Gold News

Too Big to Fail? Oh Yeah...?

How the Eurozone government debt crisis grew...


LET'S LOOK
at how the European debt situation developed, writes Bill Bonner, currently in London, England for The Daily Reckoning.

When Europe brought out the Euro in 2002, it changed everything. All of a sudden, you could lend money to Ireland or Greece without having to worry about the Irish Punt or the Greek Drachma. They were all using the Euro, which was managed by the Germans. So why not lend to one of these peripheral states of Europe and earn a little more interest?

Things began to change fast. Interest rates in Spain and Ireland dropped. People started buying houses. Builders began putting them up all over the place. Prices were going up. It was similar to what happened in the US, but amplified. Ireland, for example, had always been a relatively poor country. But by 2007, rising house prices had turned the Irish – on paper – into the richest people in Europe.

Bust follows boom. Always has, always will. And when the bust came to Europe, its banks were holding a remarkable amount of mortgage debt. The trouble was, debtors didn't have enough income to pay it. In a panic, investors dumped bank stocks...figuring the banks would go bankrupt.

But in stepped governments. They tried to halt the correction. They gave guarantees. They made commitments. The told the world that they would make sure senior lenders got their money. But how? The governments were deeply in debt themselves. But that didn't stop them. They went ahead – to varying degrees – and guaranteed bank debt.

And so here we are. Ireland guarantees its bankers' debt. Europe guarantees Ireland's debt. And who guarantees Europe's debt?

And why do they bother? Why not just let the speculators take their losses?

"There will be no haircut on senior debt," said Olli Rehn, EU commissioner for economic and monetary matters.

They made the decision to invest of their own free will. It's gone against them. Shouldn't they be permitted to learn from their mistakes? Why not?

We have never heard a good explanation. And we have a suspicion that no one else ever has either. Instead, it is more of an implied threat...whispered...too terrible to think about.

"Pssst...They're TOO BIG TO FAIL."

Oh yeah? Why? What, exactly, would happen? Weak banks would fail. They'd be quickly taken over by stronger banks. Government debt that was too closely connected to the weak banks would fail too. Paper currency may even collapse, if people feared "the whole system" was coming down.

Governments may then have to come out with a gold-backed currency – one that people could trust. Then, unable to borrow more, they would have to live within their means. And the surviving banks would know better than to take risks bigger than they could cover.

Would that be so bad?

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New York Times best-selling finance author Bill Bonner founded The Agora, a worldwide community for private researchers and publishers, in 1979. Financial analysts within the group exposed and predicted some of the world's biggest shifts since, starting with the fall of the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s, to the collapse of the Dot Com (2000) and then mortgage finance (2008) bubbles, and the election of President Trump (2016). Sharing his personal thoughts and opinions each day from 1999 in the globally successful Daily Reckoning and then his Diary of a Rogue Economist, Bonner now makes his views and ideas available alongside analysis from a small hand-picked team of specialists through Bonner Private Research.

See full archive of Bill Bonner articles

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