We Are All Insolvent: It is Too Late to Prevent the Collapse of the G-7

02-12-2010 • ZeroHedge.com

For Greece, with on and off balance sheet liabilities at over 800%, it's game over. For the Eurozone, with the same ratio at about 500%, it is also game over. For the US, at 500%+, it is, you guessed it (sorry Joseph Stiglitz), game over, but since we have the printers, it will simply take a little longer. Following up on yesterday's popular post on prevailing delusions as captured by Albert Edwards' colleague Dylan Grice, we present Albert's latest outlook. Please don't read this if you want to keep believing there is any hope left for the (developed) world. But first some aeral photography from Dylan Grice, indicating just how far the US government is willing to go to get the population stoked about owning fixed (shouldn't it be called broken really?) income. With British QE over, and the country still to implement the same criminal annuitizing of 401(k)s that Uncle Sam is contempltating in order to make "Buy Bonds" a "voluntary" option one can't really decline, maybe letters on modern architecture building blocks is all that would works. As Edwards says: "I?m not sure leaving man-sized building blocks around the City of London is really going to make an awful lot of difference, but I suppose when your public sector deficit is around 13% of GDP, every little bit helps!" So back to Greece, the Eurozone, and policy response in general, Edwards places the causes (and "solutions") of the escalating problem precisely where it belongs: at the core of the Keynesian systemic outlook flaw. A major divergence of views in the market at the moment concerns what governments should be doing with their outsized fiscal deficits. Economists seem to be polarised between those who think governments should be rapidly cutting fiscal deficits to avoid impending insolvency and/or a surge in bond yields, and those who believe this will be totally counterproductive and that deficits should stay very large. Behind this controversy probably lies the key to the economic outlook. To Edwards, and to ever more hedge fund investors judging by the jump back in Greece Bund spreads which just broke the most recent technical resistance level of 300 bps, Greece is nothing more than Russia and LTCM (or Bear Stearns as the case may be). The situation in Greece following hard on the heels of similar solvency issues in Dubai feels to me very much like the Russian default and LTCM blow-up in 1998. For the blow-ups that year were a direct follow-on from the Asian crisis a year earlier ? a different chapter in the same book. There will be more crises to follow Greece, both inside and outside of the eurozone. The outcome of broken Keynesian policy (by definition) will be ugly, and will destroy the eurozone. We said it some time ago, and SocGen has now also confirmed this bearish perspective. My own view of developments, for what it is worth, is that any ?help? given to Greece merely delays the inevitable break-up of the eurozone. But, for me, the problem is not the size of the government deficit and the solvency or otherwise of the governments in the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain? we deliberately exclude Italy). The problem for the PIGS is that years of inappropriately low interest rates resulted in overheating and rapid inflation, even though interest rates might well have been appropriate for the eurozone as a whole. Rapid inflation has led to overvalued bilateral real exchange rates (they do still notionally exist) for the PIGS and in most cases yawning double-digit current account deficits. With most trade done with other eurozone countries, the root problem for the PIGS is lack of competitiveness within the eurozone – an inevitable consequence of the one size fits all interest rate policy. Even if the PIGS governments could slash their fiscal deficits, as Ireland is attempting, to maintain credibility with the markets in the short term, the lack of competitiveness within the eurozone needs years of relative (and probably given the outlook elsewhere, absolute) deflation. Hence the PIGS public sector deficit will inevitably remain large as a direct consequence of this weak growth outlook. As noted earlier on Zero Hedge, in Europe the population is a little less brainwashed by the moronic happenings on prime time TV, so while in America the destruction of the economic system, as trillions are transferred to the kleptocracy which knows fully well the end game is nigh, results in some sighs of desperation at best, in Europe the outcome will be somewhat more violent.

2 Comments in Response to We Are All Insolvent: It is Too Late to Prevent the Collapse of the G-7

Comment by Anonymous

Entered on: 2/12/2010 11:18:53 AM

Buy some 40% silver Kennedy half dollars (1965-1969) off of ebay or at coin world.

Hey I love the votive candle phot on this article. Each time China raises its reserve requirement, I go to Food City and buy one for $1 and light one in my home.

My favorite one is "El Mano de Poder", although sometime I will get the Virgen de Guadelupe or St. Francis of Assisi one.

Comment by Lucky Red

Entered on: 2/12/2010 11:08:59 AM

So, now what? Do we all go back to trading beads for corn?

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We Are All Insolvent: It is Too Late to Prevent the Collapse of the G-7

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