YOU CAN TRY TO LEAD GREEKS TO AUSTERITY
(but you can’t make any good Hellenes….drink it!)

The Euro-zone is in crisis, and the Greeks are the proverbial canary in its financial coal mine, with Portugal, Italy, Spain, and others, not very far behind.

With the Greeks, after decades of being conned and lulled into believing that only Statist/Socialist profligate spending could sustain a wide ranging social programs life-style, they have been rudely brought up short and told….only severe austerity measures can keep them afloat. Understandably their reaction to that idea has been violent, giving a clear message to their government….you can try to lead Greeks to austerity…but you can’t make any good Hellenes….drink it!

It’s a cautionary tale. One that applies to almost every country in the world, even here in America (the only difference between us and the Greeks being our Treasury printing presses are more efficient, and, are operating 24/7/365). But the real issue here is not just profligacy and overwhelming sovereign debt loads, but rather, how the rise of global economic inter-dependency between nations has created a vulnerable financial and trading system highly susceptible to any economic, financial, or political tremor in it, whereby, the slightest local “hiccup”, anywhere in that system, turns into a raging epidemic of economic and financial “reflux disease” everywhere else. It’s the –domino theory- on steroids.

Thus, in many ways, globalization is not the rosy economic mechanism we might have been led to believe. And the main reason for that is because national governments everywhere are lagging behind that development in the way they still operate with their financial and trade policies. Business, Finance, and Industry, have all made great leaps forward, at warp speed, into the 21st century’s world of advanced technologies. Comparatively speaking national governmental systems have remained in the Stone Age (some more than others).

Perhaps it’s now time to seriously re-evaluate, not the concept of globalization, but the systemic structure by which it operates. There must surely be better ways than bail-outs to prevent events in any one part of the system from shaking up the entire structure. Perhaps if such events were treated like any other “contagion”, and a means developed to create a mechanism for some form of “quarantine”, until a local economic malady was no longer “infectious”, such moments of crisis would be diminished….if not eliminated.

Well, as for the Greeks, right now, the only apparent option left for them may be to hock the Parthenon….as collateral for their sovereign debt.

Ah, Solon, they sure could use you now!

CENTURION