The major economic and governmental problems we have, center on constant wealth transfer that rewards the incompetent at the expense of the competent and the forced leverage syncronized between banking and government that are the tools that accomplish the job - otherwise known as Fractional Reserve Lending and the Debt Money system.
Whether a person as an individual, or a government as an entity, can legitimately fulfill their obligations is not relevant to people looking to become recipients of their defaulted assets - nor are the attempts to obfuscate the issues and delude the masses. Benanke did not once apologize for cheerleading the Real Estate market all the way down...clearly his agenda was more important than that.
Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Iceland never had a place being considered for a homogenized unit and debt based constitution called the Euro. The presumption that they ever could be forced to maintain compliance and establish economic and constitutional equilibrium was and still is a pipe dream by people attempting to unify finance and governance. This video of Herman Van Rompuy is really a sad commentary on our times. (listen to the quotes at 1 minute and 45 seconds in the video)
"We are in a period of anxiety, uncertainty and lack of confidence. Yet these problems can be overcome by a joint effort in and between our countries. 2009 is the first year of global governance and the climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet. Our mission, our presidency is one of hope supported by acts and by deeds." - Herman Van Rompuy
After you hear this crap, it rather looks like the hope means "hope for the few" and the "anxiety, uncertainty and lack of confidence" of which they speak are the reasons that they have hope. The crisis that the world is in is not surprise. It has been engineered via regulated and legislated theft and fraud. When I worked at JPMorgan, it was clear that the financial engineering and leverage allowed and encouraged explicitly at the behest of the Fed was being used as a mechanism to scale up and grow our financial system and obfuscate its risks and frailties. This was accomplished via critical accomodative regulatory and legislative efforts and achievments. This leverage was explicitly encouraged, endorsed and allowed.
The result was that a few people have most of the wealth and the remaining people are struggling to cope with the results of their losses. Anxiety, uncertainty and lack of confidence are great tools if you are a banker - especially a pathological central banker who wants to pretend and is determined not to see a housing, debt or derivative bubble even when it's right in front of his eyes.
