The Great Debate UK
Democracy vs. austerity
By Kathleen Brooks. The opinions expressed are her own.
Throughout history it has always been difficult to take something away from someone once you have given it to them. Europe is finding that it is extremely difficult to reign in public finances once they start to go out of control. Democracies don’t like to vote for austerity, which is why Sarkozy lost the Presidency in France, why a radical left party came second in the Greek elections and why the Conservatives got a drubbing at last week’s local elections in the UK.
This tells us something about democracy in the western world. Governments have to manage the public finances directly – they have to sell the debt, do the sums and present budgets. However, the people who vote them into (and out of) power are the public, who rightly in most cases, believe they have worked hard, paid taxes and deserve the services and retirement promises made to them.
So here we have the problem: some governments in the West have unsustainable debt loads and deficit levels and yet they don’t have the popular mandate to try and bring that under control. That isn’t the story all over the west. The Germans and the Dutch agree that the government books should be balanced. But if you asked the rest of Europe if they wanted to reduce public debt levels to make country finances more sustainable at the expense of public services and jobs, the recent election results suggest that you would get a resounding no.
So there isn’t one unified way of thinking about austerity in the West. Some people see it as a virtue, others as a type of hell. So what to do? Europe’s one-type fits all model that is largely designed by Germany could lead to social disorder and radical political parties grabbing the reins of power in Greece. However, the more people fight against austerity the more unlikely it is that their governments can attract enough investors to buy their debt to fund their public spending needs.
So where does this vicious circle end? The answer is that no one knows. Now that the true state of public finances in Europe has been revealed it can’t be brushed under the carpet and the Greeks et al can’t go back to the pre-2007 ways of living and spending. However, the opposite – harsh austerity designed to reign in public finances at half the time it took to amass the debt in the first place – isn’t working either.
A more sensible plan is for Europe to reach some sort of compromise. Germany and Greece (as the two extremes) need to realise there are multiple views about what a democracy should provide and how public finances should be controlled. The next step is to plan a fiscal pact that allows countries to reign in public spending at the same pace as it amassed it in the first place – and fiscal targets should be spread out over 10 years rather than the current demands to bring down deficits to 3 percent of GDP by the next fiscal year. The UK could probably follow suit and realise that the debts took two parliaments to accumulate, thus it should take two parliaments to rein them in.
A two-speed economy for Europe’s youth
By Kathleen Brooks. The opinions expressed are her own.
A new dimension to the currency crisis is upon us. First there was the two-speed growth – with richer, predominantly Northern European economies performing well while the weak south was on the cusp of recession. But in recent months an even more worrying divide has started to emerge in youth unemployment.
In Spain the number of under 24-year-olds out of work is 50 percent, in Italy nearly a third of young people are without a job and in France the figure is a quarter.
However, in Germany youth unemployment is expected to sink to record lows over the coming months and is currently well below 8 percent.
If you are a young person in Germany your prospects for work and the future are brighter than they have been for generations. But for their peers in Spain things have never been worse.
So what is Germany doing right and can Spain learn a few lessons? In an article written for the Centre for European Reform, John Springford lays the problem out clearly. In EU countries where rates of unemployment are high levels of participation in higher education and vocational studies is approximately 40 percent. In Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark and Finland, where youth unemployment is fairly low, rates are closer to 60 percent in some cases.
Education and training is key to reducing youth unemployment. Not only does it help deal with young people when jobs are not plentiful, but it also boosts skill levels and could increase productivity in the long-term while also avoiding a “lost generation” of young adults who become reliant on benefits.
The euro is on life support, and the on-off switch is in Frankfurt
By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.
The short term solution to the problem of how to manage the euro zone crisis may now be right there in front of us. The central issue, as far as Germany is concerned at least, is how to reconcile bailing out the other member countries with keeping up the pressure on them to put their fiscal house in order. Quietly, without any official recognition of the fact, the ECB has taken charge of the situation and is now effectively running fiscal policy for most of the euro zone by simply buying enough Greek, Italian, Spanish and maybe French bonds to keep yields from going too high, but not buying so many as to reduce yields to anything like comfortable levels.
Moreover, treasury officials in every country will be only too well aware that what the ECB giveth, the ECB can take away. Any relaxation in austerity regimes can always be countered by an end to ECB purchases or even by ECB sales in the secondary market, driving yields back up in the space of a few minutes to 7%, 8% and beyond. In short, most of the euro zone members are now on a life support machine, and the on-off switch is in Frankfurt.
As a temporary situation, this suits everyone. Politically, it is far more acceptable both for Germany and its clients to conceal the fact that power in Europe is now shared only between Berlin and Frankfurt. Moreover, it conceals from the German electorate that the dreaded Transfer Union is already up and running, because they are in fact subsidising their neighbours via the ECB. With transparent subsidies ruled out – the European Financial Stability Fund has failed to get off the ground and Frau Merkel is unwilling to contemplate a Eurobond – the transfers are being made in the most opaque way possible.
Notice also that the current state of affairs is entirely consistent with developments in Greece and Italy, insofar as it means that technocrats are now running the euro zone too. For Europe, it is the culmination of the trend to unaccountable government that stretches all the way back to the Treaty of Rome in 1958.
Convenient as the current ad hoc arrangement may be, however, I suspect it will not hold up for long, though it will probably get us through to the New Year and beyond. Holding a gun to someone’s head only works if you are really willing to pull the trigger. If, or more likely when, one of the ECB’s clients calls its bluff by refusing or simply being unable to implement additional austerity measures for fear of bloodshed in the streets, a decision will have to be taken in Frankfurt and Berlin. Either stop buying bonds and run the risk of being seen to precipitate a collapse in both the economy and possibly in law and order too, or alternatively surrender to moral hazard, abandon any hope of controlling the money stock and accept inflation as the inevitable long run consequence.
Germans who believe, with their Chancellor, that fiscal integration is the ultimate answer might like to ponder the question: how would it differ from the current scenario? Would it involve some kind of rules to set limits on each country’s fiscal policy? If so, they should explain how those rules could be made any more effective than those in the Maastricht Treaty, which even Germany itself flouted. Some in Germany are said to favour fines for overspending countries, which demonstrates that there is in fact such a thing as a Teutonic sense of humour. (Imagine imposing a fine on Greece today. How do you levy a fine on any country, let alone one which is already bankrupt and which you yourself have to bail out? Presumably, Germany would have to pay Greece’s fines too?)
Thank you for this good summary of the current situation of the Euro zone. I agree with you that the Transfer Union is already operating, and that, while this may work for some time, the planned construction of a fiscal union will not be stable in the long run.
In the past, I believed an “United States of Europe” would be a reachable goal, and that the Euro (and especially the exptectable Euro crisis) would be the major tool to reach this goal. In a way, both seem to become true now – the Euro crisis as anvil to forge the Union. But the internal tensions in countries ruled by a German-led Fiscal Union are bound to break into the open through radical political movements, like the Front National in France or the Lega Nord in Italy. The later the final divorce comes, the higher will be the costs.
One needs only to look at history to see that state unions of different peoples, and with an inequilibrium of power and size, never are stable on the long run. Unless the largest 4 EU countries break up voluntarily (which will not happen), the EU should better remain an alliance of independent countries, not trying to convert itself into an U.S.-style Union.
Put the euro zone out of its misery
By Laurence Copeland. The author is a professor of finance at Cardiff University Business School. The opinions expressed are his own.
Let me make a wild guess – just a hunch, a vague feeling, the kind you get when you hear a football club chairman say “the manager has my full support”. My forecast is that the IMF monitors currently poring over the Italian government’s books will uncover a black hole somewhere, probably one big enough to swallow the euro zone, and the discovery will leave them as shocked as Captain Renault when he found there was gambling going on at Rick’s Bar in Casablanca.
My gut feeling is based on a deeply rooted suspicion of Italian statistics dating back to the early 1970’s, when I got my first job in academic life, as a research assistant in the University of Manchester. In that more tranquil era, it seemed possible to uncover a number of stable relationships between macroeconomic variables for all the other countries in the industrial world, but somehow never for Italy, which was always the outlier. Suspicion of the data is reinforced by the well-established claim that as much as 25 percent of Italy’s production is in the economia sommersa, the underground economy, exempt from taxation, unmonitored and unregulated (in fact, the Italian authorities have sometimes seemed to take a pride in its size, notably in 1987, when by a sleight of the statistician’s hand, Italy’s GDP was deemed to have overtaken that of Britain, thanks to an overnight reassessment of the scale of the country’s black market).
Even if Italy’s predicament is no worse than it appears from official statistics, the outlook is grim. It is hard to imagine a Berlusconi-led government successfully enforcing a serious austerity regime, but neither is it likely that an opposition dominated by ex-Communists could succeed where he failed. Moreover, as with Greece, those who are enthusiastic for a non-partisan administration made up of technocrats forget that mustering support in parliament is not enough. Restoring Italy to fiscal health will need a government able and willing to enforce spending cuts, raise taxes (or at least collect them more vigorously) and deregulate labour markets in the face of bitter and potentially violent opposition from trade unions, the professions and probably much of the public. It is not obvious to me that a government of supposedly neutral technocrats is better placed to achieve all this.
With a total debt of nearly two trillion euros, even a relatively modest haircut for Italy would be ruinously expensive to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), and a Greek-style coiffure of 50 percent or more would use up all the additional funding promised (but not yet delivered). Moreover, there would be devastating consequences for the creditworthiness of the core countries — France in particular, but even Germany, and of course for all the major European banks.
For months now, commentators have been urging the EU authorities finally to get ahead of the curve, something they have repeatedly failed to do in the case of Greece. They began by refusing to admit the need for a bailout, then denied the inevitability of a partial default, then were forced to recognise the need for a 20 percent haircut, and have now been reduced to begging Greece to accept a 50 percent writedown, an offer which will still leave the country facing a crippling debt-to-GDP ratio for a decade or more and which may be rejected anyway — in which case we will end up with a disorderly default after all.
The same sort of slow-motion trainwreck with Italian debt will sink Europe’s (and possibly the world’s) banking system – yet the authorities in Brussels and Frankfurt seem set on that course. To those who ask whether we face another Lehman Brothers, the answer is yes – and probably worse than in 2008.
Having enlightend us with why it should be put out of its misery, now show us how?
Its that HOW that inflicts pain that no-one is willing to bear – perhaps a glance at your colleagues graphics might help illuminate that -
http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/11/07 /BV_STRSTST0711_VF.html
Capitalism and democracy under threat from euro zone crisis
By Laurence Copeland. The author is a professor of finance at Cardiff University Business School. The opinions expressed are his own.
It takes quite a lot to make me feel sorry for politicians, especially the European variety, but I must say that Nicholas Sarkozy and particularly Angela Merkel have a right to be livid at the news that the Greek government now proposes to hold a referendum on whether they will agree to be given another gigantic dollop of aid. Having only reached agreement (of a very vague kind) at last week’s summit in the early hours of the morning, you can imagine how the French and German leaders must have felt when they discovered that their marathon negotiating sessions may all have been in vain. It seems the Greeks are now too wary of foreigners bearing gifts to accept their largesse without weeks or months of prior deliberation and debate.
The acceptance of the referendum proposal is apparently not a foregone conclusion, which is just as well, since it is plainly insane.
First, consider the wording of the referendum question. Opinion polls appear to show that Greeks remain keen on staying in the EU (and maybe even in the euro zone), so as things stand at the moment the outcome could be a majority in favour of rejecting the deal, but staying in the EU. But is this option still open to Greece? If not, the Greek government could end up with a mandate to follow a road that is already clearly blocked.
To pre-empt this scenario would require some sort of clear statement from Brussels about whether they would be willing to allow Greece to stay in the euro zone and/or EU if it rejected the latest round of austerity measures.
Even supposing the details of the referendum are sorted out, what then? How long is all this supposed to take? The vote could hardly go ahead before mid-January at the earliest. What on earth does Mr Papandreou think will be happening in the markets in the meantime? Does he think they will simply sit on their hands and wait patiently for Greek democracy to grind through the gears?
In reality, the momentum of this crisis is so inexorable that you can be quite sure that the deal currently on offer will have become totally irrelevant by the time any referendum is held, if the offer hasn’t anyway been withdrawn by the time you read this.
Spot on.
One thing I do find very strange in all this is the stubborn over-valuation of the euro. One can only assume that if and when the innumerable problems of the eurozone are resolved, one way or another, it will climb even further, exacerbating the already shaky trade situation of all its less efficient members.
Yet throughout all this, I don’t think I’ve heard a single EU politician or bureaucrat even express a desire for the currency to fall somewhat. One can only draw the conclusion that none of them really thought this through, and the only possible explanation for that is that they were all so fanatical about their beloved “European Project” that they couldn’t think straight.
The euro zone marriage is over
By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.
Under the Arc de Triomphe, tourists can gaze up at the engraved list of Napoleon’s great victories: Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram… Perhaps a similar triumphal arch should be built in Brussels to commemorate the string of victories won by a tiny band of heroic Eurocrats over the mass of their combined electorates: Rome, Maastricht, Lisbon, Wroclaw, and now Berlin, where, to nobody’s surprise, the integrationists in the Bundestag have easily seen off the opposition to their plan to bolster the EFSF. Cue the now-familiar backslapping in Europe after each of their knife-edge victories over the forces of democracy.
The starting point for these Eurocrats/integrationists is that the popular will is simply an obstacle on the road to the ultimate destination of a United States of Europe. Whenever they encounter one of these inconvenient roadblocks, they fume, argue among themselves about the merits of alternative routes until they finally swerve triumphantly round the obstacle, congratulating each other for their ingenuity and skill.
The trouble is that this game gets more dangerous at each stage. In the present case, it is reported that three out of four German voters is opposed to supporting Greece and co., and they’ve not even started paying for it yet. Moreover, it is not as though the largesse is going to create a reservoir of gratitude alongside the Mediterranean – far from it. Judging by reactions in Greece, the outcome will be a legacy of bitterness for decades to come.
It is important to realise that arguments about the cost of saving the euro zone are ultimately sterile, because under current conditions there is no limit to the commitment that the Germans are being asked to make – a point which is not lost on people in Germany. The €440bn additional funding for the EFSF sanctioned by the Bundestag is simply a first instalment, sufficient to cover the cost of propping up the bond markets on the assumption that it will prevent contagion from the Greek imbroglio – which, of course, there already is aplenty. It is several months too late to stop the panic spreading beyond the original porcine four – Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain – to engulf Italy and even to some extent France. Back-of-the-envelope calculations (which is as much as it is worth doing) suggest that the amount needed could be of the order of €2 trillion or more, equivalent to about 80 percent of Germany’s national income.
This may seem an enormous sum of money, but it is merely the downpayment on a potentially unending stream of subsidies in the nightmare transfer union scenario, as the Greeks slide back into their old, profligate ways, the Spanish continue to resist labour market reform, and the Italians replace the Berlusconi government with an administration stuffed with ageing ex-Communists.
How long will the Germans carry on financing this orgy? Like a bishop at a Berlusconi bunga-bunga party, they will either explode in a destructive rage or find the temptation to join in irresistible.
completely agreed with these arguments. I would add one distinction to the mix: most people belief of the efficacy of fiscal stimulus is based on the 30s. These were times when governments were worth 30% of the economies. Nowadays, governments such as France are worth 56% of the economy. The game has changed and they cannot go on expanding from that. (but as the article says, the political will to unfurl government is not there. people on the continent are simply not ready.)
Another week, another E.U. bailout agreement
By Mark Hillary. The opinions expressed are his own.
Once again German Chancellor Angela Merkel has had to dig deep to ensure that the euro zone can limp along for a little longer without any single nation defaulting.
And this story changes day by day. No sooner has Germany rescued the euro, Greece apologises and says they can’t meet the deficit targets – no more savings can possibly be achieved through austerity.
But as economists chart the course of this rollercoaster ride of expected default and the potential catastrophe of the entire European single currency project unwinding, is anyone paying attention to the social effect of all this uncertainty?
I don’t mean the pain of the middle classes ruing the days their house would increase in value week by week, I mean the potential for a completely different system of politics.
The political answer to the crisis in Europe is austerity. Public sector jobs are being slashed, taxes are being increased and more widely enforced, and state services normalised over decades are suddenly being cut.
Yet faith in centre-ground politicians is possibly at its lowest ebb since the end of the First World War. The general public has a very low tolerance for their elected leaders at present and non-economists generally view austerity packages as the wrong approach for repairing damaged economies.
Germany at the crossroads
By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.
Baby-boomers like me, who grew up in the shadow of World War II, have to acknowledge with gratitude that the Germany which again dominates Europe is in most respects a model democracy – multiracial, prosperous and contented. However, there is one worrying aspect of the German mentality which seems to have survived intact from its unhappy history, and it is an aspect which is likely to be tested to the full in the coming weeks and months.
From the moment when the Maastricht Treaty was dreamed up in the early 1990s to the inception of the euro zone in 1998, Germany had any number of opportunities to kill the project off and indeed, time and again, policymakers in Bonn or Berlin or Frankfurt voiced their reservations in public. The Bundesbank, in particular, with its overwhelming prestige, spoke out forcefully against what it saw as the dangers of premature monetary union.
Yet, while Tony Blair, who dared to take Britain to war in Iraq in the face of overwhelming public opposition, nonetheless baulked at taking his country into the euro zone without a referendum, and while France actually had one (which the pro-Maastricht side only won by a whisker), Germany’s leaders felt no such need. On the contrary, Chancellor Kohl famously rejected the idea of consulting his electorate on the grounds that, if the opinion polls were to be believed, he would almost certainly lose.
What is it about the Germans that makes them willing blindly to follow a leader, even though they fear he is taking them over a cliff? Am I alone in finding this a worrying national peculiarity?
I raise this question now because the problem of what to do about Greece means that Germany stands at another fork in the road. Forget the technicalities and the small print, important though they are, and focus on the critical issue of principle which precedes it: is Germany going to give in and allow some form of fiscal integration to be introduced by the front door (unlikely), by the back door, the tradesman’s entrance or the catflap? It is coming under increasing pressure to do so from all sides – euro-politicans, commentators, economists, right-thinking or unthinking members of the chattering classes – in fact, almost everyone except those who will end up footing the bill i.e. the taxpayers of Germany itself, who for some obscure reason are a lot less enthusiastic.
This may be the last chance for Germany. One shudders to think what will happen if Germans are saddled with supporting the rest of Europe in perpetuity – which is what is involved, as Frau Merkel seems only too well aware.
What message is the CDS market sending us?
By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.
Not many people seem to have noticed, but something almost unthinkable has happened in the Credit Default Swap (CDS) market recently. It is now one point cheaper to insure against a default by Her Majesty’s Government than by the Federal Republic of Germany. Given that only a few months ago, Markit was quoting twice as much to insure against a default on gilts as on bunds, this is a major change – but what is it telling us?
The message is unclear, but my guess is it is not quite the one which Britain’s Chancellor, quite reasonably from his point of view, would have us believe. Yes, the market has faith in our ability and willingness to repay – but that is far from the whole story.
The hint is in the fact that Japan (with its enormous government debt, even before it gets very far with post-tsunami reconstruction) and post-downgrade USA also have low CDS rates. As I have pointed out many times before in these blogs, what we have in common with Japan and America, apart from rockbottom government bond yields and associated low CDS rates, is the freedom to print our own currency. The fact that the three of us have massive debt burdens is therefore regarded as irrelevant. By contrast, this freedom is denied to euro zone countries, who are supposed to repay debt out of government revenue, which makes their creditworthiness dependent on their ability to collect tax and their prospective future growth rates which will determine the size of their tax base. Although Germany has a reasonably modest debt-to-GDP ratio, it cannot straightforwardly print money to repay its creditors. Add to that the fact that the market is finally waking up to the realisation that Germany is coming under heavy pressure to shoulder the debt of the rest of the euro zone, and its debt level suddenly seems far less modest.
It is often said that the markets can only concentrate on one thing at a time, which seems strange – but how else to interpret the current state of affairs? How else can one explain the willingness of the market to lend unlimited amounts to America even though the Fed has made it plain that it will carry on printing money until inflation revives and the dollar gets even weaker? It certainly makes sense for investors to ignore the negligible risk of a CDS-triggering default by Britain or America – but leaving aside CDS rates, even if outright default is ruled out, why would anyone want to buy five-year gilts or U.S. Treasuries at yields of barely 1 percent?
In fact, one could ask something similar about German interest rates – unless it decides to walk away from its supposed responsibility to carry the rest of the euro zone on its back, it will end up using its overwhelming influence to force the ECB to print euros so as to support its own bond markets, weakening the euro zone in the process. But again, it is hard to imagine Germany actually defaulting – why would it, when it has enough clout to control the ECB, especially as if it ever started demanding easier money, it would be pushing in the same direction as the majority of other members (ClubMed plus France, at the very least)?
The only interpretation I can think of is that the markets foresee Japanese-style stagnation for more or less all of us in the Western world – in other words, years of slow growth or no-growth in GDP and consumption, with consequently high unemployment, against a background of low or falling prices for equities and real estate – and, of course, near-zero interest rates and inflation, maybe even deflation.
Could Europe be on the cusp of a Lehman moment?
By Kathleen Brooks. The opinions expressed are her own.
The euro zone debt crisis has now spread from the sovereigns – after the ECB came in and purchased Italian and Spanish debt – to the banking sector. Although the EU authorities put in place a short-selling ban, which has another week to run, the banking sector is back at the pre-ban levels or in some cases even lower.
Europe’s banks are by and large less capitalised than their U.S. peers. They are also exposed to Europe’s sovereign debt and European loan books. Even if a member state manages to avoid a default, growth is now slowing and we could be in line for another recession that would most likely increase bad debts and further erode banks’ profits.
As if that wasn’t enough, German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy announced a proposal for a financial transactions tax – a Tobin tax – to pay for bailouts to Greece, Portugal and Ireland. This will be discussed at the next EU summit in September, and if implemented would only make it harder for banks’ to boost their capital bases going forward.
The Basel three global regulatory standards for bank capital adequacy requires the world’s largest banks to boost their Tier 1 capital ratios and to hold higher quality capital as a buffer in case of financial shocks in future. These rules were introduced this year and since then Europe’s banks have been in a rush to raise capital. Pressure was ramped up after stress tests that were released in June showed that 24 banks needed to raise extra capital. Eight banks failed the test, while 16 had core tier 1 capital ratios below the 6 percent threshold.
So the banking sector in Europe was already exposed even before growth started to slow and the sovereign crisis spread to Italy and Spain. If markets get a hint of trouble in the banking sector the rumour mill can go into overdrive. This has driven stocks like Unicredit and Societe Generale lower by 30 percent and 40 percent respectively since the start of August.
Earlier this week there were rumours that some banks had to borrow dollar-based funds from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s swap facilities for foreign banks. This is considered the lender of last resort when you can’t raise money from the inter-bank market. The sums were fairly minimal – EUR500mn and EUR200mn – however, they suggest that some European banks are in trouble and a liquidity crunch could be in the wings.
Any five-year old child knows that if you put ten marbles into a tin can, you can only take ten marbles back out. No amount of wishful thinking, dreaming, or praying, will yield that eleventh marble from inside that can. That eleventh marble does not exist. It never did, and it never will. All discussions about the eleventh marble are the product of imagination. The eleventh marble is a fantasy.
Private central bankers issuing the public currency as interest-bearing loans operate on the belief that they can put ten marbles (dollars) into a tin can (the world) and magically get 11 marbles back out. Thus, we may conclude that the bankers are dumber than five-year old children! But unlike five-year old children, the bankers will take your home, your business, and your nation when they don’t get that eleventh marble! The spoiled child may cry and throw a tantrum, but that will be the end of their upset. The spoiled banker, however, in his or her arrogant rage that they cannot have the eleventh marble their imagination says must still be in that tin can, may start a war before they will admit that eleventh marble was never really there.
Economies are like tin cans. Before you can take a marble out, you must have put a marble in. Nobody can give you a marble that does not exist, yet this simple reality is lost to the priests of that fantastic religion called banking in that unholiest of temples called the IMF. Their religious doctrine seems to be that there must always be an eleventh marble inside the tin can, and that the tin can unfairly withholds that eleventh marble, indeed cheats them of their right to the eleventh marble, purely out of spite. That faith in the existence of the eleventh marble, unseen and improvable, is the article of faith the religion of banking rests on. It is far easier to burn the heretics than to question the dogma.
Today we see the bankers, having already retrieved their ten marbles from the tin can, flogging the world for that missing eleventh marble. Greece does not have that eleventh marble, so they turn to Germany and ask, “Do you have an eleventh marble”, and Germany replies, “Sorry, but the bankers already took the ten marbles they put in our tin can, and we are searching for an eleventh marble ourselves. Try the Americans.” The Americans, of course, have only just surrendered the last of their ten marbles back to the bankers and are looking under seat cushions for that missing eleventh marble nobody seems able to find.
But the eleventh marble will never be found. After all that mayhem brought down on the tin can there still will be no eleventh marble. It does not exist. It never did, and it never will.
The problem with all modern reserve banking systems is that the moment the first bank note goes into circulation as the proceed of a loan at interest, more money is owed to the banks than actually exists. Ten marbles have been put into the tin can, but the bankers see 11 marbles owed back to them. Sooner or later the non-existence of that eleventh marble will create a crises of faith. People will stop believing in the religion called private central banking, and that crisis of faith will bring the system crashing down, as did the Temple of Baal in ancient times when the Syrians saw through the priests’ trickery. This evil magic of creating money out of debt was a fraud all along, as fraudulent and silly as the idea that one can put ten marbles into a tin can, and take out eleven.
In ages to come economists will look back at this failed experiment in debt-based currency, and dump it into the same category of human folly as Tulip mania, The Nation of Poyais, Credit Mobilier, the Great South Seas Company, and Mortgage-Backed Securities.
