So the Europeans killed the Europe-Greek negotiations today because of the Greeks’ insolence to ask their citizens for approval. Insolent, no doubt:
@yanisvaroufakis Democracy? You crazy Greeks. It’ll never catch on. ;)
— Roland Yanez (@rolandyanez) June 26, 2015
But why? If you cut through all the clutter, there’s a simple explanation:
The powers-that-are need to be able to pretend that there is nothing to see here in impossible-to-pay-back-debts-land, move along, everything is fine. I meant to blog about it, but I just came across Northmantrader‘s excellent analysis, which is better than anything I might have written (h/t zerohedge). Punchline:
To make global debt serviceable. To make the math work without a default.
Because imagine for a minute, if it weren’t. The Greek state is clearly never going to be able to pay back hundreds of billions. Just like US students aren’t going to be able to pay back ONE TRILLION dollars plus. The Chinese numbers are opaque, but probably terrifying. Japan’s debt is so far on the other side, it’s not even funny. And did I mention pensions and retirement, private and public, in almost all countries? And and and and … the thought that all of this is going to default is so horrifying, you simply must continue to pretend and extend, which is what the entire world is doing, calling it ZIRP and “stimulating the economy” and other colorful language.
And the Greek government just said “let’s end this BS”.
The trouble is, while they just said it to Greek’s creditors, about Greek debt, everybody heard it, about everybody’s debt.
What happens next in Greece is anybody’s guess, but the impact might be containable. What happens in the rest of the world who heard the same thing is not containable. 100’s of trillions of dollars worth of not containable, and I’m not kidding.
The Götterdämmerung of the financial system, and by extension, lots of the rest of the socio-political system of the world, is nigh. Die Raben have seen what happened at the Rhine in Brussels, and they are flying home to report.
We’ll have to see whether Yanis is going to be Siegfried or Brünhilde, but “der Götter Ende” is within sight.
The trouble is, we have met the Götter, and they are us.