Krugman’s Eurodämmerung
I’m not one to pay overly much attention to the various things that spew from the maw of Paul Krugman. The pontifications, ramblings, and rants of a rabidly fanatical Keynesian neo-Socialist who makes his rent working for the filthy rag known as the New York Times aren’t the sorts of things that I, or any other American, normally pay much heed to – except to keep an eye on what our nation’s enemies are thinking or emoting.
Krugman is willfully dead wrong more often than not on causation and dead wrong, again willfully, every time when it comes to remediation
All that being said, Krugman is not an idiot and he is skilled enough to make solidly plausible predictions of future events, especially relatively near-term ones.
Some of us have been talking it over, and here’s what we think the end game looks like:
1. Greek euro exit, very possibly next month.
2. Huge withdrawals from Spanish and Italian banks, as depositors try to move their money to Germany.
3a. Maybe, just possibly, de facto controls, with banks forbidden to transfer deposits out of country and limits on cash withdrawals.
3b. Alternatively, or maybe in tandem, huge draws on ECB credit to keep the banks from collapsing.
4a. Germany has a choice. Accept huge indirect public claims on Italy and Spain, plus a drastic revision of strategy basically, to give Spain in particular any hope you need both guarantees on its debt to hold borrowing costs down and a higher eurozone inflation target to make relative price adjustment possible; or:
4b. End of the euro.
And we’re talking about months, not years, for this to play out.
Of course this isn’t exactly rocket science or even one of the more arcane examples of the semi-mystical art form known today as the study of Economics. Both hyperinflation and the end of the Euro in the near future are easy predictions to make in the wake of Greece’s Keynesian meltdown and financial collapse.
NOTE: Krugman’s prediction of a European financial meltdown matches my own and naturally feeds into whatever level of Confirmation Bias that I’m saddled with.
Of course these events will happen and happen soon. They were foreordained from the moment of Greece’s financial implosion under the weight of their Socialist economic policies.
I’ll add though that these event will, in turn, most likely lead to the breaking of the European Union by 2015. They can’t hold together as a government – or meta-government, or whatever they are – without a common currency.
Tags: Debt | Depression | Economics | Economy | EU | Euro | Europe | Finance | Germany | Greece | Keynes | Keynesian Economics | Krugman | New York Times | Recession | Socialism | Spain