Eurozone's debt contagion

Interview of Harvard professor Nail Ferguson. Will Germany-France bail out Greece, Spain and Portugal?

Remember Milton Friedman's prediction --- "Euro can't survive a major crisis." Let's watch and see.





(update 1) Rolfe Winkler writes on Reuters on the same issue. He outlined three possible outcomes.

1) The PIIGS (acronym for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) cut their budgets to pay back debt. Such austerity programs are typically very difficult to get done in democracies. Deficit spending stays high long past the point that it’s possible to work off debt over any reasonable period. To successfully dig out of the hole requires cuts so deep, voters never agree to them.

2) Europe bails them out, which is the easiest solution in the short-run. Richer European countries certainly have the wherewithal to bail out a small country like Greece or Portugal. But it’s a dangerous precedent to set. What about Spain? It’s 14% of the Euro economy compared to 6% for Portugal/Ireland/Greece combined. If economies keep spending with an eye towards a bailout from the ECB, eventually you get #3.

3) The monetary union breaks apart. The customary way out of a debt crisis is to devalue one’s currency, see Argentina in 2001. It couldn’t maintain it’s dollar peg and still service its debt, so it devalued its currency and defaulted on debt. But this locked the country out of the international capital markets and drove them into a deep, though brief, Depression. For Greece to devalue, it would have to pull out of the Euro, pass a law that it’s debts are payable in new local currency and then devalue.

Paulson: the US was very close to financial collapse

Paulson's interview with Bloomberg.

At one point, he talked to his wife, Wendy, on the cell phone, "I am scared...pray for me."

Also watch my previous post on Inside the Meltdown from Frontline.

Ring of Fire

From Bond King, Bill Gross:



(click to enlarge)

The most vulnerable countries in 2010 are shown in the chart “The Ring of Fire.” These red zone countries are ones with the potential for public debt to exceed 90% of GDP within a few years’ time, which would slow GDP by 1% or more. The yellow and green areas are considered to be the most conservative and potentially most solvent, with the potential for higher growth.