Off The Cuff: Spinning Apart

In this week's Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and John Rubio discuss:

• Worrisome Weightlessness
  • It feels like the moment before everything heads South
• Spinning Apart
  • Europe and Asia are hurdling towards crisis as their economies falter
• Ridiculous Markets
  • There's no precedent, nor any sanity, to guide us right now
• Bankrupt Policies
  • Our policy responses have already failed. It's just no one wants to admit it.

John Rubino returns this week to address the macro view with Chris. It isn't pretty; which he nails pithily with this summary:

If Spain is going to split apart, which one-fifth of Spain’s GDP now wants to, then that will be chaotic. Spain is a much bigger economy than Portugal. So where Greece could have been tolerated as a country leaving the Euro Zone, they could have papered that over. They can’t fix it if Spain leaves. You know that’s the basically the end of the Euro Zone because then Italy has to follow and everything spins apart. So we have a year or two of chaos kind of backed in the cake and it just goes on and one.

You know China’s economy is slowing down dramatically because they borrowed so much money in the last five years and they’re terrified of political unrest because they’ve seen it in living memory.