In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Mish discuss:
- Raising taxes until morale improves
- Europe's misguided approach to its woes
- Tough medicine for underfunded pensions
- Detroit bankruptcy may be a key precedent
- Manipulation & fraud
- Two things the TBTF banks get away with
- Vacuum of leadership
- A defining crisis of our time
The world is grappling with some enormous problems right now, and the world's current leaders are proving themselves thoroughly incapable of addressing them. This vacuum of leadership is one of the defining themes of our moment in history and adds confidence to the sentiment that our current problems likely won't end well.
In Europe, the solution to the drag higher taxes are placing on sluggish economic growth is…to increase taxes further. This is not unlike the Fed's efforts in the U.S. to solve what is fundamentally a debt crisis by accelerating the buildup of debt.
Meanwhile, the bad actors in the system are getting bigger, bolder, and off scot-free (LIBOR manipulation, perfect trading years, etc.). In fact, since 2008, the "too big to fail/too big to bail" banks have gotten even bigger, while the total number of banks in the U.S. has decreased as the smaller players fold and/or get subsumed. It has truly become a system where the crooks control the policemen.
by jcat3022