Quote:
Originally Posted by Ethersync
"BRUSSELS ? German Chancellor Angela Merkel has rejected calls for a multibillion-euro bailout plan for eastern European Union member states."
Well, things in Eastern Europe are about to go from really fucking bad to a whole lot worse this week  |
After 50 ye4ars of living under communism it will not be as bad as those in the West. We will suffer but not as bad as people who have only know good times.
We are in this mess because we all lived a dream. We dreamed that if a bank was lending out billions it did not have, selling the debts to other banks and sharing the wealth, while we lent this money to buy houses that were just getting more and more expensive, filling wardrobes with clothes, buying furniture before the old one needed replacing, filling our homes with gadgets and buying the latest car that was designed to last a few years so it would be cheap and consumable. Mostly on credit.
My first wife who has not worked since we split in 1982 has a debt of $10,000. Now what system allows a person who does not work run up a debt of $10,000 and think it's fine?
A system where a bankers bonus is linked to the size of his debt portfolio.
And this is not just individuals and bankers. It's whole countries. Any countries national debt is down to the politicians running the country. They built this debt so we could all feel wealthy and they would get re elected. And we re elected them and told everyone how rich we were because we had a house worth 25% more than we paid for it last year. The truth is it was worth 25% less than we paid for it and if the train hit the buffers we would learn very fast.
As for credit card debt in the Eastern Europe countries. When Czech became independent of the Eastern Block they started giving out credit cards to anyone who asked. Many of these people run up huge debts, relative to their wages, and the banks stopped giving out credit cards. Time were good and they weathered the storm. If banks in countries like Estonia made the same mistake they have only themselves to blame.