Explaining, In Simple Terms, What The Eurozone Debt Crisis Is Really All About

Ben Delicious writes from Brussels: Don’t you just love the way politicians and money men explain how the debt crisis in the Eurozone came to be, insisting that it’s all about ‘ordinary’ people getting used to living beyond their means and governments ‘forced’ to borrow to finance welfare and the public sector.

I especially like to hear ‘horrific’ stories about pensioners leading a life of luxury and public sector workers, including teachers and nurses and firemen, rolling in dough. And now, the slimy politicians and bankers, who are all underpaid and undervalued, if you listen to them, are saying that the taxpayers should pay for years of excess and extravagance that ordinary people were enjoying. And, what’s even more amazing, the masses, many of whom have had their brains turn to jelly as a result of watching all that trash on the box every day and eating junk food and drinking cheap booze, actually fall for all that appalling bulls..t. Yes, sure, they say, we did overspend on that flat screen telly and went on a package holiday twice a year.

Wake up, you morons! Quit watching all that crap on the box and start getting your brains in order. You’re being taken for a ride and forced to pay for the corrupt practices of lenders and the failures of politicians. The current debt crisis in Europe has nothing to with excesses of the ordinary folk. It all has to do with the greed of banks that have effectively become loan sharks in the past thirty years or so, making their profits from inflated charges and interest rates on their loans. (So that you know, a credit card is a loan as well and if you check your APR on it you will find that it is twenty, thirty or even a hundred times higher than the basic rate of interest.)

Let me tell you how banks use taxpayers’ money to make a quick buck. They take soft, very soft loans from their respective governments and then lend out the money for extortionate rates. So in effect the very people, who are struggling under the burden of their debts, are actually funding the very loan sharks who are making their life hell.

But how come the debt crisis came to be, you might wonder. Very simple: the banks have been giving out money to people they knew would not be able to repay their loans in their lifetime, forced to re-mortgage endlessly or take other loans secured on their properties. The interest on those secondary loans was much higher than on the initial mortgage creating a time bomb that had to blow up at some point. That so-called subprime mortgage market in America that has supposedly triggered the financial crash in 2008 had collapsed because the debt burden simply became too much for hundreds of thousands of people. And for the banks to pretend that they had nothing to do with it is just perverse. Not to mention that the they, the banks that is, figured out that the situation was getting out of hand they simply wrapped up their toxic debts in fancy wrapping paper and sold it off to others as ‘financial products’.  Was it illegal? It sure was, but now we hear that it was all about the free market and people making their choices themselves. What a load of bollocks!

Politicians were and still are in one boat on this with bankers. They were giving them the money in the first place, practically for nothing, to then lend from them at extortionate rates. It was bound to explode at some point – and it did. The nationals debts grew to astronomical levels and budget deficits became a norm. That is why until the people at the top, who presided over the financial crash, and their friends in the banks are not replaced nothing would change for the better.

But this charade will continue for as long as the people are buying all those stupid explanations and obediently subsidise the money men. Until it all explodes in everyone’s face.

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