Tuesday, October 18, 2011

When Charly gets back to France, the credit rating goes south

Like clockwork. Same thing happened to Italy, when Rot went there. Perfect correlation.
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7 comments:

Mr roT said...

Tecs explains everything, real deep-like.

10/18/2011 12:33 PM
Tecumseh said...

I'm waiting with bated breath for a deeper explanation from you and Charly.

10/18/2011 12:36 PM
Tecumseh said...

What's to explain? ObamaCare Lite. End of story.

Your turn.

10/18/2011 1:50 PM
Charly said...

credit is for americans who can't control their spending. I don't have that gringo bone in me.

10/18/2011 4:10 PM
Tecumseh said...

The title of the post talks about "credit rating", which pertains to the rating of the sovereign debt of France, not the individual rating of your credit card debt or something. And that rating is going down, while the interest the French government needs to pay in order to issue bonds is going up (the largest spread now with German bunds since the inception of the Euro, at least).

You may or not care about that (normally, only people who have some degree of sophistication regarding financial affairs follow such stories), but this is bound to have repercussions in day-to-day life in France, I will venture as a conjecture.

10/18/2011 4:32 PM
Charly said...

You expected a serious answer ? Since any response, semi-cogent or completely idiotic, that doesn't go in the direction of ultra-conservative dogma is invariably met with a deluge of scorn I'll stick to idiotic: it comes more naturally to me and is in symbiosis with the ambient air.

Yeah, the entirely of tax on revenue is now servicing the debt which is around 85% of the PIB if memory serves. But this is the result of bad management from generations of incompetent and cliquish administrators from the ENA who have monopolized public service and aren't truly accountable. Actually, if there exists a French word for 'accountable', I don't know what it is. In the absence of vocabulary, the concept doesn't even exist.

Sometimes I miss Robespierre.

10/19/2011 10:22 AM
Tecumseh said...

Blaming it all on corrupt and/or incompetent administrators or politicians is a popular pastime, from Greece to Italy to Spain to France to the US to pretty much everywhere on Earth. And, of course, there is always a kernel (or a coconut) of truth in that -- it's human nature, after all, for people once in power to abuse it or to mess things up. It's been going on since Egypt and Greece and Rome, and it will be with us till hell freezes over.

That said, it's equally true that all these bureaucrats or whatever are ultimately selected by the people or the system or whatever. They are a product of the society in which they live. In turn, many (not all, but typically, more than a tiny minority) in said society enjoy the fruits of that venality or incompetence, and wallow in it while the going is good, as in "Elect the crook", or "Laissez les bons temps rouler", to take a Louisiana random example. Or look at Chicago as a pretty extreme example in the US -- or Greece in Europe.

So, I don't much buy all that talk of conspiracy, or blame-it-all-on-1%-of-those-knaves, and assorted idiocies of that sort. When countries go downhill (like the Roman Empire once did), it's typically a societal thing dragging it down, not just a few knaves pulling it down. Of course, a single man (such as Hitler) can have an enormous impact in screwing up a country, but ultimately, it takes a significant proportion of society to do it.

And you don't save a country by bringing a sociopathic killer maniac like Robespierre. The only chance to reverse a downward spiral is through patient, hard work. Like, for instance, the US and Western Europe did in tandem just after WWII to pull a devastated continent out of its misery, and on to prosperity.

I don't see anything of this sort happening right now.

10/19/2011 11:09 AM

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