What you get when you cobble together a bunch of stagnant, socialist economies stuck with relentless population decline:
The Greek debt crisis has spread to Spain and Portugal in a dangerous escalation as global markets test whether Europe is willing to shore up monetary union with muscle rather than mere words.
Julian Callow from Barclays Capital said the EU may to need to invoke emergency treaty powers under Article 122 to halt the contagion, issuing an EU guarantee for Greek debt. “If not contained, this could result in a `Lehman-style’ tsunami spreading across much of the EU.”
Credit default swaps (CDS) measuring bankruptcy risk on Portuguese debt surged 28 basis points on Thursday to a record 222 on reports that Jose Socrates was about to resign as prime minister after failing to secure enough votes in parliament to carry out austerity measures…
…Mr Callow of Barclays said EU leaders will come to the rescue in the end, but Germany has yet to blink in this game of “brinkmanship”. The core issue is that EMU’s credit bubble has left southern Europe with huge foreign liabilities: Spain at 91pc of GDP (€950bn); Portugal 108pc (€177bn). This compares with 87pc for Greece (€208bn). By this gauge, Iberian imbalances are worse than those of Greece, and the sums are far greater. The danger is that foreign creditors will cut off funding, setting off an internal EMU version of the Asian financial crisis in 1998.
You’ve got to live like human beings – and that means working a lot, having some children and not building up a welfare State. We’ve caught a great deal of this disease, too, but not nearly this bad. Obama, of course, thinks it would be a swell idea to follow right along down this path, but I think that the American people will prevent him from doing it. And not only prevent him, but change the political landscape to the point where we can roll back the socialism which has infected our body politic.
The real lesson of this entire crisis – really, the lesson of the past 100 years – is that we went severely off course and if we want to live, at all, we’d better go back to where we screwed up and start afresh. We must heed Solzhenitsyn’s diagnoses – we “forgot about God” in the 20th century century, and even when we didn’t fall in to absolute evil, yet we still fell away from that rational living which is only possible among people who have the humility to understand that God is ultimately in charge; that we cannot set up entirely on our own but must give proper due to the laws of God.
It is a hard lesson, but well learned. At least, it has been learned by some of us – for others, I fear, only death and complete destruction will bring them to understanding.
Blogs For Victory 