Can someone clever PLEASE explain what is going on here?
Tim Geithner? You can’t get much higher in responsibility for the US economy, yet he comes out with what to the layman seems an absolutely insane statement.
Germany is ALSO heavily in debt. The German coalition government has just announced a “Sparprogram” of €80 BILLION euros. Families, the unemployed and the civil service are all going to be hammered.
Germany like everyone else has overspent and of course been hit by the bankers’ insane greed and the ensuing financial crisis. (By the way, the latter was a total breakdown by regulators and if Obama really wants to rant at someone he should rant at the people responsible for organising the regulation of finance in the USA … oopps …. that was the politicians! No wonder BP makes an easier target.)
But returning to Geithner, does he REALLY think that we can get out of this mess by Germany getting more heavily into debt? It’s potty, isn’t it? Someone said recently “You don’t give a drunk more alcohol.”
Someone, somewhere, someone has got to say “ENOUGH – NO MORE DEBT” And anyway, why SHOULD Germans be expected to shoulder the responsibility for everyone else?
No Mr Geithner! Your government can continue to spend money it hasn’t got if you like (the US up to a $ trillion of debt now?) , but please leave us over here in Europe to sort this mess out in our own way. You are beginning to sound like ex- (God, how I love that prefix) British PM Gordon Brown, who spent 13 years playing Fantasy Finance, with the results all too clear.
Maybe I’ve got this all wrong – salvation really does come by incurring ever more debt? If so, perhaps the economists can explain it to me. Can we find two economists who agree?
The funny thing is, my Mum and my Gran both agree. In their day if you overspent you were in trouble and could neither blame anyone else nor hope that some benevolent soul would bail you out …. perhaps they should be running western economies?
By Chris Snuggs
Learning from Dogs 
Geithner, for once, is right. He is seconding Lagarde, who asked Germany to spend more.
The global economic problem in the EU, right now, is imbalances. It is not just about Greece consuming too much and producing too little. It is also about the reciprocal problem with Germany. Moreover, both problems are related: Germany is happy to sell its luxury cars to Greek fiscal scofflaws.
They are co-dependent one as a dealer, the other as consumer. The austerity package in Germany, and other countries, in the present context, is insane: we risk a depression.
Debt is a problem, but it can be solved. The death of economic activity, though, cannot be solved, except with mayhem.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
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