Tag Archives: Greece

How Much Credit Should We Have in the World?

Most of Wall Street’s rocket science is aimed at squeezing more credit out of the same amount of capital. It’s very, very clear that we overshot. We created more credit than we should have, in large part because the math we used underpredicted total risk.

Soros’s Insight

I found George Soros’s piece today at the Financial Times quite insightful, for a number of reasons. But it’s worth noting one particular point:

When the financial system is in danger of collapsing, the central bank can provide liquidity, but only a Treasury can deal with problems of solvency. This is a well-known fact that should have been clear to everyone involved in the creation of the euro.

In the most practical sense, the EMU has already dissolved. The whole point of the euro was to allow all the weaker states to borrow Germany’s balance sheet so they could borrow at low interest rates. That in turn meant they could build up internal living standards, which in turn meant that they could afford to buy more of Germany’s exports. The genius of the plan is that, after 1000 years of trying, it finally gave Germany a way of taking over Europe without killing people.

And for ten years it looked like it was working just fine. Today, the yield spread between Germany and Greece is nearly 400 basis points. The game is already up.

How the United States is Like Greece

There’s an ever-shifting balance between the goals of forcing society’s commitments to be borne more-or-less exclusively by those with high incomes, and the imperative of not destroying the economic incentives that produce income in the first place. The need to find this balance is a universal problem, not specific to 21st century America.

Coffee and Markets: Debt and the Inevitability of Higher Taxes

It’s time for your weekly dose of markets and politics with Coffee and Markets, featuring The New Ledger’s Francis Cianfrocca, a podcast brought to you by the fine folks at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and LibertyPundits.com, your new home for Conservative podcasts. In this week’s edition, we hash out what’s happening in Greece and the global markets, President Obama’s broken promises on taxes, and what lies ahead for the big entitlement bomb.

Expect some kind of bailout for Greece

Word this morning is that there will be some kind of bailout for Greece. I would expect it to take the form of a guarantee of Greek sovereign euro debt, with some degree of explicitness and a time limit. They have to roll over about 23 billion euros over the next few weeks.

To those who have pointed out that the ECB has no fiscal authority: quite right, but that’s not what’s needed here. The ECB and other authorities can guarantee Greek debt just as they did with interbank loans during the financial crisis. I keep thinking there’s a role for currency swaps with the Swiss National Bank, but I haven’t heard talk of that from anyone else.

As I’ve pointed out before, this never felt to me like the kind of crisis that would produce another 2008. The Eurozone people have way too much invested here, on two fronts. First, they can’t afford for anyone to question the viability of the euro, and possibly risk higher interest rates across the zone. Second, they can’t afford to let the IMF rescue Greece, because it would look like they don’t have things under control.

It’s almost comical to hear the French…

- March 21, 2010 -

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