Posted by
Bill Crawford on Saturday, May 08, 2010 10:32:27 PM
There is a new craziness out there and it is...us.
Europe is going through hell right now. The Greeks are at the bottom of the debt trough, and they are waiting for the EU to bail them out. This is entirely reasonable, based on the agreements that presaged the great Euro. All of the users of the great new currency did the three musketeer song together ("one for all, all for one"), but they forgot the policing they were supposed to do to the weaker players to ensure this would rarely go into crisis mode.
Well, they haven't. Big surprise there. The economic drawback since 2007 has hit hard there, so no surprise at all. And hell, Argentina has a bigger economy than Greece and has gone through a few shakeouts worse than this since 1980.
Great Britain has often been a stabilizing influence there, conveniently refusing to do the Euro thing. But they are going through coalition government gymnastics presently. But they were going through that thirty years ago, until everybody got tired of the anarchy and got behind Margaret Thatcher. This is nothing cataclysmic, either.
So what is new in this world that is causing the great economic tectonic plate shifts?
I'll tell you what it is: our "transformative" President, who has astounded everybody on the other side of the pond with the speed of his agenda. Here is the biggest problem- he is trying to create a budget stasis with more than three times the speed of government debt creation than his predecessors. Maybe he is hoping to fund it with new taxes (which is my guess). Either we become Europe in taxation and government, or we rack up so much debt that, sometime before the end of the decade, the Fed and everybody else will have to downgrade our credit.
After WWII, we became the 800 pound gorilla in everybody's room. Now, we are an 8000 pound behemoth. But with size came predictability, and as long as we stayed within limits, we were everybody's ground floor.
Obama doesn't want to be predictable. He doesn't believe in American exceptionalism. He wants to be one of the guys.
Earth to Obama: they don't want us to be like them. You can't see that? Read your history. You don't have to go back far. Start with Bretton Woods in 1971.
Editor's Note: Apologies for the record number of typos in my baseball tome. Everything I dump here is a first draft, and sometimes I don't get my usual six hours of sleep.