The economies of Europe are hurting, unemployment is too high, and the social nets are under attack. The economy of the United States is hurting, unemployment is too high, and the social net is under attack.
Options for the governments in each area are decreasing and despair is growing.
This is exactly what piling on the debt eventually does to you.
I sympathize with the unemployed. I sympathize with the under-employed. I sympathize with the labor unions…public sector and private sector…that are losing members and popular support. I wish there were more for everyone.
Taking on debt, in the beginning, looks like it frees one up…provides opportunities to do more things…own more things…live a better life.
Eventually, debt does exactly the opposite…limiting your options…constraining your life style…and exerting pressures that are unwelcome.
I sound like a preacher from the early part of the twentieth century…don’t I? This is exactly what they used to say.
Except this is just what we are seeing.
Taking on debt in the early stages of financial leveraging does allow you to do some things that you cannot do without debt. And, in these early stages, more debt can seemingly “buy” you out of difficulties.
As we have seen, more debt then becomes the solution to the problems created by debt. And, it works for a time.
The thing that people don’t see in continually using debt as a panacea for their problems is that the more and more debt they add to their balance sheets, the fewer and fewer options they have.
Finally, the obligations created by the debt result in a reduction in the options leaving the debtor with very few choices…and, with most of the choices undesirable ones.
So, the government of Greece is faced with selling assets, and tightening up its budget even further, reducing government employment, and cutting social services.
Portugal is now under the knife although it believed for a long time that it would escape the “cure”.
And, who are becoming the hard-nosed critics that are pushing these governments to take on more radical solutions?
Spain…and Italy…and Belgium….
Why? Well, because these latter countries are now feeling the potential for the “contagion” to spread in the European continent.
Spain, who seemed to be getting its house in order, observed a massive shift in voting on Sunday as the long ruling socialist party was basically removed from office. There is great fear that the accounting in regional governments has been understating the debt of the country and this will have to be recognized and dealt with by the incoming governments. Whoops!
Italy has a national debt equal to 120 percent of its gross domestic product and is experiencing sufficient economic dislocations that its future was called into question by a bond rating agency.
Belgium is now also coming up on the radar screens of the investment community. The interest spread on 10-year Belgium debt over 10-year German debt jumped to a near term high on Monday. Belgium, too, is looking anxiously at what Greece…and Portugal…do to avoid becoming one of the falling dominoes.
Yet there are still calls for these countries to increase their spending and create more debt to solve the employment and social services problems for the countries experiencing such suffering.
Foremost among those calling for more spending and more debt is the fundamentalist preacher Paul Krugman. To him more debt seems to be the solution to any problem an economy faces.
Yes, people are hurting, but, as he seeks to achieve a reduction in the “official” unemployment rate, some of us see the increase in the under-employment of our workforce throughout the past fifty years, the period of credit inflation, as the consequence of those, like Krugman, who profess the gospel of governmental deficit spending as the way to put people back to work in their legacy jobs.
Krugman criticizes those concerned with the massive debt levels achieved by European governments…and by the United States government…and claims that those worrying about these debt levels are like some that are claiming that the end of the world is near.
Yet, Krugman, himself, sounds like a profit of doom, when he claims that the world as we know it will end if governments don’t increase spending and create more debt!
The problem we now face is one in which there seems to be very few choices left for us. The amount of debt that people and nations have created is acting like a noose around our neck that is getting ever tighter. We can do as Krugman suggests, and goose up stimulus spending some more creating more debt, but, as we have seen, the outcome of this would be to provide us with even fewer choices in the future. The noose will just get tighter.
Eventually, the options will run out, leaving us no choices.
It seems to me that we must deal with the choices that are now available to us, even though they may not be very pleasant ones, and act in a way that will allow us more and better choices in the future. If reducing the debt outstanding at this stage is the only way we to increase our options, then it seems as if this is the way we must go.
Given the limited choices that are available to us at this time…I would hate to see our options become even more constricted.
No comments:
Post a Comment