks to remove a large portion of soured loans from their books so they can loan more,” said Julien Jarmoszko, senior research manager at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “If investors fear more Italian banks, this will raise their cost of capital and reduce lending as a result.”

    Look for some sort of holding action for temporary recapitalization (including a “bail in” or some sort of ECB scheme) to let all the insiders dump their bad debts onto the European taxpayer, which was the real point of prolonging the Greek farce.

    More news on that front:

  • Atlante already took control of Veneto Banca after “a €1bn capital increase demanded by EU bank regulators attracted zero interest.” And Atlante may have to tap pension funs for further recapitalization.
  • Italy has also banned short-selling of imploding Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA. That’s never a good sign, and it never works for long.
  • “It’s bad – non-performing bank loans have risen to 18%. At 10%, most banks are technically bankrupt. That’s the percentage of capital and pledged deposits they have against bad loans. Our pledged deposits, not theirs. At 18%, they’re no longer “technically” bankrupt. They ARE bankrupt! Greece still has bad or non-performing bank loans of 34%, Ireland 19% and Portugal 12%. And we haven’t seen the next serious financial crisis yet.”
  • And bank bailouts could hit Italian sovereign debt right in the bond ratings. “Italian ratings are already at BBB- for S&P, though we must also add that DBRS still ranks the country at AL. Still, if these ratings start to come under pressure from the agencies, this could lead to speculation that Italy may eventually fall out of the investment grade bucket. This would have a major impact – in the first place in terms of the eligibility of Italian bonds for the PSPP.” That’s the European Central Bank’s public sector purchase program.
  • Of course, when push comes to shove, we’re likely to see all sorts of banking rules get thrown out the window…

    Labour, Brexit, and the Left-Wing Revolt Against Global Elites

    Monday, June 27th, 2016

    Among the more interesting storylines to emerge after the Brexit vote was how Labour blew it. Despite having a leadership far more Europhilic and in favor of transnational statist government than even Tory insiders, Labour’s support of Remain was markedly tepid, starting right at the top with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn:

    Less than a month before the historic EU referendum, the team assembled by Cameron to keep Britain in the European Union was worried about wavering Labour voters and frustrated by the opposition leader’s lukewarm support. Remain campaign operatives floated a plan to convince Corbyn to make a public gesture of cross-party unity by appearing in public with the prime minister. Polling showed this would be the “number one” play to reach Labour voters.

    Senior staff from the campaign “begged” Corbyn to do a rally with the prime minister, according to a senior source who was close to the Remain campaign. Corbyn wanted nothing to do with the Tory leader, no matter what was at stake. Gordon Brown, the Labour prime minister whom Cameron vanquished in 2010, was sent to plead with Corbyn to change his mind. Corbyn wouldn’t. Senior figures in the Remain camp, who included Cameron’s trusted communications chief Craig Oliver and Jim Messina, President Obama’s campaign guru, were furious.

    So to Corbyn, a vote many in Labour leadership regarded as the most important in their lifetime took a backseat to his bitter hatred of even appearing with the Tories. “An old school socialist, the Labour leader had in the past attacked the EU as an undemocratic, corporatist conspiracy that threatened workers’ rights. He never looked the part to save Cameron in a referendum the Conservative leader brought on himself.”

    From the same piece:

    Hardened by close-run contests in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and last year’s general election, the strategists running Stronger In decided to follow the playbook that worked in those campaigns, particularly the 2015 Conservative sweep, and focus mainly on economic security.

    It failed spectacularly. The depth of public anger over the influx of workers from other EU countries, and more broadly the rejection of political and business elites, was more significant than they had anticipated.

    Also this:

    Internal polling found just weeks before June 23 one in five Labour voters did not know the party’s position in the referendum. As party aides canvassed voters around the country, they discovered a deep well of concern about immigration.

    Labour leadership no doubt found it quite shocking that so many traditional Labour strongholds voted in favor of Brexit. There were also a small but notable number of Labour MPs who supported Brexit. Some hail from those same hinterland locales that voted for Brexit, and thus could be said to actually represent the wishes of their constituents (try to contain your shock).

    But Labour MP Kate Hoey represents a constituency smack dab against the south bank of the Themes in central London, an area that voted heavily to Remain. Yet Hoey was an early and notable voice for Brexit:

    I’m tired of people thinking that only those on the right of politics are Eurosceptic. This is far from true.

    The reputation of the EU has fallen sharply among many on the Left. The sight of the EU establishment imposing unprecedented levels of austerity on Greece was a real wake-up call. This was not a benign political institution guaranteeing social protection and international solidarity, but an unaccountable force bringing crippling pain on a people who cannot hope to repay the loans that are recapitalising their banks.

    Meanwhile, the EU is willing to require ever-greater sacrifice to living standards in order to keep the Euro and the wider European “Project” moving forwards. Ever closer Union is what is on the tin – and even if the words are removed to satisfy the Prime Minister, the contents will still be the same.

    The Labour Party has traditionally had a sceptical view of the European institutions. From Attlee to Foot, and until the late 1980s, Labour was predominantly Eurosceptic – but then, following three Thatcher victories, many on the Left looked desperately to Europe to block her policies. Wise Labour voices like Peter Shore and Tony Benn, however, argued that democratic faith in the wisdom of the public was a better guarantor than the benevolence of transitory political elites. They have been proved right as the EU is no longer motivated by Jacques Delors’ ‘Social Europe’, but is increasingly out of touch with the needs of its people.

    Familiar voices try to scare us into believing that leaving the EU would ruin the UK, but these are the same people who told us that we had to join the Euro or face disaster. We stayed out of the Euro and have therefore been spared much of the chaos of that unsustainable currency – but we still give £7.3 billion net a year of our money to the EU.

    How can we protect civil liberties when the EU forces on us unaccountable extraditions through the European Arrest Warrant? How can we ensure the jobs and growth that we need when vital contracts for work go to preferred bidders on the continent and not to British firms? How can we preserve and improve our public services when the Services Directives help force the privatisation of the Royal Mail and EU rules against state aid will make it almost impossible to renationalise the railways? TTIP is a gift to the multi-national corporations. I don’t trust the EU to negotiate on our behalf, and I certainly don’t trust it to be on the side of small businesses or Trade Unions.

    The Labour Party is looking at radical policies to tackle the problems in our country. We need to take back real control from the unelected and unaccountable European Commission if we are to have a chance of implementing any of these.

    My politics are very far indeed from those of Hoey, but she’s not wrong. Greece’s government may have brought upon the crisis by spending radically more money than they took in even after it became apparent they were going broke, but the EU responded in exactly the way described. It was born as an undemocratic organization, a fact the Euro crisis finally made apparent even to the those on the left, with the decisions of democratically elected officials overruled by unelected bureaucratic elites. And the self-serving agendas of those elites tend to be at odds with the goals of both left and right.

    The question isn’t why Hoey supported Brexit, but why so many Labour MPs didn’t.

    Other Brexit News:

  • Eight Labour shadow ministers quit.
  • You know who had a good day after the Brexit vote? Nigel Farage. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “In the end, it came down to the issue of immigration. The British people wanted to reclaim their nation. They wanted their nation to be their nation. They did not want it to turn into Germany. They wanted the hordes of immigrants camped out in Calais to stay in Calais. They had had had enough with British girls being ‘groomed’ by Muslim men.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Instapundit on the Brexit: “A lot of people felt powerless, and the political system not only didn’t address that, but seemed to glory in it.”
  • David Stockman sees Brexit not only as a revolt against the EU, but against the entire world financial elite’s low interest rate regime. “The ECB will soon be embroiled in an existential crisis as the centrifugal forces unleashed by Brexit tear apart the fragile consensus on which Draghi’s lunatic monetary experiments depended.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • As soon as the Brexit vote was announced, the EU announced that they were coming after people’s toasters and tea kettles. (Ditto.)
  • The previous Megan McArdle piece on Brexit was good. This one is even better:

    The inability of those elites to grapple with the rich world’s populist moment was in full display on social media last night. Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on, and hence will believe any daft thing they’re told. Given how badly this strategy had just failed, this seemed a strange time to be doubling down. But perhaps, like the fellow I once saw lose a packet by betting on 17 for 20 straight turns of the roulette wheel, they reasoned that the recent loss actually makes a subsequent victory more likely, since the number has to come up sometime.

    Or perhaps they were just unable to grasp what I noted in a column last week: that nationalism and place still matter, and that elites forget this at their peril. A lot people do not view their country the way some elites do: as though the nation were something like a rental apartment — a nice place to live, but if there are problems, or you just fancy a change, you’ll happily swap it for a new one.

    In many ways, members of the global professional class have started to identify more with each other than they have with the fellow residents of their own countries. Witness the emotional meltdown many American journalists have been having over Brexit….

    A lot of my professional colleagues seemed to, and the dominant tone framed this as a blow against the enlightened “us” and the beautiful world we are building, struck by a plague of morlocks who had crawled out of their hellish subterranean world to attack our impending utopia.

  • I’m always up for a good Morlock reference. And if you haven’t read H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (which you should, because it’s a great novel), that analogy is more apt than you know. In Wells’ novel, the Morlocks were the underground race that actually ran things, the ones that maintain the machinery the Eloi depended on to live. Just like those inbred redneck freaks from JesusLand (or, to use a UK analogy, those Northern monkeys), the Morlocks are the essential population that keep things running, not the beautiful, useless Eloi.

    Greek Update: Tsipras Out, New Party Formed, Snap Elections Coming, Debt Payment Made

    Friday, August 21st, 2015

    “Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras resigned on Thursday, hoping to strengthen his hold on power in snap elections after seven months in office in which he fought Greece’s creditors for a better bailout deal but had to cave in.”

    Turns out promising free ice cream, only to deliver expensive rotted cabbage, wasn’t popular with Greek voters.

    Nor were his actions popular with members of his own party, 25 of whom have broken off to form the new National Unity Party, who will evidently return to the “demand free ice cream and insist others pay for it” strategy Tsipras abandoned in the face of the sinister force know as reality.

    On the plus side, Greece just used it’s new bailout fund to make a debt payment to the European Central Bank for the last batch of money it borrowed to prop up its unsustainable welfare state.

    We’re in that happy honeymoon period after Greece gets more money and before Eurocrats are shocked, shocked that Greece’s economy is still a festering pile of fail that all those and promised economic reforms haven’t actually been implemented.

    Give it another six to nine months…

    Greece Surrenders to Troika

    Monday, July 13th, 2015

    After six months of jerking around European negotiators, Greece’s far left Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras finally reaped the fruits of his labors: caving in to austerity measures far worse than the ones Greek voters rejected a week ago in exchange for more loans.

    The EU demanded real, demonstrable, non-fake, under-heavy-manners austerity from Greece, rather than the fake kind they were used to pretending to follow:

    For those who missed today’s festivities in Brussels, here is the 30,000 foot summary: Europe has given Greece a “choice”: hand over sovereignty to Germany Europe or undergo a 5 year Grexit “time out”, which is a polite euphemism for get the hell out.

    As noted earlier, here are the 12 conditions laid out as a result of the latest Eurogroup meeting, which are far more draconian than anything presented to Greece yet and which effectively require that Greece cede sovereignty to Europe, this time even without the implementation of a technocratic government.

    1. Streamlining VAT
    2. Broadening the tax base
    3. Sustainability of pension system
    4. Adopt a code of civil procedure
    5. Safeguarding of legal independence for Greece ELSTAT – the statistics office
    6. Full implementation of automatic spending cuts
    7. Meet bank recovery and resolution directive
    8. Privatize electricity transmission grid
    9. Take decisive action on non-performing loans
    10. Ensure independence of privatization body TAIPED
    11. De-Politicize the Greek administration
    12. Return of the Troika to Athens (the paper calls them the institutions… for now)

    Greece must also hand over €50 billion in assets to an escrow fund it can’t control.

    Just think: If Tsipras hadn’t been such an ass, Greece could have reached a far-less onerous deal to continue the farce another year or so, and probably before their banks started running out of money.

    It seems that Yanis Varoufakis’ ideas about game theory don’t work when one side holds all the cards and the other is dead broke. Who knew?

    Greece and the EU Compromise to…Kick The Can Further Down the Road

    Friday, July 10th, 2015

    It looks like we have an actual, honest-to-God compromise, in that Greece, in exchange for not having their economy collapse and descend into anarchy and cannibalism, will pretend to implement real reforms, while the Troika, in exchange for those promises, and not being blamed for the impending global recession, will give Greece still more loans, write down some previous loans, and pretend this actually fixes the problem.

    So expect to see another round of this dance in six months to a year.

    Germany caved on debt relief. Greece?

    A cursory look at the “new” Greek proposal to creditors suggests PM Alexis Tsipras may have sold out the referendum “no” vote in a final, desperate attempt to avert an economic catastrophe and the collapse of the country’s banks which will be cut off from ELA as of Monday morning in the event Brussels and Athens do not come to terms over the weekend.

    And indeed, the austerity outlined in the latest proposal is more severe than the version voters rejected last Sunday. Among the proposals evidently agreed to: No retirement until age 67 or 40 years of paying into the system. Caveat: Pension reforms don’t actually kick in until October, so they’re still kicking the can down the road on that as well.

    Also: “Greece will succeed in transferring bonds currently held by the ECB to the European Stability Mechanism.” If the ESM is truly the euro’s firewall, then they’re about to get an infusion of crappy Communist-era Soviet concrete…

    Other Greek crisis tidbits:

  • Earlier Greece had floated their totally serious compromise proposal that didn’t cut any pensions.
  • Faced with impending national bankruptcy, Greece’s ruing left-wing Syriza Party concentrates on the essentials: investigating reporters who opposed them. (Hat tip: National Review.)
  • People in Latvia and Lithuania sneer at spendthrift Greece.
  • Greece demonstrates 150 years of socialist failure.
  • Greek event timelines.
  • Greece probably wouldn’t do as well after a Grexit as Argentina did after their default.
  • The sneaky return of Drachmas? Of course this was before the latest agreement. But wouldn’t it be hilarious if Greece got one final big bailout, then turned around and pulled off a Grexit anyway?
  • UKIP head Nigel Farge had some advice earlier in the week:

    Not in 100% agreement, but there’s a lot of bracing truth in there. But the problem, of course, is that Tsipras, as all Socialists do, does indeed want to have his cake and eat it too…

  • Greece Starts Reaping the Fruits of Its Choices

    Wednesday, July 8th, 2015

    The problem with holding a gun to your own head is, sooner or later, someone is going to call your bluff.

    EU leaders have given Greece until Sunday to “Reach a new bailout agreement with its creditors” or “face bankruptcy and expulsion from the euro currency system.”

    The European Central Bank also hiked Greek ELA Haircuts. Translation: Hope you enjoy the scent of burning bridges, Greece, because now your banking system is even more screwed than before the referendum. (Note: Zero Hedge is down as of this posting. Maybe China got tired of him exposing their financial house of cards…)

    And Greece’s leftist PM Alexis Tsipras is still playing his old tricks. “Screw all of you! You suck! Oh, and here’s a new proposal for a bailout that doesn’t meet any of your conditions! Please give us money! Pretty please! Screw all of you!”

    “The Greek people spent part of the weekend in the streets celebrating their status as international deadbeat. They spent the rest of the weekend hoarding food, fuel, and medicine in preparation for the manmade disaster they have inflicted upon themselves.”

    Also: “The Greeks may have burned their bridge to Europe, but the Germans are roasting marshmallows over the flames.”

    Further:

    The presence of Greece in the Eurozone is the result of a lie: The Greeks pretended to get their deficits and debt under control, and the Europeans pretended to believe them. That was the first act. In the second act, after the advent of the current crisis, the Greeks pretended to enact fiscal reforms, and the Europeans pretended to believe them. Political logic is, not coincidentally, lawyer logic — which is to say, it substitutes consensus for reality. If enough people (jurors, voters) are convinced that your position is the correct one, then you “win.” Maybe the election turns out your way, as with Tsipras and the referendum. Maybe political consensus prevents your opponents from enacting their favored policies, just as conservatives have for decades been frustrated in their efforts to enact entitlement reform by cheap and dishonest images of grandmothers being pushed over cliffs. Maybe O. J. Simpson walks.

    Mark Steyn reiterates the fundamental problem:

    Since Obama took office, it’s been fashionable to quote Mrs. Thatcher’s great line: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” But we’re way beyond that. That’s a droll quip when you’re on mid-20th-century European fertility rates, but we’ve advanced to the next stage: We’ve run out of other people, period. Hyper-rationalist technocrats introduced at remarkable speed a range of transformative innovations — welfare, feminism, mass college education, abortion — whose cumulative effect a few decades on is that the developed world has developed to breaking point: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. In the course of so doing, they have fewer children later. And the few they do have leave childhood ever later — Obamacare’s much heralded “right” for a 26-year old to remain on his parents’ health insurance being merely a belated attempt to catch up with the Europeans, and one sure to be bid up further.

    A society of 25-year-old “children” whiling away the years till early middle age in desultory pseudo-education has no desire to fund its prolonged adolescence by any kind of physical labor, so huge numbers of unskilled Third World immigrants from the swollen favelas of Latin America or (in Europe) the shanty megalopolises of the Muslim world are imported to cook, clean, wash, build, do. On the Continent, the shifting rationale for mass immigration may not illuminate much about the immigrants but it certainly tells you something about the natives: Originally, European leaders said, we needed immigrants to work in the mills and factories. But the mills and factories closed. So the new rationale was that we needed young immigrants to keep the welfare state solvent. But in Germany the Turks retire even younger than the Krauts do, and in France 65 percent of imams are on the dole. So the surviving rationale is that a dependence on mass immigration is not a structural flaw but a sign of moral virtue. The evolving justification for post-war immigration policy — from manufacturing to welfare to moral narcissism — is itself a perfect shorthand for Western decay.

    So welfare entitlement states create a sense of entitlement. Who knew?

    “The European Union is dying before our eyes.” So there is an upside to the Greek crisis…

    Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before…

    Wednesday, July 1st, 2015

    Greece’s leftwing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras wants more negotiations. Because, you know, Europe just hasn’t had enough of those over Greek debt.

    Mr. Tsipras said Greece was “prepared to accept” a deal set out publicly over the weekend by the creditors, with small modifications to some of the central points of contention: pension cuts and tax increases.

    In other words: Groundhog Day on the Aegean. Yet again.

    More Greek crisis links:

  • “Socialism is a one-way ticket to misery and failure.” Also: “The Greeks are simply the vanguard in a long line of nations who have buried themselves under mountains of unpayable debt.”
  • Greece: “We’re suffering so hard!” Poorer countries in Europe: “Suck it up, you proliferate spendthrifts!”
  • Possible post-referendum timelines in Greece. I hope you like flow charts…
  • Greece Officially Defaults on IMF Payment

    Tuesday, June 30th, 2015

    And verily it came to pass.

    Greece lost its financial lifelines Tuesday, as the country missed a crucial payment to the International Monetary Fund amid growing questions about whether it would be able to remain in the euro zone.

    Greek leaders had made a last-ditch attempt to come up with the necessary cash, asking European countries for a new bailout hours before its last ones were set to expire, but E.U. finance ministers rejected the request as unrealistic. The missed payment, confirmed by the IMF, was a landmark moment in Europe’s five-year battle to preserve its common currency.

    A few more Greek tidbits:

  • Greek banks are about to enjoy some ECB-mandated haircuts. He who pays the piper calls the tune…
  • Dear PIIGS citizens: Don’t blame austerity, blame your corrupt politicians.
  • Europe’s Democracy Deficit:

    The bureaucrats in Brussels and their counterparts in Europe’s national governments are furious with the Greeks for daring to consult their own people. Daniel Hannan, a British member of the European parliament, sarcastically tweeted, “Calling a referendum is, to Eurocrats, the most offensive thing a politician can do.” Stripped of their veneer, Eucrocrats’ arguments against all referendums amount to saying that referendums are a bad idea because they shift power from small cliques of unelected but wise rulers to an unsophisticated, nationalistic mob that might fall prey to populism

  • Via the People’s Cube: Greece declares victory.
  • Judgment Day for Greece

    Tuesday, June 30th, 2015

    Today is the day Greece defaults: “Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis confirms Greece will not pay the International Monetary Fund debt due today. The European part of Greece’s international bailout expires Tuesday and with it any possible access to the remaining rescue loans that it needs to pay its debts of about $1.9 billion to the IMF.”

    And what happens after Greece defaults to the IMF? That’s when things get interesting. First, on Sunday, July 5, the Greek people vote on a badly worded referendum. If they agree to Europe’s terms, they’ll impose additional budget-cutting measures and pension reform, and presumably get a new loan to pay their IMF arrears.

    And if they vote no? Then they’ll have no euros to keep paying for their welfare state, and presumably start printing drachmas. But their debt stays denominated in euros, and there’s no guarantee foreign companies will be willing to deal in drachmas instead of euros, or that European foreign exchanges will even allow drachmas to be traded until Greece comes to some sort of agreement with the European Central Bank and other creditors. (I am largely ignorant of European foreign exchange regulations.) Either way, expect a nice dose of hyperinflation to add to Greece’s myriad coming economic woes.

    The Eurozone is far more likely to survive Greece’s exit than Greece is. Then again, Greece now has so much debt that it’s screwed no matter what happens. Deficit financing to prop up your bloated welfare state is a horrific idea that destroys economies, and Greece looks to follow Venezuela in providing this generation’s example.

    Other Greek tidbits:

  • Tsipras “thinks Greek voters, by making delusional promises to themselves, obligate other European taxpayers to fund them.” More: “Since joining the Eurozone in 2001, Greece has borrowed a sum 1.7 times its 2013 GDP. Its 25 percent unemployment (50 percent among young workers) results from a 25 percent shrinkage of GDP.” Gee, you can’t borrow your way to prosperity? Who knew?
  • Greece actually needs €275 billion to pay its debts between now and 2057.
  • Argentina went through economic hell after defaulting, then recovered. Greece would likely go through the same cycle…minus the recovery part.
  • Europe suspends Greek bond trading.