Friday, April 30, 2010

Marc Faber, Jim Rogers on Greece Bailout

In a Bloomberg interview, Marc Faber reiterated what billionaire Jim Rogers has been saying for some time, and that is that Greece shouldn't be bailed out by the European Union or the IMF, as it's only postponing the inevitable, and rewarding excessive consumption.

By excessive consumption, it means the people of Greece being given handouts from the Greek government which the Greek government couldn't afford to pay.

That is obvious to everyone now, but it was hidden from their fellow European neighbors, who are now foolishly ready to bail out Greece, which will only postpone the crisis temporarily while inviting more countries to the postponement party.

Jim Rogers has stated in the recent past a number of times that if the EU was serious about the euro, they would allow Greece to fail so the rest of the EU countries with similar irresponsible financial practices will start getting their houses in order and implement much strong austerity programs.

In other words they need to cut down on spending and eliminate a lot of the government sponsored and central bank enabled programs and perks that are in no way sustainable. It's also another way of saying governments need to get smaller and central banks hopefully some day eliminated as being a part of the financial network around the world.

Faber adds that Greece, when looking at it in a similar way as you would any corporation, should be allowed to go bust and no loans should be extended to them.

Also banks holding loans should write off the loans from 30-50 percent of the face value of them.

In the end, all this will do is lead to the ultimate bust in the view of Faber, who says the only thing democracies are doing now is postponing everything until it all blows up in their faces. They will never escape this, and eventually they'll all have to pay the price.

Loans simply don't take care of the reason behind the crises in Europe and the other democracies, and the only tool in Faber's outlook they have is the tool of postponement by loans. There is a day coming when postponement will no longer work and the entire system will collapse under the weight of entitlement and political expediency.

1 comment:

Bilejones said...

The correct response to a bubble is to burst it. The cure for a recession is to actually have the recession, not to push it off with stimulus packages etc.

Without the debt, and the corresponding asset on someone else's books, being written off as a penalty for malinvestment, the costs are merely shifted to someone else and the debt still exists; to be serviced by the next generation who where not complicit in the whole grand fraud.