Friday, February 20, 2015

EU Kicks Can on Greek Debt Down the Road -- Again

Eurozone finance ministers demonstrated their continued lack of resolve by kicking the can down the road – again: an agreement has been reached to extend Greece's financial rescue by four months.

This action sends yet another message that Europe (EU) lacks resolve: politically [Ukraine and the Islamist jihad problem] and economically [Greece]. 

The European Central Bank must stop supporting fundamentally flawed and weak economic institutions and let “Grexit” move forward.

Is the ECB afraid letting Greece fall will hasten the unraveling of both the EU and the Euro? Or, could it be the politically-connected are using influence to prevent billions in bond portfolio write-downs?

As Greece and the troubles of other EU economies demonstrate: fiat currencies are a joke. Might it be time to revisit the Gold Standard?  

For those too young to remember: the Gold Standard is a monetary system that fixes the prices of sovereign domestic currencies in terms of a specified amount of gold. Under the gold standard, a government is legally limited as to how much paper money it can print. A bankrupt country lacking hard reserves to back up its paper currency would lose license to print and put into circulation even more worthless currency.

The Gold Standard effectively came to an end last century when Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon severed the formal links between global currencies and hard commodities (to prevent a run on the U.S. dollar).

What institutional holders of sovereign European debt will not acknowledge publicly is that the EU is in a death spiral. How ironic that the Germanic leader Odoacer overthrew  
Romulus, the last of the Western Emperors in the divided Roman Republic, in 476 C.E. Today, too, the fate of the European experiment (EU) lay in the hands of another German, Chancellor Angelica Mercer.

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