Yesterday we had a bit of fun with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and how well this lovely story described the realities of how Europe works (or doesn’t work rather.) And before the ink could dry (as it were) the Troika and our dear weary old friend Jean Claude Juncker struck again with even more of their discredited nonsense pronouncements!
This time it was back to the old theme of what Greece’s Debt to GDP ratio will be in 2020. They just can’t let go of that one! They simply love it! Even though everybody knows it is utter nonsense to try to predict such a ratio over such a long time span. Even the German Magazine Der Spiegel screamed out as much, adding it would be impossible to predict Germany’s Debt to GDP ratio for 2020 let alone that of an economy such as Greece’s!
But oh no. Juncker and the troika know better. They had the sheer audacity to state in an official report at that too, that now, after the partial default on her loans, Greece is expected to achieve a Debt to GDP ratio of 116.5% by 2020. Note the precision of point five! And this may be sustainable PROVIDED Greece sticks firmly to the policies imposed on her by the Troika till 2030. Okay. Great. Forward planning. And… yes, more arrant BS from people who not just should know better but DO know better. No way that they don’t.
So why the continual BSing? Let alone the obvious which I cannot help state again and again, that since the Troika’s policy has achieved an average annual recession of 6% so far, then by 2020 we will have lost something like 70% of our GDP and by 2030, we will have less than no GDP. So why do they insist on all this arrant nonsense and with such precision in official reports?
Well, the precision and official reports are merely used to try and convince everybody (perhaps including themselves) that they really do know what they are talking about, that it has been studiously calculated, and that people of lower intelligence and less knowledgeable than themselves should believe them because they really do know better.
But why insist on these idiotic forecasts? As Chrys, a reader of this blog, has pointed out, these predictions are about as valid as a meteorologist predicting what the weather will be like day by day through 2020.
So why? Well, I cannot believe that they do not know they are spewing out arrant nonsense. In fact this is precisely why they use the precision of figures with a fraction added. My guess (and it can only be a guess) is that they are in a panic. Nothing is working in the way they had imagined. Even Germany is failing on her austerity program not even managing to achieve more than a mere 42% of planned cuts.
The whole of Europe is being plunged into recession. The proven way of getting out of such messes is being outlawed by The Frau. So in my opinion, it boils down to panic and ideology. A lethal combination. People don’t matter, it’s the banks that must be saved. The welfare state is a very bad thing and must be scrapped. Wages must be rock bottom because we must have profits. In other words the orthodoxy of Chicago School Free Market Economics, with a bit of the German need to punish those who dare disagree with her, added to spice the recipe up.
Now the trouble is, as happens with all religions and this is just another set of religious beliefs, you can’t just say, whoops! Sorry! We got it wrong! No. You can never admit you are wrong! You have to keep pounding at it, insisting you are right even though everything is going wrong. Anything else is heresy and heretics must be burned at the stake.
No wonder they are in such a panic! And as for Jean Claude Juncker… why doesn’t he (along with all the rest of these bigots from The Frau down) just go home quietly instead of spewing out inanities at every juncture. They don’t even have to admit they made a God awful mess of everything. Just disappear the lot of you and we will find it in our hearts to forgive you.
But GO!