The greatest president of Argentina was Ramon Puerta, who's first act on the job was to resign. Why bring this up now? The situation which brought him to power for twenty minutes is looking strangely similar to what's going on here today....
More after the fold...
It's one of those things that would have been hilarious if it happened in a movie, but was horrifying in real life. 26 people died during the riots in December 2001, but the sight of five presidents in ten days was strangely silly.
The whole mess was the result of some of a combination of corruption and incompetence by each and every civilian government since the Military regime was kicked out after the Falklands war. There was 20% unemployment, the deficit was huge, and IMF and World Bank were refusing to give Argentina any more money.
There was a run on the banks, and earlier in the year, the vice president had resigned in disgrace.
Now what has this to do with anything? Well, Federal Reserve and the Treasury department are going to bail out a number of investment banks, and thousands of lenders are hoping that the Government will buy up all their bad paper. How will the government pay for this?
There's going to be an auction of Federal bonds next week, and the Fed is threatening to print billions of extra dollars in order to finance the crisis. This is inflationary. Prices may go up like they have in some other countries, like...Argentina.
There are people who make a living in some South American countries by selling old coins and notes. Theives leave them alone because, they're worth nothing. Should familiar? There are 'humorous' commercials about this sort of thing. People bitch about $12 movie tickets and five dollar lattés all the time. How about $20 lattés and $50 movie tickets.
That's the real issue here. The World Bank and the IMF cannot bail out the US because it would destroy both.
How are we going to go about servicing the debt, which is almost 20% of the budget now, if we get another trillion or two worth of the stuff. At least without violating the constitution and subjecting the Western world to a depression unseen since the 1930s here and the post war era in Europe.
It's a puzzlement.