Monday, November 7, 2011

Greece: Financial disaster or hidden opportunity?

In japanese, the word crisis (危機=kiki) is made of two different letters: 危=”danger” & 機=”opportunity”.
I know that most of you have heard about this before but with the tale I'm going to tell you now you probably will see the crisis with other eyes.

In a normal afternoon, between caffee and cupcakes, a smart physicist (The Father-in-law) shared with his son-in-law his view of the states-debt-crisis, focus on the case of Greece.

He appointed that the European Central Bank should print money to repaid the debts of Greece.
I've heard this point of view millions of times but he went much more precisely than the people (most of them are renamed economists) talking about that on TV.

He made the figures about the amount of debt that Greece and other countries like Spain and discovered that the total amount of debt in Europe is just like the 20-30% of the total assets. So he suggested to print a certain amount of money per person. Imagine that each person is given 10,000 € so we're printing 3,000,000,000,000 € for all the European population. Spain will receive about 470,000 million € which must use to pay the 600,000 million € debt it has.

In the case of Spain, we almost pay the debts. For other countries the amount received is enough to pay the debts and also to keep money and invest it on building bridges, roads, railways or any other kind of investment that could help to create employment.

Where's the trick? An increase in the quantity of money is linked to an increase in the inflation rate and into a depreciation of the Euro against other currencies like the US Dollar. 
So, in the one hand, we'll have to pay more for our goods and even much more for those goods which are imported but on the other hand, this situation makes the european products cheaper to compit in the world so it's easy for us to sell our products abroad.

The big problem is that if we print money to pay our debts we lose our international credibility.
Who will certify to the markets that we're not going to do it again in a future? Who is going to save money instead of spend it if we save them each time they do the things wrong? Who is going to teach us that we cannot play with international economics and get free of all the stuff?

Now think about it: Credibility... I think we lost it long time ago.

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