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Immiseration, Euro division

By Owen Paine on Tuesday November 3, 2009 10:55 PM

The Euro zone also must produce mass misery for its jobblers. In fact its forex winch is even worse than Uncle's. Read this piece by econ-con Willy Buiter, shown above. Guess it takes one of the tribe to glare ferociously at a tightass bank policy when he sees it:

"The euro has become a currency on steroids. Its relentless nominal and real appreciation since the end of 2000 was briefly interrupted in the second half of 2008, but resumed with a vengeance during 2009. The strength of the currency is hurting the exporting and import-competing sectors of the Euro Area. Unemployment and excess capacity continue to rise."
My daughter likes to remind me that a card-carrying pwog always believes the Euro-zoner PTBs(*) are a lesser evil. Not so. And furthermore, despite Gallic in-plant class theater, the European Central Bank will steam along undeterred, covered by doubletalk and volkisch nonsense.

Oh by the way -- tightass Buiter's bold solution:

"Cut the official policy rate from 1.00 percent to 0.00 percent, and the interest rate on the deposit facility (reserves held by commercial banks with the Eurosystem) from 0.25 percent to minus 0.75 percent"
What a constipated goat.

------------

(*)Powers That Be.

Comments (9)

Al Schumann:

The demurrage looks okay, conceptually, although it is definitely too anal. Why not negative 10%, grandfathered in*, and see how things go from there?

* A good starting point for the calculations would be 1867.

op:

super Al is right of course
the avenue for correction is indeed
the incubus of private debtholdings

nothing a 50% cut across the board in consumer debt couldn't cure
or as brother Al suggests a hopped up retroacrive quarterly demurrrage charge

btw
i'd track down scape grace petty rentier descendents of gilded age barons
and if necessary contract for a serviceable vital organ to be extracted ..now !!!
as down payment
the rest to be delivered at death

op:


of course
the wealth would receive a great deal of this jubilee bene

so what

on the otherside they own
nearly all of it indirectly

it will be a painful unwinding indeed
like removing adhesive bandages
covering every square inch of their glorious bodies

op:

taxing reserves instead of paying interest on em would reduce free reserves to near zero quick
but only if the tax is hefty enough
free reserves could of course be dividended back to share holders or to pay down bond obligations

no
i prefer crushing the bastards
by flooding the credit channels with risky start up and expansion loans to small fry

op:

only uncle thru a hyper sba can do that

Son of Uncle Sam:

Their problem is all their races are AA to class C runners, they need some JJ's; Son of Uncle's picks on the trifecta; Algeria, Morroco, Nigeria. You gotta have a few ponies runnin' between 50 and 99 to 1.

op:

the euro version of an sba loco run ??

hey those past masters of corporatism

latin euro zoners might revive the mont de piete swindles
only with a reverse twist this time and a insane state in flow of new money

lots of superstitious
and fetish soaked avenues
for revival
over there in old europe

Mike Hunt:

For some odd reason certain so called Liberals feel every European, and conceivably Asian, is a slim super model type.
In their travel anecdotes they never seem to observe the fatties lurking in the background.

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