Well now, we have just found out that that nice young Dutchman with the fuzzy hair and the even fuzzier brain is not only not experienced but not even a real economist at all. Mr Dijsellbloem has specialised in some kind of agrarian economics and is in fact a pig farmer. I suppose the nice gentleman in the wheel chair who is undisputedly top of the class thought this was apt.
Anyhow, we have all these technocrats busily crunching the numbers, totally distanced from anything going on in the real world, imagining that the PIIGS are really what pork comes from rather than just a nasty abbreviation, in their ingenious attempts to “save” the countries of the Eurozone and the Euro.
However the more they go about “saving ” us in this disingenuous manner, the less “saved” we become. This has all now reached a point when it looks as though not only we, the pigs the farmer has come to set straight, but the Euro itself is teetering on the brink.
So the number crunchers keep crunching and every time they have crunched them enough to come up with a wizard idea like the infamous haircut of the Greek bonds or the even more infamous haircut of deposits in Cyprus, whereby a deposit is no longer a deposit but an investment….!!!!
They fail to examine any of the possible repercussions of their brilliant ideas which are usually nothing more than the result of puerile arithmetical sums. Such as, if we raise VAT from 19% say to 23%, then we shall increase revenue from VAT by 4%!
Herr Schauble may well be top of his kindergarten class, but he has no idea of strange complex things like the multiplier effect or elasticity of demand. Let alone how complex a real capitalist economy is. All he knows is that if I have three sweeties and take away two, I will be left with one! And he is so delighted that he can work that one out as to preen himself on being top of the class!
So when the crunch finally comes, and it does look closer than ever now, all these number crunchers will throw up their arms in despair since they never realised that all their number crunching would lead to would be the inevitable crunch, and despair. Leaving it to people of the real world to clear up the horrendous mess they have made. While they conveniently disappear into tax havens throughout the world!