OPINION - The return of starvation in Greece

By John Ward (The Slog) - Clive of Bridport (who sounds a lot nicer than Clive of India) writes to Sloggers’ Roost with this gem: Bloomberg: – “We’re still in a world where investors are starved of return,” said John Wraith, a fixed-income strategist at Bank of America Corp. in London. “People are still happy to diversify their holdings and buy bonds that not so long ago they would have shied away from. The slightly better data helps reassure people that finally some of these weaker countries are turning a corner.”

The illogic of ‘slightly better data’ in bankrupt countries ‘netting’ the appalling data from once-rich countries now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy is, of course, the hilariously tragic joke in that observation. But Mr Wraith has at last stumbled upon an observation made in these columns early in 2013: that if you take away income on investments, interest on savings, commodities obeying fundamentals, welfare, and various forms of trust in all the markets, then

(a) the only things left to invest in are the stock market and property – so you get bubbles in both; and

(b) no economy can grow, because the high pdi is restricted to the rich 3%. And they can only consume so much.

Regardless of one’s economic school, that is ineluctable logic accessible to the average five year old…and its conclusion has indeed proved to be the case. Yet somehow, nobody put their hand up.

Economists looking back later with 20-20 hindsight will argue forever as to whether that was the plan all along, or whether it was yet another example of the super-brights’ conviction that they can skip Page One as beneath them. I think it was probably both, but nobody will ever know for sure.

Meanwhile, in Greece the selling, slashing and promise-breaking of the Samaras government and its international dog handlers continues. The Kafenion emails me to confirm the ‘decision’ to sell Greek beaches (a right the government doesn’t have under the Constitution), Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ coalition government is going ahead with more cuts to already-devastated pensions, and is to cut auxiliary and main benefits to keep the Troika happy… thus applying a sledgehammer to the brittle promise this Kalamatian olive-stone brained idiot made to the People last year.

It makes me very sad to admit to this, but while some of us are still at it, little or no return will come from further blogging about the Greek obscenity. It was always going to be the Neoliberals’ 1936 Spanish Civil War: they have dropped all their bombs and tried out all their chemicals, and nobody further West or East has batted an eyelid. “Ergo sum,” they say to themselves, “We can do what we like when we like, just so long as we provide lots of celeb mags with tits, show trials of the innocent, and TV suggesting that even a third-rate mollusc can Make It Big and Be a Star”.

They’re wrong, mind you. And that’s why it will get very nasty indeed… eventually.