How Does That Taste Germany?

Recently, the European Union came together in a moment of crisis and flexed its collective muscle. Greece was one the brink of collapse, drawing the entire Eurozone closer to that fate as well.

Despite the fact that Greece got themselves into this poor state through rampant socialistic overspending and falsifying just how bad off they were when reporting back to Brussels, the EU browbeat the Germans into green lighting a 95 billion dollar bailout of the dismal nation.

As everyone knows but few will admit, this bailout has almost no chance of succeeding and Greece has now shown us why. Conditional with the bailout were promises made by the Greek government to drastically reduce the cost of government to get the books back in line with the acceptable debt to GDP ratios established by the EU. The Greeks lied before but for some reason the EU took them at their word this time. Fine.

Today, Greece announced a plan that would pay the room and board for any tourist stranded in Greece due to the weather (volcanoes) or industrial action (worker strikes). This is supposed to help rehabilitate Greece's image and get their tourism income back up to snuff. It's a typical, liberal, feel good, no thought, gee isn't the government great program. While the volcano was an anomaly, hopefully, worker strikes happen all the time in Europe and happen very frequently by unionized workers in Greece, angry over the potential cuts.

As we know, Greece gets lots of tourists. Greeks like to strike, especially in service industries (airlines, mass transit). It's a near certainty that the Greek government is going to have to start shelling out some dollars to cover stranded tourists. What I can't figure out is how exactly they can pay for it. I doubt the Germans had this in mind when they destroyed their own future to bail out the Greeks. While the overall monetary amount will be small compared to other government expenses, it shows why leftists can't be trusted to shrink government or save money. Mere weeks after throwing themselves on the mercy of Europe and grovelling for cash, the Greek government is once again busy creating programs that will drain the government checkbook without serving any real purpose other than to create a very temporary sense of goodwill towards the government. This one is especially stupid as it isn't even directed at the Greek people. If a country is going to try and buy favor, it should be with its own people.

Hopefully Europe and the United States are watching and learning. Spain, Italy, Ireland and the U.S. are heading the same direction as Greece at varying speed. The EU will soon have to decide if they can bail out more countries and Americans have elections in November. Greece has been as close to financial catastrophe as any country has been since pre-WW2 Germany yet they still can only promise cuts and savings, not deliver. What the EU and American voters need to realize is that ideology is not something that can be rehabilitated in the face of overwhelming logic and facts. The only way to reverse the trajectory of a nations path is to replace the vital components of government. If they can't be replaced, they should be allowed to wither away and die.

Then and only then, can the pieces but put back together properly.

Whew! Glad That's Fixed

Finally, the Securities & Exchange Commission has developed a new strategy to combat massive crashes in stock prices such as the one experienced in May. You may remember this incident vividly as the being the only time a stock crash was blamed on a fat fingered trader who typed in "billion" instead of "million". Having been unable to actually find this obese, dim-witted titan of Wall Street as of yet, the SEC was forced to act on the logical assumption that there was no fatty screwing with the Dow, rather it was an actual, market driven occurrence.

Normal, capitalist minded individuals would look at a massive stock crash and try to examine the reasons how it could have happened. Europe's credit collapse, rampant American debt and sagging credit, the current administration's hostility to all non-crony related forms of capitalism are all plausible theories that spring to mind.

Unfortunately, the United States bureaucracy is not populated by normal, capitalist minded individuals.

The solution devised by the SEC is to monitor stock prices over a floating time frame and if there is a massive devaluation of stock prices, to simply stop trading.

Awesome.

Nothing more to see here folks! No need to figure out why your investment is worth about 1/32 what it was five minutes ago. Big brother stopped trading, don't you feel better now?

You shouldn't. This plan won't work because the underlying problems aren't being addressed. Trading can't be halted forever and as soon as the freeze is lifted, whatever root causes were in play before will be in play again.

Finances are like a river. You can't stop the flow, you can only dam, divert or delay. All those things can do is buy you time. You ultimately have to fix the main problem. If you don't, those tactics will fail and the failure is often times more spectacular and costly than the original problem you were trying to avoid.