Euro Zone Debt Crisis

I think this picture says a lot about what is being discussed in the main stream media about the Euro Zone Crisis. High Debt to GDP is only an issue when the GDP is not growing fast enough to pay for the Debt. IMHO, that should be the discussion and not the level of debt. The second important point and I think this is more relevant that anything else is how are we going to grow the GDP? Iceland did it by devaluing their currency. How is Greece going to increase its competitiveness in the global market place? There is no short term answer, GDP growth always takes time to implement and structurally change the economy. It took India 12 to 15 years to get GDP growth at a rate that would make an impact in the economy and it took China over 25 years to attain the rate of growth of around 10%. If the political machine in Europe can implement policies that would get Europe to grow at 3 to 5% again the crisis can be averted. Of course there is going to be hick ups in the short term, it depends a lot of how bad of a hick up we have or a major heart attack. I am certain the policy decision of ECB is very important, they need to cut the interest rates to make the Euro economies to grow again and also stand behind supporting the confidence in the market. Failure to achieve either of those things we are going to have a deep and severe recession in the Euro Zone and the above Debt to GDP ratio is going to get worse.

Taleb goes to Congressional committee hearing

Image via Wikipedia

Nicholas Nassim Taleb discussing the Financial Crisis causes and solutions with the US Congress. His advice is quite simple:

1. De-leverage the system
2. Stop transferring debt from private sector to public sector through bailouts
3. Do not do deficit spending i.e. Stop printing money
4. Reduce the size of banks, have many banks and remove the Too Big To Fail syndrome
5. Do not pass laws thinking you understand or stop Risks to the system, because we don't understand Risk as we live in a Complex world. Putting rules to stop bad behavior in this complex world is naive thinking.

I agree with Mr.Taleb...

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