The Greek Crisis – “Irresponsible borrowing and irresponsible lending”
A good read about the Greek crisis/scam, titled: Guest Post by Hawkeye – Irresponsible borrowing and irresponsible lending (http://golemxiv-credo.blogspot.com/2011/06/guest-post-by-hawkeye-irresponsible.html)
So will it be austerity or default. Let’s get ready to rumble …
Those calling for Austerity claim lazy workers, socialism and corrupt politicians created a dire fiscal problem that Greece must now pay up for. The sins of the past must be repented through public sector belt tightening (a squeezing of living standards) and large-scale land and infrastructure privatisations (i.e. asset sales).
Oh yes, I have heard the Greeks are lazy. Very very lazy. Sloths even. I know it’s true, because the Corporate Media said so.
Those calling for default state that the very Sovereignty of Greece is being challenged by external enforcement of debt peonage. Debt that was foisted on them without due care or consent.
Debt peonage? Without due care or consent? So if you elect politicians, they can’t just do whatever they want? Including lying to the people and forcing them to bear, aka “share”, the burden of the politicians’ decisions? Interesting. Go on …
Here are at least six very sound reasons why the implementation of Austerity would be morally, socially and legally reprehensible:”
1) Shared responsibility
If a bank made a stupid loan to me or my business, who is the greater fool?Surely, in cases of poor lending circumstances, an irresponsible lender should be just as much to blame as an irresponsible borrower. To enforce total accountability on the borrower is tantamount to supporting loan shark type tactics. In a civilised world, the lender of money has a duty of care to ensure the standard of lending, and this should manifest through the acknowledgement of accountability in times of poor judgement.”
So the borrower and the lender must be held accountable? Both are responsible? My God what craziness is this you speak of? Accountability and responsibility in the business/banking world – is such a thing even possible? Is it even conceivable? This would be tantamount to saying if they make a bad investment, they should also bear responsibility. What kind of fairy tale is this?
2) The symmetry of risk & rewardThe voices calling for Austerity also seem to be the most vocal ones with a conservative / libertarian bent. Yet they don’t even realise the sheer hypocrisy of demanding such asymmetric punishment when the very mantra of the true Laissez-Faire Capitalist is the cure of poor investment stakes through default! Hence the very principle of Equity Investment which correctly balances risk & reward.Debt peonage is not the symmetrical solution as defined under Libertarian principles. One has to be either deluded or an ignoramus to accept the blatant contradiction of extracting all reward (interest AND principal repayment) for no risk. The true meaning of liberty is to be free from debt bondage, but the modern Libertarian has become trapped by a cunning twist of his own logic to declare us all “free to become contracted into debt without recourse”.
You mean investments carry risk? That can’t be! Why here in the good-ole USofA we bailed out those who were both wholly incompetent and fraudulent in their actions. And we didn’t even attempt to hold them accountable or responsible. Not only were they bailed out, but they are doing better than ever, and no jail time. Not even any trials. But this pinko-commie treehugger wants to … and this is the crazy part … enforce that bad investments should be born by both the borrower and lender. I can understand the borrower, for as we are told, they deserve their lot. But the lender too? What madness.
3) Incompetent lending
In addition to the concept of shared / symmetrical responsibility, it should be clear that in all respects a lender should be more accountable for bad investment decisions, as after all they are deemed to be specialists at lending. I am not a professional borrower of money, but my bank manager is a professional lender. They are deemed to be competent, qualified and professional stewards of investment capital.So let’s review the performance of these lending professionals.Taking the historical track record of Greek sovereign debt; it has spent 50.6% of years since 1824 in default or re-scheduling. It suffered a severe banking crisis between 1991 and 1995. This is not an auspicious start point, is it? The banking “professionals” may well proclaim that they relied on elaborate and professional risk assessment criteria using the very latest in sophisticated statistics. But a cursory examination of the situation using the techniques of one Rev’d Thomas Bayes would reveal that the Prior Probability of Greek default was in the order of 50%! And in fact, the course of events is no doubt going to support the accuracy of risk assessment by the humble Bayesian probability over the wildly naïve Gaussian statistics of high finance.Therefore, it’s not just irresponsible lending that has happened, but incompetent lending!Bear in mind that bankers justify very high salaries and bonuses because they claim to be very good at their job and that they perform socially beneficial activities. Clearly they are not using reliable tools for assessing levels of risk, and nor have they conducted appropriate due diligence on the country’s ability to pay. Not only this but their self-proclamations of societal benefactors is crumbling before our eyes.
Ouch. He’s a got a point … for a commie. They do justify their outrageous salaries for 1. their excellence in their field, and 2. they benefit society. However, they have been proven wrong, time and time and time again. Which makes them wholly incompetent. And since they literally gutted the world economy there’s goes the socially benefit angle. So the pinko commie has a point. I mean this ain’t just incompetence. This is world-wide incompetence surpassing any levels ever before imagined. They tanked the world economy. How “good” can they be at their jobs. I mean even a trained monkey would do a better job, ie. it’s highly unlikely a group of trained, or even untrained, monkeys could do this much damage. Unless of course the monkey was trained by GS. In which case, you never know. Alright, score one for the hippie. What else you got hippie?
4) Odious debtSo we have seen how the lender has to accept an element of responsibility, but now to turn to the borrower. What many voices seem to declare is that each of the people within Greece have been personally complicit in this excessive borrowing. But this is to accept the idea that all nationals are fully accountable for the conduct of their “representative” leaders. It is the notion of “borrowing by proxy”.”
Was I consulted on this? Did I vote for this? Did I sign a declaration of acceptance of these terms? No, I did not.
There is a term for this situation and one which may become more prominent in months to come. It is that of “odious debt”. Debt which was incurred for purposes that do not serve the best interests of the nation, and therefore should not be enforceable.”“Iceland serves as an example of this principle in action. The people of Iceland have refused to underwrite the extraordinary liabilities of private banking institutions. They understand all too well the morally unjust nature of letting a few wealthy people prosper during the good times, and the scarper when it goes bad (in fact they are charging their Prime Minister for financial negligence for tolerating such leveraged liabilities).”
Did the Greek people sign up for this? Did they vote for this very issue? Did they tell their elected reps to hide the debt in collusion with GS? They had personal debt. They signed for it. But did they sign for this? Did they say or vote specifically that they wanted their government to incur this debt??? Bloody hippie has another good point: odious debt. And the politicians can’t very well say these actions were taken in the best interest of the Greek people, since it was NOT.
5) Debt for foreclosureReturning to the national stereotypes mentioned above, then why in the world would anyone invest money in such a country and then expect to get it back? One can’t turn around and forcefully demand the repayment of debt from a nation, whilst at the same time claim that those peoples were never really good for it in the first place. This is an overt admission of not doing one’s homework, but then still demanding full and fair entitlement. It is nothing less than a deliberate intention to ensnare.Economist Michael Hudson tells an intriguing story of this very strategy in action more than 200 years ago in the US:“[In] colonial times, when British speculators eyed rich New York farmland. Their ploy was to extend loans to farmers, and then call in the loans when the farmer’s ability to pay was low, before the crop was harvested. This was indeed a liquidity problem – which financial opportunists turned into an asset grab. Some lenders, to be sure, created a genuine insolvency problem by making loans beyond the ability of the farmers to pay, and then would foreclose on their land.”“They sued under the fraudulent conveyance law, which says that if a creditor makes a loan without knowing how the debtor can pay in the normal course of business, the loan is assumed to have been made with the intent of foreclosing on property, and is deemed fraudulent.”In other words, it is a pre-planned strategy on the part of the lender to push the borrower into such a corner that they have to sell up at firesale prices. But, clearly this strategy needs some form of social compliance and legitimacy, otherwise it would / should be deemed legally fraudulent!To socially and legally tolerate it is to explicitly legitimise loan sharking for the express purposes of asset stripping:“high finance is seeking to turn public infrastructure into rent-extracting tollbooths to extract economic rent (the “free lunch economy”), while replacing labour unions with non-union labour so as to work it more intensively. This new road to neoserfdom is an asset grab.”
So the banks did this on purpose. The banksters attempted strip assets from the Greek people by ensnaring them into this con. Hippie made another good point. Hippies may smell, but this one is starting to make some real sense. That’s why they made the “bad” investments. They knew Greece would fail. They wanted it to fail. So they can go in and privatize everything.
Well now the hippie has me worried.
6) And finally, but what if the devil turns on you?There is a stark warning for us all in the events in Greece. If you are happy to play along with the Neoliberal asset stripping and cheer the Austerity along in other countries – then don’t complain when they turn their sights on us. As highlighted above, the UK’s implicit sovereign liabilities are 5 times our GDP (and therefore more than twice our whole country’s national wealth). In a way this means that our nation has mortgaged its own assets twice over!Hudson’s article later extends the actions happening in Greece to the wider western world. He situates this as a general rolling back of progressive principles which were enacted primarily Post WWII:”The asset stripping that Europe’s bankers are demanding of Greece looks like a dress rehearsal to prevent the “I won’t pay” movement from spreading to “Indignant Citizens” movements against financial austerity in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Bankers are trying to block governments from writing down debts, stretching out loans and reducing interest rates. “
Come for us? They already came for us. They’re still here. Having “bought”, ie. stole, everything. They stole our retirements, our investments, our houses, etc … And now SS, Medicare/Medicaid, and every other thing we have is on the chopping block. And let’s not kid ourselves, it will get chopped.
No, the Greek scam has already been perpetrated, with the government, the WH and Congress, as willing accomplices to the greatest theft EVER.
And of course, America Is Being Raped … Just Like Greece and Other Countries (http://www.zerohedge.com/article/america-being-raped-just-greece-and-other-countries).
Darn pinko commie hippies. Why do they always have to be correct?
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