![]() As usual, Karl Denninger has the details at the Market Ticker: mortgage scandal is on the verge of entering the next stage, which threatens both the banking industry and the housing market. But just as Roubini has been late on the developing eurodisaster, he’s probably too generous in thinking that it’s going to take five years for nations to begin leaving the Euro.Ĭomplicating matters is the fact that it looks like the U.S. Ireland and Portugal aren’t much better off. Greece’s credit rating was recently reduced to CCC. But now convergence is gone, reform is stalled, while fiscal and political union is a distant dream. ![]() The eurozone was glued together by the convergence of low real interest rates sustaining growth, the hope that reforms could maintain convergence and the prospect of eventual fiscal and political union. Yet scenarios that are treated as inconceivable today may not be so far-fetched five years from now, especially if some of the periphery economies stagnate. Exit would impose big trade losses on the rest of the eurozone, via major real depreciation and capital losses on the creditor core, in much the same way as Argentina’s “pesification” of its dollar debt did during its last crisis. ![]() Of course today the idea of leaving the euro is treated as inconceivable, even in Athens and Lisbon. After all, in all those emerging market financial crises that restored growth a move to flexible exchange rates was necessary and unavoidable on top of official liquidity, austerity and reform and, in some cases, debt restructuring and reduction. So given these three options are unlikely, there is really only one other way to restore competitiveness and growth on the periphery: leave the euro, go back to national currencies and achieve a massive nominal and real depreciation. Nouriel Roubini finally latches onto the fact of the collapsing European currency: The so-called moral argument for free trade to which many Libertarians appeal is not only unjust, overtly anti-American, and anti-Constitutional, it is an important tool in the service of one of the most fundamentally evil concepts in the history of humanity, a centralized international government with global authority. This means that contrary to the way in which equality of opportunity is to be preferred to equality of result, liberty of result is to be preferred to liberty of opportunity.įurthermore, it is no more intrinsically unjust that foreign corporations are forced to pay a tariff in order to sell their wares – or even not be permitted to sell them at all – than foreigners who are not resident in the USA are not permitted to vote for the U.S. It is not desirable that everyone be the same, whereas it is desirable that everyone have the maximal amount of personal freedom. But liberty, unlike equality, is a desired net outcome. There is a difference between liberty of opportunity and liberty of result. What Fletcher is saying without specifically articulating it is a variant on a point I have previously made with regards to abortion and immigration. Anyhow, Fletcher’s casual observation connecting Babel and globalism is one that should give any Christian, libertarian or not, food for thought. But as one prominent libertarian has now seen through the free trade delusion that generally grips his fellow libertarians, this is probably a good time to explain what he got and they didn’t.įollowers? I have followers? And here I thought I merely had Ilk. I’m not qualified to speak to the “Christian” aspects of free trade – whatever those are – beyond observing that globalism, of which free trade is a part, certainly looks like the Tower of Babel. This did not go over well with some of his followers. He followed it up with an article making many of the same points. I recently gave a podcast interview to Vox Day, a prominent Christian libertarian, explaining why free trade is bad for America. Ian Fletcher takes on the free trade Libertarians at WND:
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