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Europe may soon be choking
on that plat du jour of government
a la Hollandaise with the side of chopped Greek salad. The whole world, in fact, has got something like a giant hairball stuck in its craw. The hairball is composed
of filaments of lies wound over a core of supernatural indebtedness. The lies are promises that
the debt will be paid back.
For two months the financial markets have gone sideways on a
cushion of the European
Central Bank's Long term Financing Operations and the hot air of austerity chatter. The illusion of remaining
airborne may dissolve now with the Hollandaise denunciation of Franco-German
team spirit while a centripetal vortex of unpaid
obligations sucks notional
wealth through the event horizon of massive deflation.
Things are heating up, in other words. Wake up, sleepyheads! Welcome to the rest of the year 2012.
Paul Krugman, the
Nobel Prize winning Professor of Economics and
International Affairs at
the Woodrow Wilson School
of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, is so amusing
this morning. I, too, almost upchucked
my "Paleo" diet breakfast of salmon hash with four eggs (pas de
Hollandaise). Krugman writes
in his column:
What's wrong with the prescription of spending cuts as the remedy for Europe's ills? One answer is that the confidence fairy doesn't exist -- that is, claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and
businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper.
What an excellent misrepresentation of
reality by one of the official molders of public
opinion and policy in this
exceptional land. I would
attempt to debate his statement above that spending
less government money is proposed to encourage consumers, blah blah. It is proposed
because government doesn't have the money to spend
and has run out of the ability
to borrow more money due to the bad
odor now wafting off the world's compost
heap of sovereign bond paper. Everyone is going broke
simultaneously, including
putative lenders, i.e. buyers
of bonds, who are the same
ones selling them.
I like the way Krugman avers offhandedly to the concept of "depression."
I believe this is a new thing for him to admit a certain absence of "green
shoots" on the spring economic
scene. Heretofore his halftime act between two
presidential terms has
been sheer cheerleading,
but I guess he forgot to bring his pompoms to the office yesterday. I would refer to the situation as something
more severe than a "depression," which merely suggests a valley between peaks. I would say that we
are instead out on the arid
buzzard flats beside the deep blue sea
where modernity is shortly to drown itself in a fugue of suicidal bad faith.
All of which is to say the pretense that has reigned since 2008 (viz: "recovery")
may not float through the rest of 2012. Surely in the USA, we are approaching a dark inflection point where the fall elections collide with the broken promises now gathering into the shitstorm vulgarly called "Taxmageddon."
The event horizon for that
extravaganza of financial
lightning strikes is officially January 1, but the effects will be felt
long before that as households, businesses, pension funds,
municipal governments, and various
branches of the US military prepare
to roll over and die.
Enjoy the European sideshow
for now because the roustabouts are still setting
the props for act in the
center ring. When the clown cars pull into the political conventions this summer, I would like to see these circus
troupes greeted by large and lively
mobs of furious citizens hurling objurgations at the likes of Barack Obama and Willard
"Mitt" Romney. This is
probably the least we can do to register some objection to the two useless parties' way of running
things. Also, by the way, I would wonder what the generals over in the Pentagon will think (or might do!) as they see their country fall to tatters.
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