Ongoing European Debt Crisis

To be more precise, Krugman says the Euro was half-assed. They need to either follow it through to its logical conclusion or scrap it; otherwise these crises will just keep happening.

In related news, some of the comments on Krugman's latest column make my head ache. I guess there's nothing quite as likely to inspire fanaticism as a failed idea that you have a political investment in.

edited 7th May '12 6:46:31 AM by Fighteer

I love it when he talks common sense.

Mind you, I love the one where he said the right was the one to homogenise everything. From the British Point Of View, it's the left!

One or two commenters do bring up the point of Finite (Natural) Resources, though, since economists prefer infinate growth — what is to done about that?

Asteroids? No, seriously: too many people seem to forget that for all intents and purposes, Earth is a closed system when it comes to the macro.

There may be an issue with finite resources, but it gets trotted out about as often as The World Is About To End Next Sunday and has about as much relevance to the issues at hand. Thomas Malthus would be proud.

If Malthus and his modern adherents are right, at some point we'll exhaust one or more vital resources, human civilization will enter a supply-demand imbalance that will eventually cause it to collapse, and we'll have a major die-off, followed by a return to subsistence.

Even if you buy into that theory, it would seem to prescribe liberal social policies vis-a-vis the environment, economic sustainability, and the like, not austerity until everyone except the very rich is preemptively starving.

But that's what you get when people with political agendas use armchair philosophizing to justify the policies they already want to enact.

edited 7th May '12 7:55:24 AM by Fighteer

I'm reminded of Jared Diamond's Collapse.

We're an inventive lot: if our brains are so special, we'll work something out. And, if they're not that special, we won't. And, say hello to hunting and gathering again. As a genus, we managed for millions of years that way. <hugs her laptop>

That's not Malthus; that's a view like that of Boseup — the opposite of Malthus.

@ Fighteer:

More than liberal — it's a full-on Genocide of Humanity, and I seriously think anyone who wants that would want the very rich to die first anyway — after all, I guess they'd be looking for Population Reduction — fast.

edited 7th May '12 8:03:16 AM by Greenmantle

Well, I happen to believe in the view that humans will find a way to make it work, although it may have to wait until things suck a lot more than they do now — we tend to be complacent until our backs are against a wall, at which point everyone digs up all the stuff that innovators have been coming up with and starts paying attention to it.

The point is that using it as an excuse for austerity in a budget crisis is absurdly transparent.

Yeah, you'd think you'd want to go after the top consumers, not the bottom.

edited 7th May '12 8:28:44 AM by Fighteer

You hear people complaining about cries of "Eat the rich!", but not as much about the strategies that translate to "Starve the poor!".

The poor don't have time for this shit.

The poor don't have time or resources to fight back, which is why politicians are supposed to be working for them, not against them.

I have a theory about businesses. You don't pretend corporations are moral creatures. "Business Ethics" is great and all, up until it inhibits us from instituting policy that shapes business behavior because we think they'll do it on their own.

I guess the same thing applies to politicians.

Aviva boss Andrew Moss to step down

He's not the first CEO to leave his post in the last few weeks, either.

New Greek elections as coalition talks fail - Venizelos

No need to say any more, really.

Nope, new elections likely, the Far Left have a serious chance of dominating the new elections, and Greece moves ever closer to leaving the Euro.

Woo hoo. Was a dumb idea in the first place IMO. I mean, it's tragic, considering the attempts at unification, but I support sovereign nations having their own currency.

There are ways and ways. The State's Federal Dollar took a while to settle down, itself, you know.

The Euro, however, has provided a wonderful example for How Not to Unitise Currency for Dummies, though.

There's certainly an argument that the US's dollar is a triumphant example, but the Fed controls the entire nation's monetary policy, and fiscal policy is set at the national level. The EU has sovereign nations with their own problems.

Also, I'm not convinced the dissimilarity between the economies of the states is equivalent to the dissimilarity between the economies of Europe.

Way back when, you'd find a different picture, Tomu. The states were rather dissimilar in both background, culture and economic base. From this distance in history, all the rough edges that did cause friction during federal unification appear rather less abrasive than they were at the time. There were points when it teetered badly.

But, yeah: in the main, the US is a How-To guide.

edited 15th May '12 12:30:37 PM by Euodiachloris

I've heard the "But the US-" argument before, and I totally forget how it was countered, so I'll concede the point.

Oh, I wasn't claiming they were as disparate as the European member states. Just, things did get very rocky at times as adjustments across the board had to be made.

The euro's survival 'requires political union': Robert Peston. It is an interesting article, I watched the end of the show — it was quite interesting, too.

Krugman gives the Euro apocalypse a few months at best. I'm leery about him making such a specific bet, as it guarantees that people will try to use it to discredit his whole policy if he's wrong, but since he's made a big stink about economists being afraid to step in and get their hands dirty, I guess he has to walk the talk.

Obviously it won't happen, due to Germany's Historically-based Phobia of Inflation.

But, even if it did happen, is that enough? Will that take too long? One commenter there said that 3-4% would take 15 years — 15 years? The Euro hasn't got that long. 15 months, 15 weeks, 15 days — that's the time period we're talking about here.

Either way, the Time of Reckoning is almost here.

edited 18th May '12 9:50:36 AM by Greenmantle