The head of the IMF has warned that its $384bn (£248bn) war chest designed as an emergency bail-out fund is inadequate to deliver the scale of the support required by troubled states.
Related. And for those who need cheering up….
The head of the IMF has warned that its $384bn (£248bn) war chest designed as an emergency bail-out fund is inadequate to deliver the scale of the support required by troubled states.
Related. And for those who need cheering up….
In a G20 communique issued on Friday, leaders set a six-week deadline to resolve the crisis – to unveil a solution by the G20 summit in Cannes on November 4.
No way, no how, should my taxes be going to bail out European socialism.
These SOBs built their European Common Market so they could kick our butts economically and here they’re crashing and burning and Canada has to help put out the fire?
These A-holes, Britain included, don’t even appreciate the sacrifices in blood and treasure Canada made in World Wars I and II to save them from themselves.
Canada OUT of the G20 OUT of the UN, and OUT of NATO!
There’s only one way out of this situation and that’s to do a reboot of the world economic system. Whether this is done through massive inflation hence rendering the total world debt equivalent to the amount of money required to purchase a loaf of bread, or whether more extreme measures are taken remains to be seen.
This is the type of situation where a dictator who says the right things can get into power. What’s become clear is that the current model of democracy, in economic terms, has been an abject failure. When a majority of the population can vote themselves entitlements without concern for the consequences, the end result is – what we’re seeing right now.
Then there’s crony capitalism which is one of the worst perversions of the capitalist system to have come about and it makes child molesters seem angelic in comparison to the politicians/bankers/crony capitalists who have conspired together to enrich themselves at the expense of the population. The one thing about hyperinflation is that it would leave them with just their physical assets, or maybe not even those as they’re somewhat difficult to enjoy when hanging by ones neck from a lamp-post.
Hopefully the physical assets will survive the days of rage that are coming as people hit their breaking point. It’s going to be a very interesting time as politicians deluded that the economic system is linear are defeated by a very nonlinear chaotic system. Things will work out as this is just another unbounded step change in the economic system which demonstrates self-similar properties when examined over the period of centuries. This was Mandelbrot’s big discovery looking at cotton prices over a 3 century period and finding that the fractal properties of cotton prices were unchanged by world wars, civil wars in the US and all manner of economic disruption.
I doubt that politicians have the mental capacity to understand such concepts, but it would be expected that economists should be aware of Mandelbrot’s work. Then again, probably all the really bright people went into theoretical physics instead of economics just like the dullest scientists have been attracted to CAGW.
I am grateful Harper is in charge rather than someone like Iggy or Bob, who would gladly pledge Canadian money to deal with the Greek farce.
That being said, I suspect that it will be impossible to get out of our IMF obligations unless the IMF totally falls apart because the US or UK refuse to pony up more money.
The EU needs to die a quick and painful death so that rational governance can return to that continent.
Meanwhile, European bureaucrats are mortified by the thought of having to work 8 hours a day.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2040678/An-hour-day-Not-say-EU-pen-pushers.html
And check out the benefits listed in that article for the EU bureaucrat scumsuckers (BARF!)
I can only hope those parasites end up selling pencils to Chinese tourists in a decade.
The socialist governments of the world for the last 40 years, same here in Canada from Lisping Red Mike Pearson up today have spend us into the poor house. Canada’s Total Public Debt is over 4T without the extra 1T of Provincial Debt. Now as socialism is dying an ugly death, the elites are demanding further debt servitude of taxpayers everywere to bail out the fly now pay later policies of socialists all over the world. See the Ottawa Sun Today on Dalton The Debt Devil awesome, every voter in Ontario should get a copy. Christina Blizzard my hat is off to you. Even tho you understated Onarios Debt Burden at 200B when it is actually around 320B as of 2008.
The Greek economy, ya gotta laugh, they invented the word economy and they still don’t get how it works.
Maybe if they had invented work instead, that would help.
Instead, I gather they invented play, sport and horsing around (in more ways than one).
Still, what they should do is send thirty Greeks to every town in North America, set up a Greek restaurant, a soccer team, and a playhouse, and just leave a skeleton crew back in Hellas to keep the Turks out. Better idea, let the Turks have the place, at least they have some clue how to collect taxes.
Pass this on to every voter you know in Ontario. Christina Blizzard in the Ottawa Sun Today. McGuinty is The Debt Devil. She understates Ontario Sovereign Debt by over 100B but this article is a good start on Canadian Sovereign Debt Discussion. http://www.ottawasun.com/2011/09/24/mcguinty-is-the-debt-devil-blizzard
Peter, that was funny, it was funny because it was true.
I think that Greece probably invented “Californication,” Which I am defining now as driving the hard workers to emigrate out of sheer frustration, thus strengthening their hold on the government.
Greeks coined another word here, more appropriate here, kakistocracy.
There is at least one Greek that has a clear-eyed view of the situation – “Taki”, a regular columnist for the UK magazine “The Spectator”. Here are some gems from recent columns:
Here in Gstaad you have some awfully rich people who show off mightily and disgustingly. But I don’t see any young Swiss throwing rocks and plundering the expensive boutiques that line the main street of the village. That’s because if they do they will go to prison for a long stretch and no one will write excuses for them
The French protect the rich and powerful, just look at DSK. That other arch phoney, the pseudo-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, would have been laughed off the campus of a school for retarded 12-year-olds, yet he regularly appears on French TV as an adviser to Sarkozy and as a well-informed source. Source for self-promotion and bull-shit, says Greece’s greatest philosopher since Plato.
In fact, one Daniel Hamermesh, an American professor, has written a long and boring article in the International Herald Tribune about ugliness. He says it’s unfair….He keeps the best for last: his solution for helping the ugly cope with a world that prefers beauty is to offer legal protection to the uglies. ‘Ugliness could be protected by small extensions of the Americans With Disabilities Act,’ he writes. ‘We could even have affirmative-action programs for the ugly.’
There’s much, much more. Most of his columns are free online, and although some are filled with name-dropping about parties and old friends, many contain gems that make you laugh. Here’s a link to his archive:
Taki
“Canada OUT of the G20 OUT of the UN, and OUT of NATO!”
oz
Careful Ozzie, you are going to be labelled a Ron Paul isolationist around here…Ron Paul’s policies are very naive according to many neocon geniuses here don’t you know.
My take:
The world’s denomination is still the US greenback…As long as there is paper, ink, computers that are powerful enough to keep tabs on the sheer size of the numbers and do the transfers and people who believe in it’s value and the illusion that there is no inflation going on and that interest rates are kept near zero (Never mind people who have money invested that provides puny returns) then the printing press (Federal Reserve) will ‘Fed ex’ (Pun intended) a ton of it to it’s other division, the IMF, for distribution.
This game, the globalists are hoping, will carry on until China shows it has enough military might to challenge/take on the US.
Then the Benjamin Franklin greenback will be replaced by a note with Mao’s face on it.
Otherwise, don’t try to understand the math of their economic fundamentals, it makes no sense and as not for years.
A guy I knew who worked for the Investors Group told me it’s simply “out of control”…That was in 1992.
Paraphrasing Margaret . . . . Socialism is fun until they run out of other people’s money to spend.
And they are running out . . . quickly.
The whining from the Left is going to be loud, painful and stupid.
“We would like to see the politicians executed,” says Maria, not smiling as she delivers the joke. “Most people are saying this: politicians deserve capital punishment – at the Greek equivalent of Traitors’ Gate…”
So many socialist a$$holes, too few bullets.
People get the government they deserve. Now the bills are coming due.
Remember when the socialists kept promising tomorrow would never come? Well, it’s here! How do you like it so far?
The unions in Greece are still striking in opposition to leaving within their means. This should be a lesson to our own entitlement driven public sector (and especially teachers) unions. Good Lord…give your heads a shake folks.
Kate! A Greek “Not Waiting For The Asteroid” quote.
(from your linked Telegraph article)
“We can’t watch the television news any more,” says Dmitris, shaking his head. “If you watch it, with the constant uncertainty, it can make your psychology very low. It’s like a nightmare we can’t wake up from. Perhaps it’s fortunate that we’ve had to cancel our cable TV subscription. I don’t trust the media any more: I get all my news from the internet.”
Since when did they get the CBC?
Am I the only one who noticed that they have to scrape to buy clothes and groceries but apparently they’re still paying their ISP?
totally related:
VDH: Why Does the Good Life End?
From the second linked piece—“The Greek Tragedy…”:
Tried and put to death for what? Not for lying, cheating and stealing their way into this mess, (Why does the author insist it’s a joke?) but for the “austerity”—less largesse—now forced on Greece by its creditors. And why only politicians? What about all those complicit in the stupidity and corruption, and those who dined out on its proceeds? And what about the voters, Maria? I’m afraid Maria has hold of the wrong end of the stick.
The idea that politicians should be held legally accountable for their actions in office is not a new one. It has been laughed out of the public forum, by politicians and their ilk, as unworkable. Time to re-introduce it, folks, and make it stick.
Husband Dmitris laments:
He can no longer trust the media, nor the politicians. This, we are told by our politicians and journalists, is lamentable. Why? Well, it is depressing to be forced to face the fact that you’ve been fleeced. But trusting those that would manage us is what got us into the mess, Dmitris. No one who’s been paying attention has any reason to trust them to do anything other than what they have been doing. The sooner we acknowledge it, and demand transparency at all levels of government, the sooner we will shake off the yolk of the managerial class. And the sooner you acknowledge your own part in creating the mess—your longing for the impossible cradle-to-grave nanny-stateism—the sooner you’ll stop inflicting it on the rest of us. Wake up.
There. At least I feel better.
“…I shouted out; who killed the Kennedys?…When after all, it was you and me…”
Sympathy for the Devil, 1969, The Rolling Stones.
Yes, we mostly did it to ourselves…
Totally related.
VDH: Why does the good life end?
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/why-does-the-good-life-end/
(If I submit a hyperlink it seems the spam filter stops it)
Loki said: “This is the type of situation where a dictator who says the right things can get into power.”
Gotta agree Mr. Loki sir. It already happened in the USA, 2008. Happened five years ago in Ontario, Dalton McGuinty (Caledonia, remember?). Could happen again in Ireland real soon with that IRA a-hole.
What I see is this is the type of situation where big f-ing wars get started. A semi-dictatorship in the USA or Canada is no big deal, because Americans and Canadians aren’t the kind of culture to cooperate. The foot-dragging alone will keep things calm.
A dictatorship in Germany however, rising out of Germans getting their economy ruined by scumbags in Greece? That’s different. We have seen that show before.
And the hell of it is, the Germans wouldn’t be wrong about it. the Eurozone was created to keep THEM in line right from the get-go.
So the IMF wants nations to go further into debt so they can prop up other countries and banks that are in even worse debt!?!?!
Where does she think the money will come from, the magic money tree?
The thing is, all the politicians and political appointees are not going to do the right thing.
They have to cut, cut, cut, the pay of everybody, whatever the level of government,(hereafter politicians). Those that generate the wealth and taxes are getting paid less than those consume the taxes. In some cases welfare is paying better than work.
What the politicians do is lay off numbers of government workers that end up either in another government job or go on the dole. It does not mater, those that generate wealth are still paying the same useless people. Would not it make more sense to keep them working at 25% less?
Unless the cut, cut, cut, things will go on degenerating until there is no money left.
Like the guy on CNBC clip said, “stop spending, stop spending, stop spending……….”
@RFB
“Canada’s Total Public Debt is over 4T without the extra 1T of Provincial Debt.”
4T is a daunting figure. I am no fan of debt, but can someone tell me how much assets does Canada have?
Can we pay off the 4T by exporting oil/potash to Chindia and bulk water down south?
loki: “There’s only one way out of this situation and that’s to do a reboot of the world economic system”
How true,I remember reading that idea somewhere.
Revelation 13:15-18
He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.
I thought this was all a rather grand comedy in the tradition of black farce:
“MY BIG FAT GREEK TRAGEDY”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8788223/Christine-Lagarde-IMF-may-need-billions-in-extra-funding.html
Christine Lagarde: IMF may need billions in extra funding
Christine Lagarde has signalled that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) may have to tap its members – including Britain – for billions of pounds of extra funding to stem the European debt crisis.
The “Bailout-ors” have become ‘bailout-ees’…
or in more prosaically financial terms:
The ‘lessors’ have now become the ‘lessees’
or is that;
The lessor you get, the more lessee you become.
Even bona fide money launderers are having difficulty keeping up.
Oh I’m sure the financial geniouses will explain it all to the great unwashed in due course.
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
It’s as though the IMF wants the G20 to borrow some more rocks to fill their pockets with before jumping in to save drowning men and the members of the G20 are already wearing cement shoes.
loki: “There’s only one way out of this situation and that’s to do a reboot of the world economic system”
I’m pretty much always onside with loki, but I’m wary of the word “reboot” and “economic system”.
That, unintentionally I’m sure, smacks of central planning.
The developing disaster has resulted from a decades-long attempt to “fight recession” escalating after the 1987 stock market crash. Governments, through monetary manipulation (counterfeiting) create recessions and make them worse by fighting them which of course results in a Great Recession or even a Greater Depression, a term that luminaries like Doug Casey use.
Don’t reboot. Boot government out of all intervention in the economy. We shan’t hold our breath, what?
Gary North (channeling Hayek’s Denationalization of Money, I’m sure) recently opined that central banks should be abolished and that multiple competitive commercial currencies should be permitted to evolve. I know, I know, it sounds crazy. BUT it would work, the only catch being the need for a highly educated public, which of course is not possible with a state-run “education” system). Now, there’s a apt use of the word “system”.
G20 members:
Argentina
Australia
Brazil
CANADA
China
European Union
France
Germany
India
Indonesia
Italy
Japan
Mexico
Russia
Saudi Arabia
South Africa
South Korea
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States
20 most Indebted Nations as a percentage of GDP:
1. Ireland – 1,382% (Debt, at $172.3 billion, more than 10 times the national GDP)
2. United Kingdom – 413.3% ($8.98 trillion)
3. Switzerland – 401.9% ($1.3 trillion)
4. Netherlands – 376.3% ($2.6 trillion)
5. Belgium – 335.9% ($1.3 trillion)
6. Denmark – 310.4% ($626 billion)
7. Sweden – 282.2% ($1 trillion)
8. Finland – 271.5% ($505 billion)
9. Austria – 261.1% ($867 billion)
10. Norway – 251% ($641 billion)
11. Hong Kong – 250.4% ($816 billion)
12. France – 250% ($5.4 trillion)
13. Portugal – 223.6% ($552 billion)
14. Germany – 185.1% ($5.4 trillion)
15. Greece – 182.2% ($580 billion)
16. Spain – 179.4% ($2.46 trillion)
17. Italy – 146.6% ($2.6 trillion)
18. Australia – 138.9% ($1.2 trillion)
19. Hungary – 120.1% ($225 billion)
20. United States – 101.1% ($14.8 trillion)
And the IMF wants the G20 to borrow more money to kick into the bailout fund?
Canada out of the G20!
I,m almost afraid to read Steyn these days.
He gets small point s wrong sometime. Very few to be accurate. His prognostications though mostly come about. They are not pretty, or for the faint hearted the realities of our time. His humor is the only thing that starves off the waves of the grimness in his prose, of our situation these days.
I keep hoping he is wrong. Deep down though you can never get away from the reality.
We are in deep trouble from our politicians antics, to demography. A culture that has lost its bearings while instead of pumping out the water that would sink its ship. Is actively rending holes in the cargo area to let in more water to drown quicker.
Canada’s Total Public Debt is over 4T without the extra 1T of Provincial Debt.
That figure includes ‘unfunded liabilities’ which I think is a tad misleading. Either these liabilities will be funded later, or, if there is no money, they won’t be paid. Just look what happened in Prichard, Alabama. Or Nortel. Promises can be made – and broken.
To all those who say we have to cut, cut and cut: it’s easier said than done. Just look at Rob Ford in Toronto, or Chris Christie in NJ. When it was time to swing the axe, they chickened out. I can see sooner or later the welfare state will collapse (see above about promises) but who wants to be the one blamed to pull the plug on it? And politicians who are totally honest about dismantling the welfare state have no chance of being elected.
Assume you own a business. Let’s say you elected politicians who stare down the unions, and cut the salary of every government worker to $10 and hour. Take it or leave it. The budget is balanced, on paper at least, and you expect to save a lot of tax dollars. At the same time, many of your customers were those very same public employees. You lose their business. They will hurt, and so will you. There is no easy or painless way out of this.
Rizwan:
I couldn’t find any current figures, but in 2006, the net worth of Canadian households was almost $5 trillion. And that’s just households – it doesn’t include the assets of businesses or government, or the worth of minerals/oil still in the ground, to say nothing of what our farmers grow every year.
Oz, what in that meaningless press release says that our taxes will be contributing to the EU bank bailout? Did they contribute to the 2008 US TARP program? Did we? So stop panicking.
And as for your demand to exit NATO, are you completely thick? Have you not the slightest understanding of what Canada’s defence policy has been for the last 70 years since the Ogdensburg Agreement? It’s called collective security.
Terry Tory, we are quite right to be skeptical of isolationists. In case you hadn’t heard the news, mercantilism became obsolete several centuries ago. If we freeze out relations with all the other large nations in the world, who do you think is going to buy all our petroleum, wood, minerals and all the rest? Elves? Are you under the illusion that we are the only source for these commodities?
It’s obviously escaped your notice what the G8/G20 really is. It’s a mutual protection society. All the members of the club undertake not to put the boots to each other.
And as that rock-solid conservative Winston Churchill once said, “Jaw, jaw, jaw is always better than war, war, war.”
MND, I agree with all of your post except one key statement. Central banks are absolutely essential for the key reason they were created in the first place, to defend and maintain the value of currency. The problem with central banks is that they have been increasingly politicized in very recent years to intervene in the national economies.
cgh: Except, that was the propaganda not the reality. The FED, like all central banks, was created in order to execute a co-ordinated inflation, not ever to protect the value of the currency. As you’re no doubt aware $1 at the time of the FED inception in 1913 is now worth about 5 cents.
Without the dates readily at hand, prices were more or less stable for a century before the creation of the FED counterfeiting machine.
I just finished a second reading of Hayek’s brilliant little book called Denationalizion of Money. If you’d like to think way outside the box, check out this radical thesis.
And as for your demand to exit NATO, are you completely thick?
~cgh
Being part of NORAD and a party to the Tripartite Treaty(which deals with the security of Canada, UK, U.S.) will do fine security wise for Canada, thank you very much.
(bet you know little to nothing of those treaties or they slipped your mind like cheese slipping off of a cracker)
Those, by the bye, are defence treaties, while NATO has proven since the ’80s to be a de facto Offence* treaty thereby making Canada part of the armed enforcers of thuggish and corrupt UN One World Government policies to the determent of the Canadian national interest.
*(and not in ‘a good offence is the best defence’ kind of way, but a ‘pushing the agenda of shady international anti-democratic elites’ kind’o way as the Brussels EU bureaucarcy exemplifies)
MND, my musings of rebooting the economic system were not an endorsement of central planning. On the contrary, I much prefer as decentralized a system as possible and it may be time to reconsider the whole concept of money and how peoples voting power is determined by money.
I’ve never had a grasp of economics and every time I attempted to read an economics textbook, it seemed to be baseless BS. It wasn’t until I read some books by Benoit Mandelbrot and Nasim Taleb that I was starting to get a glimmer of understanding of economics. The current world economic system is a byzantine mess of favors to special interests and has mutated greatly from what was supposed to be a major advance over the barter system. Right now it’s an unstable mess that can wipe out most of the worlds wealth in an instant – all the more likely as playing with money becomes a game far removed from reality for a class of people who produce absolutely nothing.
The process of economic collapse has been greatly hastened by the “green” policies of various governments who squandered trillions of dollars on absolutely useless projects when we could have had a massive nuclear power generation capability built for the same money. There is the delusion in N. America that we can run an economy based on selling services to one another without having any production capacity whatever. The Chinese have already figured out how to build factories without any western help and they’ll be the primary industrial power on the planet in the next decade. That is, if their economy based on a government kleptocracy and rigid central planning doesn’t collapse along with the rest of the world economies.
KevinB notes that the net worth of Canadian households is $5 trillion, but probably 80% or more of that value is based on housing prices. When people have no money I very much doubt that a run-down house on the west side of Vancouver is going to find a buyer for $1 million. If real estate prices plunge, then the net worth of Canadian households will be less than $1 trillion and the debt/asset ratio for the country will increase dramatically.
The only solution seems to be let the crash happen and hope that what evolves from that state is something better than what we have now. The lucky people are going to be the ones that buy physical items that will be in high demand in the immediate post-crash period whereas those who leave their assets in various financial instruments are going to be wiped out. We can do a semi-controlled experiment by letting the worst indebted countries default on their debts and observe the social effects.
Loki: You’re a doctor, a man of science.
I can certainly understand your frustration with economics.
Sadly, most economists are really state scribes –Keynesians despite Keynesianism having been thoroughly de-bunked in the late 70s.
May I suggest you read Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action. It is a mind-altering experience, a life changer. I had known about LvM’s master work for decades before finally getting around to it about 10 years ago.
No, the problem isn’t greenism. That’s a sympton. The problem is total monopoly state control of money which is now anchored by nothing but political hot air. Try F.A. Hayek’s little book, Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined.
Both can be purchased on mises.org.