I told you so!
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party and its coalition allies have been defeated in regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia.
German Chancellor Merkel appears to have lost the state vote in NRW and may see her control of parliament reduced or eliminated. It’s her own fault.
Germany and in particular NRW (the industrial powerhouse of Germany) are in a serious economic situation with enforced cuts left, right and centre and yet she has loaned (aka given) billions to feckless, idle, corrupt and shambolic Greece.
The Germans have had to tighten their belts and are still paying vast sums to bring East Germany up to speed, yet Merkel feels she can fritter away her people’s money to “save the euro“. It won’t save Greece or the euro.
The Greeks fully deserve to go bankrupt and are incapable of complying with the degree of “cuts” the Germans are demanding. Other European countries will lose money if Greece defaults. Tough.
Better to suffer a one-off loss than an endless shelling-out into a black hole. No bailout of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland or Britain. Did the PEOPLE of ANY of the rest of EU countries have ANY say in this at all?
It seems the French pushed hard for a bailout. What a coincidence that some of their insurance companies have invested heavily in Greece. TOO BAD. Greece’s problems have been well-known for years; which moron poured billions into their black-hole, retire-at-53, inherit-your-sister’s-pension, go-to-work-if-you-feel-like-it economy?
And the Greeks? They seem to feel it is the fault of the REST of us that they have to make cuts. Was a reality check ever more fully needed? Sadly, but inevitably, there will be social breakdown in Greece from which something new will emerge. What that is, one cannot say, but I do not believe it can include membership of the Euro.
The Brussels Overlords think differently. Their little Euro brainchild must be saved at all costs. But they are all personally very well off and have no problems with money, unlike the majority of their constituents thanks to the despicable fraud perpetrated on them by the banks under the appallingly-negligent supervision of a multitude of governments.
I have written about Greece several times in recent weeks since to me it is a symbol of the combination of arrogance and utter folly of many of Europe’s governments – and in particular Brussels – who have overspent wildly, who have allowed their banks to make fraudulent loans and have imposed an ever-increasing burden of bureaucracy, Human rights, paperwork and regulations on the peoples of Europe.
How we are supposed to compete effectively when we A) price ourselves out of the market and B) wildly overspend is a mystery.
Has Europe now to prepare itself for a long period of decline and retrenchment in living standards as Asia maintains its inexorable growth and raw materials rocket in price? I fear so, but it’ll be the ordinary people bearing the brunt of all this, not the increasingly-remote politicians in national governments and Brussels.
Greece is a warning for the rest of us. There is no law that says we cannot go the same way. The UK and France in particular have bloated, feather-bedded public sectors. The chickens always come home to roost, and they are now flocking rapidly towards the hen-house.
By Chris Snuggs
Learning from Dogs 
True that the public sectors are bloated and inefficient. We don’t want to become Constantinople.
The fact remains that the euro is still overvalued, and was overvalued for years, in an attempt to save the American overlords, whose bloated financial sector provides most of their so called “growth” (of the metastatic cancer).
Why not to undervalue the euro for a few years, in turn, to see how many Boeings are been sold?
PA
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Patrice – I am not an economist but I think it is right to say that anything is only “worth” what someone is willing to pay for it.
The euro is floating against other currencies, so no doubt it will settle down somewhere at its true “worth”.
I also believe that any currency that is going DOWN relative to other currencies and thus finding its true “worth” is WEAK, which is not a particularly good sign. It is said that Greece could get out of some of its troubles by devaluing – if it could. This is hardly reassuring, knowing that the euro is going down.
When I was a kid, one could get 11 DM to the £. When the DM was ditched for the euro it was worth about 2.8 to the £. This spoke volumes about the relative strength of the German and British economies. In other words, the euro going down cannot for me be spun as “finding its true level” but as pathologic – and pathetic – weakness.
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According to you, strength means going up all the time, so we should be able to get to alpha centauri this way.
I covered this subject on my site extensively. Euro was successor to the ECU, and predecessor. Euro is supposed to be ONE DOLLAR (from averaging French currency against dollar since it exist… the dollar, France having existed before the USA). The rest is just propaganda from rabid plutocrats. At one dollar the USA economy will break. Hence the American economists’ hysteria against Europe.
PA
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