nationalism

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The Fabled Greek Mega-Bailout

In a truly eyebrow-raising CNBC interview, Matthew Lynn alleges that Europe shall be saved! (As if by the grace of God!).

With Europe on the brink yet again Germany will act.

The Greeks can’t carry on with the austerity being imposed on them. No country can be expected to endure annualized falls in GDP  of 7 percent or more,” he said, “and 50 percent youth unemployment for years on end.

On Tuesday we learned that the Greek economy shrank by another 6.2 percent in the latest quarter. It simply isn’t acceptable” Lynn said.

But Germany and the rest of the EU could come up with a Marshall Aid-style package for Greece. Very little of the bail-out money so far has gone to the Greeks. It has all gone to the bankers.

Forget talk of a ‘Grexit’. There will be a mega-bail-out—a ‘Grashall Plan’—instead.

And when it happens, the markets will rally on the news.

At various stages in the last two years everyone from China, to Germany, to the Fed to the IMF, to Martians, to the Imperial Death Star has been fingered as the latest saviour of the status quo. And so far — in spite of a few multi-billion-dollar half-hearted efforts like the €440 billion EFSF —  nobody has really shown up.

Perhaps that’s because nobody thus far fancies funnelling the money down a black hole. After Greece comes Portugal, and Spain and Ireland and Italy, all of whom together have on the face of things at least €780 billion outstanding (which of course has been securitised and hypothecated up throughout the European financial system into a far larger amount of shadow liabilities, for a critical figure of at least €3 trillion) and no real viable route (other than perhaps fire sales of state property? Sell the Parthenon to Goldman Sachs?) to paying this back (austerity has just led to falling tax revenues, meaning even more money has had to be borrowed), not to mention the trillions owed by the now-jobless citizens of these countries, which is now also imperilled. What’s the incentive in throwing more time, effort, energy and resources into a solution that will likely ultimately prove as futile as the EFSF?

The trouble is that this is playing chicken with an eighteen-wheeler. While Draghi might be making noises about “continuing to comply with the mandate of keeping price stability over the medium term in line with treaty provisions and preserving the integrity of our balance sheet” (in other words, not proceeding with the fabled “mega-bailout” even if it fractures the Euro), we may well see a full-blown financial meltdown (and of course, the ramifications of that on anyone who is exposed to the European banking system) unless someone — whether it is the ECB, or the Fed, or the IMF — prints the money to keep the system liquid.

There are really two layers to bailing out the insolvent nations: the real bailout is of the banks who bought the debt, and the insolvent nations are just an intermediary. Should the insolvent nations become highly uncooperative, it seems more likely that the insolvent nations will just be cut out of the loop (throwing their citizens into experiencing a forced currency redenomination, bank runs, and even more chaos) while policymakers continue to channel money into “stabilising” the totally broken global financial system — because we know for sure that a big disorderly default will likely cause some kind of default cascade, and that is something I am sure that (based on past form) policymakers will seek to avoid.

How close to the collapse we will come before the money gets printed is another matter.

Given that it is predominantly Germans who are in charge of Europe for the moment — with their unusual post-Weimar distaste for monetary expansion —  it seems to me like just as we have seen so far, the money will come at the last minute, and will just keep things ticking over rather than actually solving anything.

And ultimately, I think it is the social conditions — particularly unemployment levels — that matter more than whether or not the financial system survives. If the attendant cost of ad hoc bailouts (in the name of pretending to stick to the ECB mandate) is a continued depression, and continued massive unemployment and youth unemployment then politicians are focusing on the wrong thing.

The problem is that as conditions continue to fester and as solutions seem distant and improbable that Europe’s problems may become increasingly political. As the established (dis)order in Europe continues to leave huge swathes of people jobless and angry, their rage and discomfort will be channelled toward dislodging the establishment. As we have seen in Greece and France, that has already produced big lifts for both the Far Left and Far Right.

We already know, I think, that in Greece’s upcoming election the outsider parties will crush the establishment, with SYRIZA most likely emerging on top. A key metric for me in the next few weeks will be Golden Dawn‘s proportion of the vote.

Let’s not forget history:

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The Dangers of the Era

Modern civilisation has its problems but right now it works. Electrical grids, water systems, mass agriculture, global shipping, the internet, road networks, governments and financial markets are all still functional, and life for the majority is significantly easier and more colourful than for most of history. In the presence of civilisation, most of our basic needs (food, water, shelter, culture) are fulfillable, even if civilisation is highly fragile.

Nonetheless, many people are angry. Angry with the system, angry with authority, angry with society. We see it in #OccupyWallStreet. We saw it in the spontaneous thievery and riots in England in August. We saw it in the ongoing Arab Spring. We see it in Greece‘s protests against IMF-imposed austerity. We saw it in the Tea Party’s shades of “mad as hell and I just can’t take it anymore“.

People are mostly angry about some combination of poverty, angry about inequality, angry about rising joblessness, lost civil liberties, the loss of Western manufacturing, economic weakness, bailouts, or simply perceived unfairness. This isn’t a partisan issue; it exists as much in so-called left wing (like anti-austerity protests) and right-wing (Tea Party) camps.

The essential problem (that affects everyone who is not part of the elite) is that while civilisation functionals reasonably well for a vast majority, it functions significantly better for a tiny minority.

If nurses, teachers, soldiers, electricians, tradesmen, scientists (etc) are getting $50,000 a year for their labour, and traders on Wall Street who were bailed out after their businesses failed are getting $5 million bonuses, eventually the majority will start to seethe with questions like “why are they more valuable to society than we are?“, “if they failed to see the last recession coming, why are they still getting rewarded?”, “if unemployment is so high the economic system cannot be working, can it?, and so forth.

Corporations — and by extension, governments — have much reason to be fearful.

From the Washington Post:

Recent protests—Occupy Wall Street, of course, but also the Tea Party movement as it first began—rise out of a profound rage over unfairness in this country. The scale of this unfairness and inequity makes it hard to know where to direct that rage, to know what to do. Occupy Wall Street has the right target; but where their rage will go, nobody today knows. I am certain, though, that any alert board should be instructing their managers to do three things: admit the problem exists, take positive steps to make the corporation function fairly, and consider what other steps would address the concerns of the protests.

Simple? Not quite. But necessary? You bet.

If the present Occupy Wall Street protests do not create an unignorable threat, they certainly raise the prospect of one in the near future. Rage at unfairness is not easily quenched and once started can be hard to curtail. We’ve seen this time and again throughout history. Shareholders may think of themselves as victims of CEO power, as innocent shareholders , but we need only look to the Russian and French Revolutions to see that everyone having anything to do with fallen power, or in this case “guilty corporations”, may be attacked and injured—even if, like shareholders, their only crime is doing nothing.

But the real danger of all of this is not to corporations, or governments, or Wall Street, or the power elite. The danger is to society itself. Corporate and financial hygiene is at an all-time low, and the global financial infrastructure is an interconnected hyper-leveraged house-of-cards ready to come crashing down. The higher joblessness and wage inequality go, the  sooner the smouldering embers of fury we see today will be transformed into a burning conflagration of rage in wider society. If people with electricity, water, food and Chinese consumer goods are getting furious today, while civilisational is still functioning reasonably well, imagine what might happen if another financial crash caused by a Euro-default raised unemployment another 5%? If gasoline costs rose another 50% in response to an oil shock? If a new conflict or war significantly raised the cost of imported goods?

Establishments need to quell the furies of the population before they reach tipping points by letting bad banks and businesses fail, by reforming the tax code so that everyone pays a fair share, by creating jobs, and by finding ways to reduce citizens’ and institutions’ debt burden. Unfortunately, I believe that the global financial and political systems are so entrenched that at this stage deconstruction (rip it up and start again) is impossible because vested interests make any such changes highly unlikely.

The real danger is that in desperate times people will follow any charlatan who can offer food and security. In the 20th Century, Germans, Italians, Russians, the Spanish, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Libyans and others all discovered the dangers of overthrowing corrupt entrenched establishments, and replacing them with new regimes with no respect for individual liberties, religious freedoms, the freedom of speech, the freedom of association. I want the revolutionaries of the 21st Century to understand that the problem is not capitalism, nor liberal democracy. The problem is that a tiny minority are rigging the system to enrich themselves.