Saturday, February 28, 2015

Friday Pussy - Party like it's 1929



The more I study our current situation the more it's looking like the 1920s just before the market crashed. See if this doesn't sound familiar. Bucket shops which are equivalent of our modern day derivatives sold side bets to the stock market. Trade deficits nearly equal to what we have now. Foreign debt - Germany was made to try and pay for WWI which they couldn't. Inflation for Germany was so bad that it took bundles of marks to buy a loaf of bread. In today's example that would be Greece but they don't have the power to print their own money so they're stuck with the euro that can only be manipulated by big European banks.

Japan is facing an energy crisis as they can't restart their nuclear plant at Fukushima. That "clean up" is surely sucking monies out of the economy. Not to mention the loss of farmland from the contamination zone. No way to stop ground water from becoming contaminated and seeping into the ocean.

Back to Greece which is looking a lot like Germany did back in the 20s. Germany wrestled with the war debt problem until Hitler took power and invoked the Liberty Plan which criminalized anyone in government who tried to make reparations for WWI debt as agreed to in the Young Plan. It was probably the reason he made it to power in the first place. To it's credit the Young Plan canceled much of the debt and stretched payments out to 59 years. Greece as was mentioned before can not restructure its' currency or seem to come up with a viable plan for ending its' economic woes. The European Central bank seems to be unwilling to let Greece sell bonds to help pay its' debt which was the plan for Germany back in the day. Germany by the way finally paid off the last of its' war debt in 2010.

And this week we have one bank fail in Puerto Rico. 

5 comments:

BBC said...

You seem to know a lot more about markets than I do, but I've never been interested in them anyway.

billy pilgrim said...

what's your prognosis for gold?

BBC said...

I'm not interested in gold either, but I have some mercury.

Demeur said...

From what I understand countries are repatriating their gold. Meaning bringing it back to the home country from it's storage in the U.S. The problem? It isn't all there. There was more certificates sold then gold to back it up. You know like banks leveraging their deposits.

Demeur said...

As for Billy maybe he could corner the market on pocket pussies. :-)