Where I'm an avid follower of Shaun Richard's excellent blog on Mindful Money, his brilliant, non political, analysis of current financial affairs is unique on the web. The understanding for Mr Average is much better from his free blog and this contribution to society, he is being recognized for this where he recently appeared on Geff Randells program on Sky news. I regularly link to it on this the OOF website when it is topical to do so, and I'm a regular contributor to the comments section on his blog.

The reason this is currently the hobby I spend the most time on at the moment is the current economic situation, is a global war that affects all of us including me, it is the equivalent of WWII without bombs, shells and bullets (yet), so those that ignore it and say it is not my cup of tea, be careful as it might creap up on you and bite you hard on the butt. Remember the smart informed Jews left Germany before the holocaust.

Greece should have defaulted with a haircut when the economic crisis first hit her. Greece is currently in an austerity based economic death spiral. The current situation is like somebody with crippling credit card debts, they can no longer afford the mortgage, food or heating, so they agree to cut down on these to below subsistence level on the basis that they will be given a new credit card, to use to pay the interest on the debts on the credit cards they already have. We all know this is madness. So why are the Greeks doing this, they are sold the political leader propaganda (to save the politicians skins for April elections) that all of the alternatives are much worse, like we were in 1991 by the fools Major and Larmont. Once their lies were exposed by the markets, once black Wednesday hit and according to their rhetoric, we were now going to suffer from an economic black plague, guess what, the UK economy went from recession, to a golden era of tremendous growth (to be killed from 1997 onwards by the grinning hyena Blair and the fool Brown). But, the Tories will not gain absolute power for at least 20 years (a generation because of their mismanagement of the economy, and on that basis quite rightly so, unfortunately the alternatives were even worse with the fools Blair and Brown). Greece need to do the same by defaulting, there is no other sensible alternative.
Back to Greece, the sh*t Sarkozy is up for election in April / May and Merkel has backed him and is interfering in France's internal affairs (a democratic disgrace) as the alternatives, do not fit Germany's agenda, the other two major contenders are an anti-Eu Marie Le Pen or a very left wing tw*t who's name I can't remember, so part of trying to increase his chances of reelection are to kick the Greek can down the road, and avoid a potential Greek default creating devastating French bank losses and requiring a bailout. Frau Angela is up for election in November, now if Greece goes belly up, she will have to bail out several German banks, but much worse, the losses by the ECB from buying Greece bonds and the recent bank liquidity funding on which they will have accepted much junk collateral and Germany is the biggest guarantor, so Germany's tax payers will have to make good the losses, this will kill Merkel's reelections chances, so again the Greek can need to be kicked down the road past November.
So what about the Greek people's suffering, Mekel is very sympathetic in a Miss Whiplash way, with platitudes like: "tough sh*t", "you created it you solve it", "do what we tell you to or else". We all know the sh*t poodle Sarkosy will give his absolute support by having a dump on a Greek front lawn! With friends like these who needs enemies.
