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Nov. 16, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

39:43

2033 Germany's Inflation Fetish Is A Major Global Economic Threat?

Article deconstruction by Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world -- http://www.freedomainradio.com

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	Hey everybody, for those who are enjoying the article deconstruction topic, I've come across a truly cosmic powerhouse of scumbaggery that is just amazing in the intensity of its Wittgensteinian ass-clownery.
	Not be a good name for a band.
	This is from the Huffington Post, I guess a day or two ago.
	And it's by the unaptly named Peter S. Goodman.
	Germany's inflation fetish is a major global economic threat.
	Now, much though I enjoy reading about German fetishes, this was not the article that titillated me in the right way.
	This is what the man has to say.
	Oh, please be patient with me.
	This is well worth exhuming and eviscerating.
	He writes, the world's most irresponsible global citizen.
	At the moment is not North Korea or Iran, despite the obvious dangers each poses.
	It is not China, favored target to blame for job losses from Indiana to Istanbul.
	Rather, it is one of the primary beneficiaries of global integration, a country now contributing aggressively to the risks mounting in the global economy.
	It is Germany.
	Job losses. I don't know.
	It's kind of funny, you know, people sort of blame China for job losses.
	You know, I was on the Liberty Cruise recently, and we saw these huge ships sailing back and forth, massive ships, thousands of miles across the ocean from China.
	I mean, how screwed up does your economy have to be that you can't compete with a semi-communist economy thousands of miles away by ocean?
	That that's the level of efficiency.
	And it's always funny to me, you know, if you really want to think about job losses, what you want to think about is...
	Things like agricultural subsidies, I mean, they create huge job losses, right?
	So you subsidize the farmers and then you pay the farmers to dump their goods into third world countries, throwing all of those farmers out of work and creating periodic or exacerbating periodic starvation.
	Don't really hear that much about that.
	Another thing, of course, that causes a lot of job losses, the arms sales in the world, of which the U.S. is the very largest arms seller in the world, because, you know, you really want the global policeman to be arming as many others as possible, otherwise it's tough to get these kinds of manufactured threats.
	And these are just, you know, some basic things.
	But yeah. Anyway.
	So he says, one person on Earth has the power to dampen the crisis in Europe, which risks spreading beyond its continental confines to yield a global contagion.
	Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel.
	Merkel could attack the largest threat now confronting Europe and the rest of the global economy, rising borrowing costs which have the potential to turn anemic economic growth into a catastrophic credit shock whose consequences would be felt virtually everywhere.
	What's brilliant about this sentence, and there's so much about this guy that is like evil genius 101, is that the largest threat now confronting Europe, as if it's some external thing, Somewhere that came from out there.
	Space aliens inflated our currency and bribed all our civil workers and sold off generations of the unborn decreditors.
	It's confronting us.
	As opposed to, you know, the largest threat that has been systematically created through a rapacious system of majority rule, no rights democracy, the endless predation that has taken down every civilization that has ever tried it in the past, from Greece onwards.
	But it's a threat now confronting Europe, like it just came in from some other dimension.
	They didn't cause it, they didn't create it, nobody's responsible for it, just popping up.
	A threat is now confronting Europe.
	I mean, it's just weird.
	It's like seeing a guy who smoked for 40 years is now mysteriously facing the threat of lung cancer.
	I mean, good heavens.
	How strange. He's just confronting this threat now.
	She, this is Merkel, could declare that conditions have become so dire that the European Central Bank must put aside its traditional constraints and aggressively purchase the sovereign debts of Italy, Spain, and other nations grappling with rising interest rates.
	They're grappling with it. It just came out of nowhere.
	You know, they just woke up and they were on this ice cliff with their clamp on.
	They're grappling with this problem that just came out of nowhere.
	Ugh. And they're grappling with rising interest rates.
	I mean, if I completely blow my credit rating, because I just borrow all of this money and blow it on hookers and coke, And then I find it hard to get people to lend me money at low interest.
	I'm grappling with rising interest rates.
	No, I have caused rising interest rates in my own situation.
	They've pissed and bribed and kleptographized, stolen all of that money.
	The money from everyone they can get their hands on.
	The money from everyone they can't get their hands on, i.e. the unborn.
	And they have pillaged and raped the economy.
	They have run up national debts.
	They have counterfeited.
	Greece lied its way, as so many other countries did, lied its way into the EU.
	And now, after these criminals have been preying upon everyone they can get their feasty little fleshy hands on, now they're just grappling with rising interest rates.
	It's just come out of nowhere.
	It's not their fault.
	There's no responsibility here.
	It's an external thing that they're just trying to deal with.
	It's amazing. And he says that the European Central Bank should put aside its traditional constraints and aggressively purchase the sovereign debts of Italy.
	With what? It's all you need to do to bring down this kind of stuff is say, with what?
	With what is it going to purchase these sovereign debts?
	I mean, the European Central Bank doesn't have any money.
	I mean, I guess it has some of the money that it basically takes from member countries, but they're all in debt anyway.
	It's going to print money?
	I mean, they don't have any money.
	It's just madness. Madness and bizarre black magic.
	He says, that would bring borrowing costs down immediately while setting in motion a process that would quell the crisis, or at least shrink it substantially.
	So, the people in governments all across Europe, and it's across the world, but all across Europe, have borrowed and bribed and stolen and corrupted and feasted on the quivering flesh of the faintly productive for decades, and have backed themselves, painted themselves into a bloody red corner.
	And now, The way to solve this massive predatory debt is through more debt or more counterfeiting.
	Madness. Anyway, he goes on to say, but Merkel, Chancellor Merkel, will not issue such an exhortation, instead allowing the central bank to remain impotent in the face of emergency.
	Come on. And it's a great word, right?
	Who wants to be impotent?
	I mean, you've got to be potent.
	It's just, it's great. I mean, the way he lays his language, this is pure delicious, tasty strudel Cinnabon propaganda.
	It melts on your tongue and befogs your brain.
	It turns your brain, your sort of reasoning centers, into a kind of penny candy or cotton candy.
	You know, there's just fuzzy sweet stuff that seems to have substance.
	When you look at it from a distance, but up close, it just dissolves into a tooth rotting, Enamel-cracking, sugary, glucose-y goo.
	So Merkel will not allow or exhort the central bank to print money.
	And there are two reasons for this, and he focuses on one here.
	She will not do it because central bank intervention could increase inflation.
	And Germany is ruled by a visceral fear of that prospect.
	Now, he doesn't talk about what it is directly, but I'll mention what it is.
	I'm sure most of you know, but in the 1920s.
	Okay, so let's do a very, very brief history of this, just so it makes sense.
	So in 1917, World War I was drawing to its gruesome, carnage-soaked end, in that everybody was running out of young men to feed into the wood chipper of modern warfare.
	And so everybody was just going to go home.
	No boundaries were going to be withdrawn because there was about an equal...
	Slaughterhouse. Everybody was just going to go home, which would have been by far, by far infinitely compared to what happened.
	It would have been much, much better for that to have occurred.
	There would have almost certainly been no World War II if World War I had ended as a stalemate.
	And human beings would have learned that lesson of war and the entire history of the 20th century would have been different.
	Woodrow motherfucker Wilson decided to get all up into the war, right?
	So he declares war in 1917.
	They ship hundreds of thousands of troops over and new weapons, new machinery, new tanks, even airplanes.
	And this turned the tide of battle.
	And so Germany lost.
	Germany and its allies all lost.
	And they lost really badly. They lost to the point where, because of the overwhelming American intervention, they lost so badly.
	Now, before they lost, What they did was they shipped Lenin through Finland to Russia with money and with weapons because they knew as America came into the war, they were coming in from the West, they knew that Russia from the East, if they had to fight a two-front war, they were toast.
	And which is, you know, same thing happened in the Second World War.
	But what they did was they shipped Lenin with weapons and money into Russia to foment a revolution.
	And Russia was, of course, I mean, Russia spends its soldiers like they're going out of style.
	In fact, Turning them into just a bloody mist regularly.
	And Lenin, of course, got this revolution going.
	The Bolsheviks got in and then the Bolsheviks took over in 1917 and you got the Russian Revolution, which caused 70 million deaths and was a pretty heavy contributing factor to To World War II and to the rise of Nazism,
	because there was a perception, which was not entirely inaccurate, and Winston Churchill has written about this too, that the heads of communism were largely Jewish.
	I think Jews were like 3% of the Russian population.
	They were more than 50% of the Communist Party leadership.
	Obviously, Karl Marx and Lenin And Trotsky and Stalin wasn't, but there were so many Jews at the top.
	And it was perceived in Germany that the Jews who were running the Communist Party in Russia were killing all of the Christians, the gulags, and killed millions of Christians.
	And this is one of the reasons why anti-Semitism, I'm not saying it was fair or just, but this is an understanding of the sort of pendulum that swings.
	This is why Germany became so afraid of one of the reasons why anti-Semitism was able to be stoked so high in Germany, because they perceived it as a Jewish war against Christians in Russia, from communism slaughtering the largely Christian serfs and kulaks.
	Anyway, that's sort of neither here nor there, but the reality is that...
	With Russia out of the war, it still wasn't enough.
	With all of the American interventionism coming in to the First World War, they were able to impose this crushing peace on Germany.
	And Germany was never actually invaded, and so the population didn't experience war directly, although there was just brutal starvation of the Germans through the naval blockade run by Churchill at the end of the First World War.
	Unbelievable starvation levels, just horrendous, just brutal, and pretty unnecessary.
	It was pure vindictive vengeance against a largely female and child population.
	Most of the soldiers were dead or whatever.
	And, of course, you got the Spanish flu, which was spread from the returning soldiers, which almost certainly would not have occurred without the end of World War I. So, you know, 10 million killed in World War I, 20 million killed with the Spanish flu outbreak.
	It just went on and on, a complete disaster.
	And the intervention of America turned what would have been a stalemate Unbelievable object lesson in the futility of war.
	It created the Russian Revolution, which did a lot to provoke the German anti-Semitism.
	The Russian Revolution led to the Chinese Revolution.
	The Communist Revolution led to Cuba.
	In the Second World War, the fall of the Eastern Bloc countries into the grip of Russian communism.
	Just astoundingly evil stuff all over the planet came out of the First World War and specifically out of This American intervention.
	You don't know what's going to happen when you set these events in motion.
	It's just brutal. And so after the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles was imposed upon Germany and its allies.
	And Germany was not able to pay.
	And so France, I think, invaded, took back the Rhinelander, Alsace-Lorraine.
	And Germany ended up coughing up, but they couldn't pay.
	They couldn't pay. And after they'd paid up all their gold and a lot of their produce, and they'd had all their factories shipped off, you know, it's like, take somebody's factory and then ask him to pay your bills.
	It doesn't make any sense. But it was pure vengeance.
	It had nothing to do with any sensibility.
	And Churchill, to his credit, did argue strenuously against the Treaty of Versailles.
	But, They printed money.
	Germany printed money because they couldn't pay their bills.
	And the printing of this money led to inflation and then led to hyperinflation in Germany, which led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
	It led to the famous wheelbarrows of money to go and pick up a loaf of bread.
	It led to exchange rates changing multiple times throughout the day.
	And it led to, for 500 bucks, you can buy an entire city block in Berlin towards the end of this process.
	This, of course, had huge effects on the rest of the world's economy.
	It had a lot of contributing effects towards the boom in the 1920s, which was followed by the Great Depression.
	These are all the after-effects of violence.
	This is why, when you go to war, you just don't know for how many decades you're going to be paying, and in what form You're going to be paying.
	It's never ending, which is why war should...
	Anyway. So, Germans are terrified of inflation.
	They're terrified of inflation.
	This has been passed down from generation to generation because inflation led to the destruction of the middle class, the radicalization of the poor, And of the rich, as you can see, of course, happening in America right now, because violence always does the same stuff.
	It hollows out the reasonable, and helium pumps up to steroid testosterone levels all of the extremists within society, whether it's the rich or the poor.
	And so this was what caused...
	So the looming specter of what was perceived as a Jewish-dominated genocide against Christians in Russia was then...
	Exacerbated by this hyperinflation, the destruction of the middle class, and the rise of Nazism, which came out of this desperation.
	And so anyway, sorry, that's not that brief.
	It's fairly brief. So she says, Germany is ruled by a visceral fear of that prospect.
	This fear has outlived its historical origin by a half century.
	Catering to inflation worries today by hemming in the central bank is something like refusing to restore electricity to a darkened German city for fear that President Roosevelt will bomb it.
	So, I mean, the greatest economic disaster ever to Occur within Germany, which led rise to a savagely evil, predatory, Europe-destroying, national socialist dictatorship, which, you know, obviously murdered, horribly murdered six million Jews and intellectuals and gypsies and homosexuals and professors.
	I mean, and first of all, it's more than half a century.
	Half a century ago would be 1961.
	We're talking sort of 1931.
	It's more than 70 years.
	But anyway. You should be over that.
	You should be over that. But, I mean, try talking about race in America.
	I mean, when was slavery? Ended.
	130, 140, 150 years ago.
	Something like that. And race still remains a highly sensitive issue.
	So saying to Germans, you should be over the whole Nazi thing by now.
	I mean, come on. It's crazy.
	Be way past it. Well, America is not real great at lecturing other people to be over historical immoralities.
	And you could make a very strong argument that Nazism had far more deleterious effects on the world than Southern slavery did in the world.
	Southern slavery in America did.
	But this is the kind of thing that insane, nasty propagandists do.
	They say, well, you should be over your historical fears of this and that and the other, and you should start to worry about...
	You should not worry about inflation anymore just because it created Nazism in the Second World War, which was responsible itself for 40 million murders around the world.
	You should be over that now.
	Astounding. Astounding.
	Then he writes, and it just gets better and better, the fundamental threat that haunts the world today is essentially deflationary, with prices falling and businesses hunkering down.
	The fuck is wrong with prices falling?
	I've never understood that argument.
	Nobody's ever been able to explain it to me in any way that makes any sense.
	Look, I worked at the computer industry.
	I was a software executive and salesman and marketer and technologist for 15 years, and the price of that shit was always going down.
	And I don't remember anyone saying, oh, it's a complete disaster that the price of computer chips is going down.
	Oh, it's a catastrophe for the world economy that the price of memory is going down.
	Or the price of motherboards or whatever, right?
	I mean, what the hell is wrong with prices going down?
	I mean, that's what happened throughout most of the 19th century.
	Prices went down as things get more efficient, as the free market refines its processes and new innovations come in.
	And of course, I mean, look at the prices for books, for Christ's sake.
	I mean, physical books used to be really expensive.
	Three days after the Gutenberg Press was invented in the 16th century, yeah, It was really expensive to print books.
	Now you can get e-books for free or for 99 cents.
	So I haven't heard anyone write about how disastrous it is for the economy that the prices of books have been falling and the prices of computers have been falling.
	It's terrible. There's nothing wrong with prices falling.
	And what the hell does it mean?
	Business is hunkering down.
	Again, hunkering down is not a very descriptive phrase.
	Anyway. He goes on to say, people in control of money can see that economic growth is slow, meaning that not enough consumers can afford goods and services.
	The result is retrenchment, layoffs and stagnation, a cycle made worse by the austerity imposed by Germany and other European leaders as conditioned for a plainly inadequate financial rescue fund they cobbled together for a debt-saturated European nations.
	Again, I mean, this is just astounding.
	Economic growth is slow.
	Economic growth is slow, meaning that not enough consumers can afford goods and services.
	But, I mean, that doesn't explain anything.
	It doesn't say anything. It's like saying, as a coroner, this man died from a lack of oxygen.
	Well, everyone dies from a lack of oxygen in one form or another.
	That's what everyone dies from.
	You know, it doesn't mean anything.
	It's like you take a guy who's been beheaded to the coroner and he says, this guy died from beheading.
	Well, it doesn't explain anything. It's completely obvious.
	And this is this idea that, I mean, this is the old Keynesian bullshit, right?
	I mean, remember, Keynesianism was plucked out of the sea of economic theories because it was the most useful to those in power, not because it had any truth value whatsoever or any historical value whatsoever or any pragmatic value to the citizens as a whole.
	It was plucked out of the sea of academic theories because it gave politicians great fucking excuses to spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, which means bribe and get into power and pass the debt down to people like you and me.
	Fuckers. Not enough consumers can afford goods and services.
	Why is economic growth slow?
	Economic growth is slow because of the rise of coercion within society.
	I mean, there was not a lot of economic growth in the Second World War because it was saturated with violence, and there's not a lot of growth in the Western economies because they're saturated with basically two kinds of violence, monetary violence and physical violence.
	The monetary violence is counterfeiting, which is printing money or creating money, and the physical violence is the endless regulations and threats against anyone for reasons that they can't figure out if they start a business or try to expand.
	100,000 regulations passed last year in the US economy.
	Do people not think that that has anything to do with whether economic growth is occurring or not?
	Anyway. So he says retrenchment, layoffs and stagnation.
	So, the results, not enough consumers can afford goods and services, so businesses collapse what they're selling.
	Of course, yeah, if there's less demand, there will be less supply.
	But the question is, why is there less demand?
	There's less demand because people are out of work.
	Why are people out of work?
	Because inflation and coercion and herding all of these people into buying houses in the US and herding all of this money into the stock market, which damn well shouldn't be there, but stockbrokers love it and the government loves it and the average person can't follow the trail to their own bloody financial demise.
	Anyway. So, the cycle is made worse by the austerity imposed by Germany and other European leaders as a condition for a plainly inadequate financial rescue fund they cobbled together for debt-saturated European nations.
	I mean, another way of putting this is that German taxpayers don't want to fund the early retirement of the Greek islands of Greek civil servants, which he'll talk about in a sec.
	But debt-saturated European nations as opposed to European leaders who have spent themselves into massive debts, which they're now trying to absolve themselves of responsibility for.
	That would be a more accurate way of talking about it, which means that he won't.
	He says rising borrowing costs are an outgrowth of the fact that global investors lack faith in Europe's abilities to fix its problems.
	The available facts are no source of comfort.
	Global investors They don't work on faith, my friend.
	They don't work on faith.
	They have. I mean, I worked for almost a little over a year, I think it was, as a programmer on a bond trading floor, in a stockbroker floor.
	They don't get together and pray about what stocks.
	They don't look at chicken entrails.
	They do massive calculations.
	They look into balance sheets.
	They look into debt-to-equity ratios.
	They look into demographics, particularly with the government's abilities.
	I mean, everyone can see this massive bulge of baby boomers is going into retirement, which means they're going to stop producing taxes and start consuming taxes.
	resources from their society as a whole.
	I mean, you've got these budding, newly hatched, wrinkled vampires about to feast upon the jugular of the young, and they're just going to swarm them.
	You ought to be able to see the young for the leathery old bat wings and wrinkled cream and liver spots obscuring the apple cheeks of the young from view.
	They're just going to feast on them.
	I mean, Greece, what a Greek birth rate is 1.2 years.
	Europe is like 1.3, 1.4.
	I mean, it's not producing enough young virgins for these wrinkly old dragons to feast on.
	I mean, so, that's not a matter of faith.
	It's not that they lack faith.
	They don't work on faith.
	They work on numbers and reality.
	Investors know that the European Union is a union in name only and that the Euro lacks mechanisms to aid countries that face untenable debts.
	Not that have caused untenable debts.
	To aid... I mean, if you were to rewrite this, right?
	It lacks mechanisms to give money to politicians who have bribed themselves into power and now are facing the bill coming due.
	But they're not facing untenable debts.
	These countries have created these untenable debts.
	They know that Greece, a relatively small country in economic terms, still can't pay its debts over the long term, not even after the latest European relief package.
	They know that the austerity Germany demanded for that relief will make the situation in Greece worse.
	You know, I mean, if I don't pay my debts, I can go to jail, right?
	I don't get to go to my neighbors with a gun and say, give me your money, or I'm going to burn the whole neighborhood down.
	I mean, I guess I can do that, but I'm just going to end up in jail for even more.
	Germany's not demanding this austerity for fun, for shits and giggles.
	It's demanding its austerity because, you know, giving...
	You know, this is an old P.J. O'Rourke line, right?
	He's saying giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
	I mean... You know, you might as well set fire to your money and at least get a little bit of warmth rather than hand it over to Greeks, right?
	I mean, because they spent 400 years under the Turks, they have no respect for government, and it's a grey or black market in extremity.
	They know that Italy, he says, a large country is growing hardly at all, making it impossible to pay back its debts without a lot of help.
	Help. You see, we want to help people.
	They know that increasing the size of the bailout fund entails a messy political process, likely to yield a disappointment, exacerbating the crisis of confidence.
	Increasing the size of the bailout fund entails a messy political process.
	Yeah, I mean, wanting to give a lot of money to Silvio Berlusconi, is that an irrational thing?
	I mean, yeah, of course the man's got to have his hookers, but it's not necessarily that everybody else wants to fund them.
	They know that if Italy defaults or Italy comes close, that will produce serious trouble on many shores as banks reckon with fresh losses and demand for goods and services takes another hit, sending major economies into recession.
	They know that French banks are particularly exposed, putting pressure on the government, which would presumably have to bail out teetering French lenders, adding to the chatter that even France could be in for a downgrade to its credit rating.
	Yeah, I mean, as someone who's been arguing humorously, vociferously, violently, loudly, quietly, surreptitiously with a rose between my teeth doing the Macarena for 30 years against France, Government control of debt and against government control of interest rates and against government control of the monopoly of currency.
	Yeah. I mean, has this guy been talking about it?
	No, of course not. I mean, it's a Keynesian, right?
	So he's probably been for increased government spending for most of his career.
	And now that that is coming due, he's like, wow, this is a mysterious problem everyone seems to be facing.
	We need some help. I don't know.
	You know, if you smoke, you don't get one of my lungs.
	That's all I'm saying. You can ask, but unless you're my wife or daughter...
	Anyway. All of these facts are manifest in a single barometer, the bond market.
	Investors have been shunning sovereign debt, which forces governments to pay higher rates of interest to finance their debts.
	So finally, it's the amazing thing.
	Finally, the word force is coming into this guy's conversation.
	You see... Once people figure out that you can't pay back your debts, apparently, rather than cut your spending or something like that, you're now forced to pay higher rates of interest to finance their debts.
	They're forced. See, I mean, it's like, I don't even know how to explain this.
	It's just so completely bizarre.
	So investors don't want to give money to governments that are using it to bribe people, which they're never going to get back.
	Yeah, that's understandable, right?
	It's like saying if I don't go to the casino, I am forcing the casino to break people's kneecaps who don't pay their debts.
	So somehow that becomes my fault and I'm the one who's forcing them.
	No, the casino's doing force like that.
	Anyway. In recent days, borrowing costs have spiked not only in Italy and Spain, but in Eurozone nations that have much smaller debts, such as the Netherlands, Austria and France.
	Of course, because they're all in the same fucking currency, you idiot.
	Anyway. The bond market speaks in simple declarative sentences.
	What it is saying now is that people are afraid to lend money to European governments because they don't see how those governments are going to pay them back.
	And then he goes on to talk about how powerful are the bond market's edicts and blah, blah, blah.
	And Berlusconi, of course, has just left the Italian premiership or prime ministership or whatever the hell it's called, presidency.
	So, he goes and talks a bit about Berlusconi.
	Then he says, Angela Merkel has the power to soothe the bond market.
	Soothe the bond market.
	You know, like traders who don't want to live, who don't want to lend to predatory politicians, just need a back rub with a little baby oil from Angela Merkel.
	Again, they're not refusing to lend to the governments at prior interest rates or lower interest rates because they're excited or irritable or shunning or upset.
	They've just done the math.
	Rather than read this kind of trickly, brain-rotting propaganda.
	Anyway, so she has the power to soothe the bond market.
	She could champion an expanded role for the European Central Bank, making it the continent's lender of last resort.
	That would...
	I mean, governments don't lend, they steal.
	I mean, I wish people could just get this through their...
	Rock like heads.
	Governments have no money.
	Governments have no fucking money.
	Repeat after me. Governments have no money.
	They steal and they counterfeit.
	That's all they have. Sorry, they steal, they borrow, and they counterfeit.
	That's all they have. They steal through taxation, they borrow through debt, and they counterfeit through control of currency.
	Through monopoly control of currency.
	This is why governments don't want a gold standard.
	Because a gold standard means that anyone can run a currency.
	If there's a gold standard, then I can go dig up some gold and I have currency.
	Governments don't want a gold standard for the obvious reason that they print more money, but also because a gold standard means that anybody can participate in the creation and dissemination of currency.
	So, governments have no money.
	They steal, they borrow, and they counterfeit.
	I mean, they have no money. So, the continent's lender of last resort, they have no money to lend.
	The European Central Bank has no money to lend.
	The German government has no money to lend.
	The American government, the Canadian government, the Egyptian government, the Spanish government, they have no money to lend.
	They have no money.
	They can borrow, they can steal, and they can counterfeit.
	But they have no money of their own.
	So saying that they're the lender of last resort means that they are the thief of last resort.
	That would invite the wrath of a significant slice of her nation.
	Yet it would also make her a legitimate hero among financial policy makers worldwide.
	And action on her part could be an enormous help.
	Well, we want to be a hero among financial policy makers worldwide.
	That's always been my goal.
	That, in fact, is the slogan of Free Domain Radio.
	We aim to be the legitimate hero among financial policy makers worldwide.
	There are understandable reasons, he says, why Germans are less than excited by the prospect of putting their prodigious national savings on the hook for the profligate spending and noxious debts of less disciplined peoples.
	Of course, it's not peoples, it's governments.
	Governments have gone into debt. I mean, people have been bribed.
	And people say, well, but the citizens aren't...
	Well, citizens are to blame. Of course they're to blame.
	Of course they're to blame. Everybody's known about national debts, and nobody has voted in politicians who'll offer them less.
	And I know there's, like, unbalanced incentives and this and that, but...
	Everybody knows that if you're going to live to be 85 or 90, you can't retire at 50 on a middle class salary.
	I mean, if you are, you're just going to be stealing from your kids.
	And I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who have set that system up and profited from it.
	One can sympathize with the hard-working German employee of a manufacturing powerhouse who imagines his taxes being used to bail out Greece, where he envisions lazy government bureaucrats tapping pensions to sail off to the Cyclades?
	Cyclades? Cyclades?
	I don't know what the hell that is, anyway. And yeah, I can sympathize with that as well.
	And it's not, he doesn't imagine his taxes being used to bail out Greece.
	It's not, again, this guy just deals with these words that have nothing to do with reality.
	It's not an imagination who imagines his taxes being used to bail out Greece.
	He's saying, well, we should take money from the German taxpayer to bail out Greece.
	Well, we can sympathize with the guy who somehow weirdly imagines that his taxes are being used to bail out Greece.
	I mean, this guy, I mean, his brain has got to be like a bunch of crack house bees in a kaleidoscope.
	Anyway, so he says he sympathized with the hard-working German employees, blah, blah, blah.
	But this has already happened, and it cannot be undone!
	German and French banks led the way in pouring credit into Greece, Italy, and other European destinations, creating the cheap credit that enabled governments and individuals to borrow with little worry.
	With those banks confronting trouble, their national taxpayers are stuck coming up with guarantees needed to prevent an unduly reckoning.
	I don't know why. This has already happened, and it cannot be undone.
	Of course it can be undone.
	Of course it can be undone.
	I mean, the lending can't, but stop lending more, you know?
	I mean, just try that.
	I mean, run $10,000 up on your $1,000 limit visa if you can, and then say to Visa, listen, you've got to raise my limit.
	I already spent the money. It can't be undone.
	You've got to raise my limit. You've got to give me another $10,000, too.
	I mean, they'll say, are you fucking kidding me?
	I mean, do you have, you know, tapioca for brains?
	I mean, are you insane? But you talk about this in some political context, and to some people it makes some kind of sense.
	Well, everybody's looking at a place in the world to hang their bag of crazy, and this guy's found a pretty high tree.
	Alright, we're almost done.
	I mean, what's wrong with the banks failing?
	I mean, the reason that people are worried about the banks failing is because governments need the banks as cover, as a human shield, as the corporations that everyone can get angry at.
	Governments need the banks. And if the banks go down, then the governments have less ability to game the system to bribe the people for their own advantage.
	And so, yeah, people who are on the public payroll, people who are receiving government benefits, and rich people receiving lots of government goodies and bailouts and so on, they're terrified of bank failures.
	Anyway. And if repugnance at bailing out the undeserving continues to dominate policymaking, the result will be fewer people able to buy goods, which means fewer sales for German manufacturing powerhouses whose experts have produced so much wealth.
	What can you say?
	Oh, spare us from these mad, lightning-storm-brained, cluster-fracking, state-sucking, leeching-toady-parasite-ass-clowns saying insane shit like this.
	You gotta bail out grease so grease can buy your manufacturing goods.
	I mean, just try this.
	I mean, Try going into a convenience store.
	The guy runs a convenience store.
	Go into the convenience store and say to the guy, listen, if you give me $1,000 out of the cash register right now, you give me $1,000, I promise to spend $100 of that in this store.
	And that will boost your sales by $100.
	Just try that. I mean, try that with somebody who's 14 years old sitting behind the cash register.
	Give me $1,000. I will spend $100 in this store and you'll be up $100 in sales.
	What do you say? Sound good?
	I mean, a 14-year-old will say, get the fuck out of here.
	And rightly so. So the idea that you give money to Greece, which Greece then gives to its people who then may buy some small subsection of goods in Germany...
	I mean, it's insane.
	It's insane. It's not insane that this is written.
	I mean, lots of crazy shit gets written.
	I've read what's on the bathroom stalls.
	But the fact that this gets published.
	It gets published. Anyway.
	One way or another, the German taxpayer is going to pay!
	The only question is what they will get for their contribution.
	Global growth and the avoidance of financial catastrophe, or the smug satisfaction of having not helped an unsympathetic neighbor whose slide into recession brings everyone else along for the ride?
	Look, Germany can just bail out of the Euro.
	Just bail out of the fucking Euro.
	Just get out of the Titanic.
	That's what they can do. Do not say to the Germans one way or another, you will pay!
	Because they... Anyway, I think we have to talk about that.
	Merkel has in recent days, he says, spoken of her abiding commitment to enhancing European political union, which is very nice, and even important in the long term.
	But it's irrelevant in the here and now, and it can't happen quickly enough to make a difference.
	It's like talking about installing solar panels on the roof while the gas furnace is burning the house down.
	One way or another, Merkel is about to put her mark on history.
	She gets to decide precisely how.
	She can carry on as ever and go down as another parochial figure who could not transcend the traditional limits of place and culture, and who helped destroy the Euro and the historical project of European integration, or she can take a risk, confront the German inflation fetish, and help it unleash the crucial credit of the European Central Bank, and maybe play the leading role in averting global tragedy.
	There is no mention of how the debts incurred by the European Central Bank are going to be repaid, because the European Central Bank has no fucking money either.

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