[Info-vax] HP stopping VMS paper documentation ?

[John Wallace]

On Dec 1, 9:48 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
> > Do tell us how to "bring jobs back to the USA".  I was under the
> > impression that American workers expected to be paid two to five times
> > as much as foreign workers!
>
> Workers will need to accept lower paying jobs and lower standard of
> living. But that is still better than being unemployed.
>
> There is no magical solution to job creation. The problem I see is that
> govt spending is just a short term boost to prevent a crisis, it does
> not solve the unemployment problem.
>
> The idea of stimulus spending to give the economy a quick short term
> boost is fine. The problem is that unemployment isn't a temporary
> problem, it is a structural problem with so many jobs having shifted to
> asia. And it won't be solved by a quick stimulus spending.
>
> And if you keep on saying "we need to spend this year to help the
> unemployed, we'll deal with the debt later", you will be saying this
> every year because the unemploymebt problem isn't going to go away, so
> you end up never dealing with the debt and it gets to an uncontrollable
> point.
>
> This is what happened in Greece.
>
> If an individual leaves above his means, the second he missed a mortgage
> payments, the banks pounce in and seize his assets and destroy his life.
>
> But countries don't get treated this way, they get offered more loans in
> order to help pay back previous loans that they can't afford to pay. But
> eventually, this white gloves treatment comes to an end and all hell
> breaks loose.

Individuals don't normally get to pay Goldman Sachs a fortune to make
their previously poor credit rating look good even though nothing much
has actually changed. But that's what happened with Greece.

If a bank lends to an individual (or a business extends credit to a
customer, which is very similar conceptually) despite the recipient
not really being creditworthy, and the recipient goes bankrupt or
otherwise can't pay up on time, the bankers don't expect to be bailed
out by the taxpayer; the bankers simply pass the costs on to their
other customers.

The bankers lent massive amounts to Greece (etc) despite Greece not
really being creditworthy (thank you Goldman Sachs).

For some reason the bankers in recent years seem to think that the
taxpayer should bail them out. I don't remember the taxpayer agreeing
to that, do you? I do remember being told every few months for the
last few years "just one more round of bailouts and all will be
OK" (those may not have been the words but they were certainly the
underlying claim).

The taxpaying public are not bailing Greece out (or Ireland, or
Italy), they're not bailing out Greek people (or Irish or Italian),
rhey're bailing out the financial institutions that were quite happy
to lend massive quantities of money (and consequently award themselves
massive bonuses long before the loans were paid back) to countries
with little chance of paying it back in full.

Countries are offered more loans (that they still can't pay back) in
order to minimise the chance of people spotting that the bankers lent
too much and it isn't going to be paid back anything like in full,
ever, and in the hope that a miracle might one day occur and the loan
will get paid back, or by a different miracle the taxpayers are fooled
into bailing out the banks yet again.

There's a writeup of this based on BBC Radio 4's numbers programme
called More or Less from a few weeks ago:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio4/2011/09/more_or_less_debt_-_a_european.html

As David Cameron (one of the twenty odd millionaires in the UK's
Cabinet) says, "we're all in this together".

But I don't think he and his mates will be facing too much austerity
for a while. Do you?