The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

There's a big joker waiting to be played in the US economy: the Euro. What if a substantial amount of foreign investment now residing in squishy US equity and debt markets decides over the next year or so to move into Euro-denominated capital markets? I'll tell you what will happen. GAME OVER in the US. Our markets tank and we have ourselves a nice dollar-denominated currency crisis.

Europe is not heaven on earth, and it's seen some nasty action in recent history, but right now the major players over in the Old World are behaving a whole lot saner than we are. In case you haven't noticed, they don't have DiTech 125 percent Dream Loans over in France, Germany, Spain, Holland, and Italy. They haven't hocked their lives on the basis of a home equity bubble. In Europe, someone who is a poor credit risk does not get loans. Their central bank interest rates are not heading down to zero. Ordinary citizens do not buy groceries on their credit cards. They have big corporations, but they haven't destroyed local commerce. They even grow better food for themselves than we do.

Though they have plenty of automobiles in Euroland, the Euroites have not allowed a wholesale trashing of their cities. The excellent condition of their cities, big and small, has left them prepared for the rigors of the 21st century, when the cheap oil era comes to an end. They will have an armature for daily life. Ten years from now, we will be stuck with the dysfunctional suburbanoid clusterfucks of Houston and Atlanta. The Europeans will have habitable, walkable, beautiful places to live and do business without a slavish dependency on cars.