The Automatic Earth

“Pie eating contest, Jefferson school, 8/2/23.” Still more pie-eating in Washingon, D.C. National Photo Company Collection glass negative We all know Einstein’s definition of Insanity – “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time”. And more than a few people have applied that to the Eurozone sovereign debt debacle. Case in point – Greece and Spain. It didn’t take more than a single day for the EU officials visiting Greece to figured out

German magazine Der Spiegel dropped a bombshell this morning in an article which is for now available only in German. My German is quite decent. Here's the original and my translation: IWF will Griechenland-Hilfen stoppen (IMF wants to stop Greek help) Griechenland könnte schon im September pleitegehen. Der Internationale Währungsfonds hat nach Informationen des SPIEGEL der Brüsseler EU-Spitze signalisiert, dass er sich nicht an weiteren Hilfen für das Land beteiligen werde. Greece could go bankrupt as early as September. Spiegel

After Jared Loughner opened fire on group of people in an Arizona grocery store early last year, apparently targeting Congreswoman Gabrielle Giffords, I wrote a post called "The Lunatic is in my Head". It questioned the mainstream narrative that we were fed about Loughner being a paranoid schizophrenic who had simply gone untreated for too long, and suddenly snapped. Let me be clear – in my opinion, whether Loughner was a "lunatic" or not is irrelevant to whether he should

Harris & Ewing Hot Air 1938 "Goodyear Blimp at Washington Air Post, Washington, D.C." Jeff Rubin, former chief economist with Canadian bank CIBC, is very well known for his predictions of exponentially increasing oil prices (see for instance this 2009 lecture). Mr Rubin’s position was that prices would continue their rise due to a confluence of circumstances – that conventional supplies have peaked, that unconventional sources are expensive to produce and that demand would continue to grow with the energy

I’m always surprised by the common argument that central authorities will “not allow defaults to occur”, as if a) they have a clear-cut choice in the matter and b) those defaults haven’t ALREADY occurred. Obviously, this threat is the most acute at the so-called “sovereign” level in the Eurozone, in which countries are inextricably wedded to each other in unholy monetary matrimony. Greece has already defaulted on its obligations to private creditors, while the so-called “autonomous” regions of Spain are