Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Summarizing the causes of the coming Eurocurrency Crash

The full article on how to profit from the disaster aimed at Forex Traders, linked here, has this interesting summary of Europe's mess: European governments have spent the last few decades constructing their current mountain of sovereign and structural debt to afford their citizens a quality of life previously unknown. This process was encouraged by private companies and investors, post-war and post-coup reconciliation efforts, a rapid market deregulation process which followed the end of the Cold War, and an unrealistic optimism which added to the recent housing bubble, including a culture which looked unfavorably on market skepticism. Now, after the bubble popped and markets came crashing down, the solution seems to be to create a massive bailout pool which countries can access in times of need, and simply pay it off later, with interest. In other words, they can enter more debt, but to a different source. Americans know this process as paying off one credit card with another, which doesn't actually pay off the debt; it merely changes the recipient of the repayments. The obvious critique is to point out this fact and push actively for economic and political reforms instead of bailouts, which is what countries like Slovakia and Germany are doing, much to the chagrin of PIIGS. On the reverse side, the argument has been made, and is being pushed for by many of the struggling economies, that without such a bailout their economies will come crashing down and be pushed into default. If such an event occurs, it creates the very contagion (the Black Debt) that the euro zone wanted so desperately to prevent due to the interconnected nature of the regional economies. Once one country defaults, it can't repay loans to another that may also be at risk of default, and so on; creating, in theory, a deadly domino effect that brings the whole region down and kills the euro.

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