Skip to main content

Indebtedness

The drama that is unfolding in Greece is an exemplar of that cliche, 'a slow motion train wreck'.

Everyone 'knows' that a sovereign default is high likely but everyone is in denial.

As you push back the likely default, it both becomes more likely and its consequences become more awful to contemplate; thus, you push it further back, trapped in a vicious circle or, more likely, a downwards spiral.

I have every sympathy with the protesters at one level - this is not a crisis directly of their own making. The political class of all persuasions has conspired to have Greece live beyond it means and with entry to the euro make it less possible to escape the consequences through devaluation.

But at another level methinks they protest too much - anyone who knows Greece knows the collective collusion of a bloated state and a tax evading public. If the British sin has been easy but expensive credit and a mass religion of shopping, Greece's has been imagining that you can be employed by the public sector while somebody else is not paying for it (unless maybe it is an EU subsidy).

Meanwhile, at a meta-level, virtually nothing has been done to mend our financial architecture to either resolve our current difficulties or prevent future crises.

I am all in favour of pumping money into the system (if invested in the right places, as Keynes, noted to generate future revenues) rather than imagining that you can cut yourself out of a deficit (as if a government budget behaved like a household one). But at the same time you have to change the architecture of finance - making it, once again, as boring as a utility for making and doing things in a real economy (rather than speculating on itself).

At the moment, we appear to be pumping money in one end and taking it out at the other - like pumping up a punctured tyre without  ever repairing it and wondering why everything remains precarious!

If ever there was a time for political leadership this was it but we appear to have abdicated to the unfathomable mysteries of 'the market' (not apparently realizing that it is something made by human hands) served by that strange priesthood called 'economists' whose language has the coherence of the failed builders of Babel!

Comments

  1. First time I've actually read your blog Nicholas. Intelligent work. Enjoyable to read. I'll start paying more attention. cjr

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev