Apropos my post below, Niall Ferguson at Huffington Post:
The harsh reality that is being repressed is this: the Western world is suffering a crisis of excessive indebtedness. Many governments are too highly leveraged, as are many corporations. More importantly, households are groaning under unprecedented debt burdens. Average household sector debt has reached 141 per cent of disposable income in the United States and 177 per cent in the United Kingdom. Worst of all are the banks. Some of the best-known names in American and European finance have balance sheets forty, sixty or even a hundred times the size of their capital. Average U.S. investment bank leverage was above 25 to 1 at the end of 2008. Eurozone bank leverage was more than 30 to 1. British bank balance sheets are equal to a staggering 440 per cent of gross domestic product
The delusion that a crisis of excess debt can be solved by creating more debt is at the heart of the Great Repression. Yet that is precisely what most governments currently propose to do.
It really does begger belief that we have a president and a pliant Congress (or is that a Congress and a pliant president?) who eagerly wish to pass perhaps the most foolish bill in our nation's history. Already drowning it debt, only a fool believes the solution is more debt. But this we will do, our South Dakota Democrats in Congress will vote for it, they will come back to South Dakota and tell us of all the federal money they got placed in this massive debt bill, and then we will re-elect them. After all, who gives a crap if we are bankrupting our children? We want money and our elected officials want votes. Who has time for discipline?
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