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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:55
The Fall of Europe. Prepare Yourself Accordingly.
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Hi everybody, it's Stephan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
This is a companion piece to The End of America, entitled The End of Europe.
General mythology that is put forward that Europe went through an unfortunate recession starting in 2007-2008, but boy don't you know it, recovery is underway.
Well, this is really not the case at all.
The multi-decade orgy of coercion and deception known as the EEC is almost over from a functional standpoint.
Who knows how long its zombie corpse will drag on in the political corridors of power, but financially it's pretty much done and the statistics are pretty clear about this.
The degree of misery, particularly among the young in Europe, staggers the imagination.
Just look at this chart from 2008 to 2012.
the misery index gone from the low teens 11 12 to 25 26 27 except in Germany Germany of course is one of the great challenges of the EU right so the EU was basically a way for intemperate and profligate countries Greece
To be able to gain access to the cheaper lending rates that were more appropriate to conservative and not historically spending countries like Germany, and this of course only caused the pigs, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, and Italy now of course, and the UK to some degree, to overspend like crazy.
So the misery index is really, really terrible.
Eurobarometer survey from recent.
71% of the EU citizens consider the economic situation in the country poor.
100% of Greeks believe that the economy is in trouble.
99% of the population of Spain.
96% of the Irish.
93% of the Hungarians.
92% of the Italians.
So everybody knows that it's a real mess.
As always, it hits the most vulnerable in society.
Youth unemployment across the EU is just astounding.
I mean, it is in Greece, you know, 40, 50 or more percent.
Spain, Portugal, all hovering around 50 or 40 percent and it's just wretched.
Again, down to Germany.
Germany had one of the great ministers of the economy in the post-Second World War period, which only goes to show you history is not A series of impersonal movements of large ideas.
It is the individual actions of individual people that make the change in history and the massive decentralization and de-socialization of the German economy brought about by one of the great ministers of the economy that occurred in Europe after the Second World War.
It's one of the reasons why Germany has remained so productive, but of course it is being dragged down by all the lead weights of the hysterical Mediterranean countries.
Youth unemployment is accelerating, not decelerating.
So this is summer 11 to summer 2012 and you can see in all the countries save for the UK and in comparison to the US, the EU average is that it's increasing.
Greece has gone from 45 to 55 percent, Spain from 48, 47 percent to 53 percent, Italy has gone up and so on.
So youth unemployment and this has huge effects over the long term because The time when you really begin to amass your human capital, your economic productivity, is when you are young, getting into your first job, and so on.
So, this is very significant.
The wealth obliteration is really, really important to understand.
So, percentage change in total wealth, 2011 to 2012.
I mean this is just straggling.
Look at all the European countries.
Greece, France, Ireland and Portugal and Spain.
The wealth destruction has just been astonishing and this does not even count the increases in the national debt that have occurred over that time period.
So this is just catastrophic.
Eating the seed crop as they used to say.
Government deficits in red or surpluses in blue?
Well, Ireland, Spain, Greece, the UK, Slovenia, Cyprus, Romania, Lithuania, France.
I mean, they're all just catastrophic deficits that are being run.
And this is important.
You know, I remember when I was younger, there were movies and big, amazing economic analyses coming out about the Japanese tiger, about how Japan was going to be just so enormously productive and a huge threat to any Western economy.
The same thing, of course, occurred.
But the Irish tiger, boy, the Irish, they cut their tax rates and so on.
And lots of megacorps went to Ireland.
And what happens then, of course, is a huge amount of tax revenue comes in, which the government uses as collateral to borrow more.
And so whenever you get a little glimpse of the economic blue sky through the black, bloody, raindropping clouds of statism, it is only a prelude to an increased storm.
Freedom breeds tyranny.
Ah, the government debts.
Just astonishing.
And this is percentage of GDP.
Now, with all these statistics, it's actually much, much worse than it seems.
Because what is counted in GDP?
Well, government spending is counted in GDP.
Government spending on infrastructure.
Government spending on entitlement groups.
Government spending on its employees.
And so on.
And so, if you take away government spending from this, and you actually look at the productive areas of the economy, rather than the parasitical areas of the economy, this data is much, much worse.
But you can see here, it's mad!
Greece, 144% of GDP.
Italy, 126.
Portugal, 117.
Ireland, 111.
Oh, it's just too horrendous.
And the EU total is at 84.9.
Portugal 117, Ireland 111.
Oh, it's just too horrendous.
And the EU total is at 84.9.
And Germany, of course, you know, as one of the more free markety kinds of countries is still at 82% of GDP.
And this again does not count unfunded liabilities in the future, because of the stuff that the government has promised to people that there's no way it can possibly pay off.
So, I mean, this is, you could rearrange these into a cross over the mixed economy and it would be much more accurate.
it.
Household debt to income ratio in G7 countries 1960 to 2011.
All you really need to know is that it's going up and up and up and up.
As government predation takes over more of the economy, and certainly in the US government is more than five times than it was a couple of decades ago, as government predation takes over more of the economy and government printing of money to satisfy the endless gaping moors of special interest groups in democracies, As it increases, wages go down, and opportunities go down, and income goes down, of course.
And so what happens is people turn to borrowing to make up the difference.
And, of course, because the bank's system is largely socialized too, it doesn't have the same checks and balances that it would in a free system, so they're happy to lend, even when it's not really possible to pay it back.
Capital flight, total deposits held by Spanish financials.
This of course is what happens when banks are unable to get paid for the money they've lent to governments or other people.
People begin to withdraw their money and the capital flight across Europe is very significant and I think a little bit on the under-reported side.
Number of Spanish corporate bankruptcies each quarter.
Look at this.
Dum-de-dum-de-dum.
You know, 200, 300, and now 1,500 over 2,000 in 2012, heading up, heading up, heading up.
This is huge.
Of course, when you have a corporate bankruptcy, you are not paying your property taxes.
You are not paying the taxes on your employees' incomes.
You're not paying your corporate taxes.
And so you're not contributing, to put it loosely, you know, the way that you contribute to the mafia fund.
If you live in a mafia-controlled neighborhood and have a restaurant every month, You contribute to not having your restaurant burned down.
But these people then go on unemployment, and they want retraining programs, and so on, and so it is a double whammy.
You're not contributing, and the people who aren't working are taking out much more.
So this is, again, a death nail in the coffin.
Rising food prices, as in Egypt from a couple years ago, what triggers revolution is hunger.
Corn prices have surged and remain high, continue to filter through to food inflation.
So if you have a look here, these are corn prices from 2011 to late 2012, you know, 550 to 800, 850.
It's not a zero based graph, but it's still important to understand that the corn prices have gone up enormously.
Adjust in a couple of months.
And this has huge effects.
Of course, it's another way of eroding people's income.
So fundamental to all of the foods, particularly the high fructose corn syrup that we'll be talking about in the presentation on obesity.
So there's a high risk of poverty even in the rich EU countries.
So in the UK, compared to the EU as a whole, the average at-risk-of-poverty rate's total population, well, you know, 16%, close to 20% in England.
So the welfare state has not exactly solved the problem of poverty.
In fact, it's simply deferred poverty in the form of debt to the future.
The global wealth pyramid, I think, is really, really important to understand.
If you look at the world as a whole, it is really pretty catastrophic just how much wealth is concentrated at the top.
Now, don't get me wrong, I like wealth to be concentrated at the top if that is the result of voluntary interactions in a free market.
If it's a meritocracy based upon voluntarism, fantastic.
But if it's not, then it's a problem.
And, of course, the A purpose of the welfare state was to reduce wealth inequalities, and it's actually, of course, violence always achieves the opposite if you want.
Beat up your wife, does she love you more?
No.
Use the state to control for income inequalities, to attempt to reduce income inequalities, you will get more.
So if you just look at the top here, it's really just 0.6% of these people have US dollars a million or more.
I mean, it's just, it's wretched, you can see from the picture.
The bottom 50% of the global population possesses barely 1% of the total wealth.
The richest 10% own 86% of the world's wealth, and the top 1% alone account for 46% of global assets.
Now in a free market situation this would quickly devolve into much more equality, because if you had free access to poorer workers you would simply bid up their wages.
But all of the controls of hiring other workers, immigration, emigration, or In a rational universe, what is simply called moving, these barriers create these inequalities, right?
You know, like these reservoirs and canals, they have these barriers which allow for the inequality of water height.
You take those down, it all tends to smooth out, but that's not the way it is.
This is all the result of statism.
Real GDP growth rate by decade.
This is really important to understand just how much energy and momentum has been taken out of the economy as the government has gotten larger and larger and larger.
And this is why politicians still cling to this mad delusion that they can somehow grow their way out of a deficit, because in the past this was more possible.
So look at Spain.
Real GDP growth rate in the 1960s was 110 percent.
It's gone down to 24 percent in the 2000s.
In Italy it was almost 77 percent.
Now it's gone down to 4 percent.
24% in the 2000s.
In Italy, it was almost 77%.
Now it's gone down to 4%.
Germany, 53% down to 8%.
Netherlands, 60% growth, now down to 14.9%.
France, 70.4% down to 11.7%.
Britain, 33.9% down to 19.7%.
The US, almost a 50% real GDP growth, and now down to 17.3%.
And again, this all counts the thumb jiggery and quantitative easing, the diarrhea of fiat currency currently coming out of the ass of the Fed.
And so this is the result of trying to make...
society richer by using the force of the state, of increased regulation, increased debt, increased taxation, increased controls, increased laws.
This has been the result that the problem of poverty was being solved in the 1960s, and it stopped being solved once you got into the 1970s, and now has become permanent and worse, even though it's deferred through debts and deficits.
Unemployment rate in the EU is almost 12 percent, brand new, all-time high.
More than 17 million people were out of work as of February 2012.
Unemployment rate in Greece is now 26% a year ago.
It was only 18.9%.
The number of unemployed workers in Italy has risen by more than 37% over the past year.
22% of the entire population of Ireland lives in jobless households.
22%!
Almost a quarter of the entire population of Ireland live in jobless households.
This doesn't even count government jobs, which in general are anti-job households.
The unemployment rate in France, now above 10%, has risen for 16 months in a row.
Unemployment rate in Portugal, now up to 16.3% from 13.7% a year ago.
Unemployment rate in Spain, 26.2%.
It's already higher than the unemployment rate in the US, even during the worst of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
And why are they unemployed?
Because if they try to get jobs, they will be thrown in jail.
If they try to work for whatever wage they want to, in whatever field they can show competence in, for the most part, unless they show the correct licenses, paperwork, and unless they can pay all of the taxes, and unless they can work at the minimum wage, and so on, they will get thrown in jail.
There is a... the fiery sword of the state stands between the unemployed and productivity.
And if you got rid of all those regulations and controls and that violence, those people would get a job tomorrow and the problem would be solved.
But there are far too many people profiting from having that sword of the state between the unemployed and their rent-seeking profits.
In Italy, the unemployment rate for workers under the age of 25 is 37.1%.
So not people in school.
Youth unemployment rate in Portugal, over 35%.
Unemployment rate for workers under the age of 25 in Spain is 56.5%.
Under the age of 25 in Greece, 57.6%.
All of these are record highs.
Now, I'm telling you, society, you and I need to talk.
Society as a whole, listen.
If you can't give the young their goodies, they ain't going to obey your rules.
This is how society ropes in and domesticates young people, particularly young men, is if you knuckle down and you put your nose to the grindstone and you do your work and you get up early and you go and get a job, then you're going to get into the middle class and have a nice lifestyle.
If you can't offer young people goodies, then you can't bribe them into obeying society's rules.
And this will become apparent very soon.
So the jobs that have come back, are pretty terrible.
So, among countries that use the euro, almost 4.3 million low-paid jobs have been gained since mid-2009.
But the loss of mid-paid jobs has never stopped.
7.6 million disappeared from January 2008 through last June.
In Germany, which is believed to be one of the best of the eurozone countries in terms of economic productivity, 25% of the population have the so-called mini-jobs and earn less than 400 euros per month.
The chance of getting a decent paying job is diminishing.
Some 50% of all new employment contracts in the EU are temporary work contracts for workers aged 20 to 24.
The proportion is 60%.
Of course.
So in France, of course, they made it very difficult to fire people, which means that nobody really wants to hire anyone.
Great for everybody who has a job, except that they get the jobs of the people that would have been hired.
And it's just a mess.
In Greece, private sector salaries dropped to 22.5% in 2011.
This, of course, is largely to pay for the fact that you can retire in your 50s to a Greek island and all that mess.
Reclassification of unemployment.
This is in the UK.
The unemployment rate has remained low compared with previous recessions, but figures on underemployment indicate that this is a result of people taking on more part-time roles.
The number of underemployed workers remained flat in the years before the recession, But between 2008 and 2012 it rocketed from 2.07 million to 3.05 million.
One in ten workers are currently underemployed.
Manufacturing activity in both France and Germany has contracted for ten months in a row.
The few major unexpected things that occurred that have kept the status system alive is really, really important to understand.
The current system, this predatory civil war of all against all called the modern Democratic vote trading the buying of politicians the I think it says Mencken says all elections are in advance auction on stolen goods This whole mess would have collapsed long ago if it wasn't for a few factors The first of course is nobody could have expected the rise of relative free markets in China and India
I mean, two of the most populous countries in the world and in the other Asian countries.
This has offset to some degree inflation, but of course it has cost manufacturing jobs from the, quote, developed world.
And so you can buy a lot of cheap crap from those countries, which offsets the loss of your purchasing power, but it is at the cost of manufacturing jobs.
That's one thing.
The second, of course, is the computer revolution.
I mean, the, the fact that productivity has declined when the greatest revolution in communication and productivity I think ever has occurred.
is only testament to the fact that it would have collapsed without this productivity of computers.
So manufacturing activity in France and Germany contracts for 10 months in a row.
In Spain, it's for 20 months in a row.
In Europe, it's for 13 months in a row as a whole.
The Committee of French Automobile Producers 2012, the worst year for the French automobile industry since 1915.
Eurozone's future has led to a widespread freeze on industrial investment and development.
Industrial production is collapsing at an accelerating rate, falling 7% year-on-year in Spain and Greece, 4.8% in Italy and 2.1% in France.
What major capital concerns, and I have an entrepreneurial background and know a little bit about this, what major capital concerns in the West are experiencing is a form of regime uncertainty in that there are so many impending horrible decisions that need to be faced by the government which are continually being postponed and avoided by all governments and such a huge amount of regulatory confusion and a huge amount of impending legislation and everybody knows that taxes are going to need to go way up or benefits are going to need to go way down or both.
And so people are holding off making their investments in improving their capital machinery, their factories, and all that kind of stuff.
The B2B market is declining because, business-to-business market, sorry, is declining because of this regime uncertainty.
And this, of course, just making everything worse and worse, because you're not getting the productivity that the politicians fantasize will pull them out of their own ass.
In November, Italy experienced the sharpest decline in retail sales in 17 months.
Greek news media reported a 27% drop in garbage collections in the greater Athens area.
A huge decline in smoking from 2.3 million cigarettes in 2011 from 3.1 in 2007.
Mass transit uses dropped by double digits.
It's a... To the economy, government expands like a slow-acting neutron bomb.
I mean, the buildings are all still standing, but nobody's moving.
In Greece, 20% of all retail stores have closed down during the economic crisis.
European consumers were expected to spend 15 billion euros less on their holidays in 2010.
French made vehicle sales in November down 28% compared to a year earlier.
Chinese exports to the EU declined by 16% in July.
And US exports to Europe have fallen steadily as well because the consumer demand is not there.
Spain's largest bank lost 6.3% of its domestic deposits in July.
Savings at Banco Popular Español SA, the sixth biggest, fell 9.5% in the same month.
That's a vicious cycle, right?
94 billion dollars, the equivalent of 7% of GDP, was withdrawn from the Spanish banking system in the month of July alone.
Greece's second largest lender lost 22% of its customer deposits in 12 months.
Alphabank SA, the company's third biggest, lost 26% of client savings during the same amount of time.
This is what I mean when I say everybody knows.
January 2012 to July 2012, the decline in Portuguese savings accelerated to 6% from 1% while Irish deposits fell 10%.
So, home prices in Spain fell by 11.2% during 2011.
The number of property repossessions in Spain rose by 32% during 2011.
It has been reported that some homes in Spain are being sold at a 70% discount from where they were during the peak of the housing bubble back in 2006.
At this point there are approximately 2 million unsold homes in Spain.
I mean, what an unbelievable wreck to the environment that's been to build all these homes.
I've read somewhere, I don't know if it's true, 10% of US housing is vacant.
The poverty rate in Greece is 36%, up from 20% in 2009.
The crisis also hurts young Britons 18 to 32 years old.
One in five cannot pay their utility bills and one in eight young residents of England skips lunch for the opportunity to feed their family.
44% of the entire population of Bulgaria is facing severe material deprivation.
That's a little bit more than the traditional poverty definition.
The Catholic charity Caritas said that it had fed nearly 1 million hungry Spaniards in 2010, more than twice as many.
In 2007, in 2011, the number rose again by 65,000.
22% of Spanish households were living in poverty.
About 600,000 Spanish households had no income whatsoever.
These are going to get worse and worse, these numbers.
About a third of those seeking help had never tried to use a food pantry or soup kitchen before the economic crisis.
This is after trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars have been spent to combat poverty.
Do you understand why free market people are friends of the poor and statists are selling the poor off for parts?
One of every four Spanish children is in poverty.
And, um, marriages registered in England and Wales in 2007 was 231,000 and change, a 3.3% drop on the previous year, and only three quarters of the number recorded in 1991.
Um, of course, as the economy gets hotter, people postpone marriage, people don't get married, people still have kids.
In the EU, some 37.4% of the children were born outside marriage in 2010, while the corresponding figure for 1990 was 17.4%.
So, more than doubled.
But this is important.
The rise of single households is horrendous for the economy as a whole.
Because where two people used to share, like two parents used to share a house with a bunch of kids, now the parents need two households, if one of them is even involved in the family.
Poverty and the division of labor that occurs within the marital unit is not occurring, which makes for massive economic inefficiencies.
Huge growth in the state to take care of the needs of kids and of working moms and so on.
For the economy, the rise, like all the child poverty in the U.S.
would be wiped out if people got married at the same rate as they did in 1970.
So, the collapse of the family, and I don't mean the state marriage, I mean the traditional market-developed institution of marriage.
It's catastrophic for the economy.
You can see these numbers here.
Divorce rate, of course, is increasing and the marriage rate is declining, and from 1970 to 2009 you can see these numbers.
So, as I mentioned, people are pulling out the magic fairy of debt in order to wave away the scary monster of state expansion and the decline in their purchasing power.
In the UK, in England, 10% of the nation's 25 million households are under such extreme financial pressure they've been forced to default on household debts including mortgage payments.
In Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, they all have private sector debt that far exceeds the safety threshold of 160% of GDP.
And we're going to do another presentation on the, you know, sort of Scandinavian socialist miracle and the illusion that people have that that system works.
But that's massive, massive debt.
Spain private sector debt is equivalent to 220%, sorry, 227% of GDP.
Thank you.
you.
Portugal private sector debt, 249% of GDP.
Right?
So this is just stuff people owe in the private sector.
Portugal's corporate debt to GDP is still as high as it was at the peak of the financial crisis.
When you add up all forms of debt in Portugal, government, business, and consumer, the total is equivalent to approximately 360% of GDP.
And does it really matter once you get up into those numbers?
Between 2000 and 2012, aggregate debt rose by 81%.
A rising population accounts for part of the increase, but debt per adult grew 45% for the entire period.
So this is just over a decade!
We are fueling, we are funding the inefficiencies of violence with predation on the future.
This is absolutely unsustainable.
It's unconscionable what we are handing to our children and it's all as a result of us failing to tame the rise of state power, state violence.
In Germany the richest 1% of the population possesses 23% of all the wealth and the richest 10th controls 60%.
Half the population possesses just 2% of all wealth.
You cannot get people to buy into a society that does not have a mechanism which shares wealth equally.
And the best mechanism for sharing wealth equally is the free market.
Because back in the 1950s and the 1960s, income inequality was declining.
When government came in to fix it, it got worse.
Poverty in a free market is a vacuum for investment.
Because if there are people out there who are going to work for much less, you will tend to bid up their wages.
I mean, all other things being equal.
And so, when you have the state, they're interfering with that mechanism through a wide variety of things.
And remember, of course, the government is educating all these people anyway, so if they come out of school with no economic value, that's on the government again.
In 2011, almost 120 million, or 24.2% of the population in the EU-27 were at risk of poverty or social exclusion.
of the population in the EU27 were at risk of poverty or social exclusion.
This is up from 23.4% in 2010.
80 million people or almost 16.5% of the population live below the poverty threshold in the EU. 20.2% 20.2% of children under 16 years of age are poor in Europe.
The poverty rate of persons aged between 16 and 24 years is an average.
21.6% in Europe.
In the Czech Republic it's 12.6% as in Austria.
Some of the statism has been hardest to establish in the ex-communist countries for reasons that I'm sure are very obvious.
In Greek, it's almost 30% the poverty rate between people aged 16 to 24.
83% of teachers in the UK every day see hungry students.
Over half these teachers say in the last couple of years the number of hungry school children has increased.
One in five European 15-year-olds has poor reading skills and 75 million Europeans have low qualifications, often lacking basic reading and writing skills.
Thank you, public sector education.
The Greek economy shrank 6% during 2012.
It's been shrinking for five years in a row.
The Greek economy has shrunk by more than 7% this year.
It will contract by another 4.5% in 2013.
The Greek economy has contracted by about 20% since 2008.
After seven recent tax increases, gasoline costs about $8.20 a gallon in Greece.
Economies facing 20% or greater youth unemployment run the risk of long-term GDP loss of 0.5 to 1% per year.
This is a combination of social welfare costs, emigration, contraction of the tax base, state pension contribution gaps, and loss of productive capacity.
Starve the young, kill the future.
Rising Government Debt 2007 to 2012.
I'm not going to read all these off.
I'm going to pause the video.
You can pause the video if you want.
But just a few examples.
In 2007, debt to GDP in UK, 43%.
2012, 85%.
Spain, under 40%, almost 70% in five years.
Ireland, 24% to 106%.
Just astounding.
Greece, 106% to 170% in five years.
What are the indicators of collapse or readjustment or significant change?
This is all I mean the House of Cards is going to come down and it's going to come down hard or it's going to come down soft.
The way it comes down soft is you simply withdraw government interference in the economy And within six to 12 months, things will be back on track in a way we could not conceive of.
We know this historically.
There was a worst crash in 1920 than there was in 1929, but the government didn't do anything.
And within a year to 18 months old was better.
But of course, when the government got in and started to try and manage and control and force everything, after the 1929 crash in America, you had 14 years of depression that was largely responsible for the 40 million deaths caused by the Second World War.
So, if the government withdraws its power, and if the citizens clamor for economic freedom, these problems can be solved very quickly.
If, which is much more likely, all the intellectual classes bay out and cry out in their werewolf hysterical state teat-sucking academic voices for government controls, this will go on forever, just as it has in Japan.
On Monday, 3rd September 2012, The Spanish banking giant Bankia was getting an emergency cash injection at between 4.5 billion euros.
Ford has configured its computer system so they will be able to immediately handle a new Greek currency.
JP Morgan Chase is taking no chances.
It has already created new accounts for a handful of American giants that are reserved for a new drachma in Greece or whatever currency might succeed the euro in other countries.
Lord Rothschild took a 130 million dollar pound bet against the euro.
Martin Goos, an economist at the University of Leuven in Belgium, says Europe could double its middle class job losses.
And, um, these have health effects.
I mean, this is incredibly enormous, significant effects.
The incidence of HIV and AIDS among intravenous drug users in Central Athens soared by 1,250% in the first 10 months of 2011.
Malaria is becoming endemic in the South for the first time since the late 1970s.
Sharp increase in cases of tuberculosis in the immigrant population, cases of Nile fever and the reappearance of endemic malaria in several parts of Greece, And in 2011 there were 20% more registered homeless people than the year before, which also has an effect on the spread of illnesses.
Greece is facing unfunded liabilities in future years equivalent to about 800% of GDP.
Bank loans that are a serious risk of default have gone from 1% of outstanding loans in 2008 to 7.6% today.
The value of potentially dud loans is 136 billion euros or 13% of the Spanish GDP.
I mean, if you work for anyone who lends money, if you work for a bank or anyone who lends money, default loans are horrendous, right?
You can't have, because you can't have more than a few percentage points of default loans, otherwise it takes your whole organization down.
Because you're only making a couple of points on each loan.
A couple of percentage points on each loan.
Which means that 98%, 99% of your loans have to come back, otherwise you're toast.
And so it's just a complete mess.
Bad loans make up approximately 20% of all domestic loans in the Greek banking system at this point.
The annual snapshot of the mood of boardrooms to mark the start of the annual World Economic Forum.
Only 22% of the people running UK companies were very confident about growth prospects over the next 12 months.
Those were probably people with government contracts or supplying medical supplies.
Greek suicide hotline in 2010 there were about 2,500 calls.
In 2011 there were twice as many.
The number of suicides in Greece over the last 12 months has increased by 40%.
This is the trend in many countries.
The suicide rate among men has increased by more than 24% from 2007 to 2009.
Suicides in Ireland among men rose 16%, more than 16%.
From 2005 to 2010 in Italy, suicides have increased from 52%, sorry, has increased by 52% from 2005 to 2010.
more than 16%, from 2005 to 2010.
In Italy, suicides have increased from 52%, sorry, has increased by 52% from '05 to 2010.
Again, this is, people die from this stuff.
So this was predicted by libertarians, by Austrian economists, by free market thinkers, by anarcho-capitalists.
The collectivization of currency subsidizes irresponsibility and penalizes responsibility, resulting in a general downward drag on productivity.
The misallocation of resources that results from force, from violence, from coercion, from hurting people and money around at the point of a gun, then throwing people in jail for disobeying any of the hundreds of thousands of regulations that control every minutiae of their economic lives.
This has disastrous consequences.
You cannot unleash the endless blizzard of predatory bureaucracies armed to the teeth and think that it is not going to have an effect on the economy and on freedom and on opportunity.
And mental health problems are going to arise as a result.
Suicides are going to arise.
Family breakdowns are going to arise.
Poverty is going to arise.
And nihilism, right?
The great curse of the 19th century.
Nihilism is going to arise in these situations unless people return to the non-aggression principle.
Thou shalt not initiate force and a respect for property rights.
The causes of the crisis are moral.
And the cure is moral.
So thank you so much for watching.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
Almost 50 million downloads.
I think we're over that now.
Freedomainradio.com.
The sources for all of this are going to be fdrural.com forward slash end EU.
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And euros, I suppose, too.
Thank you so much for your time.
Best of luck.
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