Off The Cuff: Planning to Plan for the Plan

In this week’s Off the Cuff with Mish & Chris podcast, Chris and Mish debate:

• Rescuing Europe
  • There seems little reason to have optimism that the latest announcement of a plan to save the Continent will be any more fruitful than the many previous ones. A better question is: Can Europe be saved?
• Fuzzy numbers
  • Reports of Cyber Monday record sales and lowering unemployment are in the media. Time to break out the champagne?

The leaders of Europe are showing Herculean talent in kicking the can further down the road. The key question now is when does the road end?
The whole European situation is a mess at this point. For all the jawboning, very little progress has been made, and the options left are extremely limited. 

It is still unknown who is going to take the losses on the huge amounts of unserviceable debt currently out there. Unfortunately, it continues to look like the taxpayers will — at least up until the point when they revolt and tell the banks to shove it (a la Iceland).

Add to this a slowing global economy — there is an interesting related exploration between Chris and Mish that the price of oil is now the new Fed funds rate — and a manageable solution just seems fictional at this stage.