Submitted by Mark Grant, author of Out of the Box
A Night At The Opera
Some days it seems like an eternity. Other days it passes in the glimpse of a blinking eye. Most days it ekes out like a sore oozing infection and so the tragedy of Europe continues and lengthens and stretches as moments come and pass and as many await the defining moment where some kind of curtain descends and ends the Act or perhaps the play. This has been the way of it for the past two years but the muddling has become bumbling and the depth of the sorrow deepens and the possibility of escape is now all but impossible.
“One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.”
-Gioachino Rossini
The amount of capital being used and the ability of anyone to pay for what now must be paid or, if not, what cannot be paid is now like an anchor firmly strapped to the neck of the beast and the stumbling increases with the weight. Promises of a 120% debt to GDP ratio for Greece, grand visions of firewalls meant to protect the Continent and fervent and constant reassurances that this firewall would protect both Spain and Italy at a minimum now decry hopes and prayers that, in time, proved to be lies and deceptions. The debt to GDP ratios for Europe, never real but a manipulated formula for disaster are proving to be just that as contingent liabilities become present tense liabilities and as double and triple counted assets remain what they always were; pledges to fund that were never funded but now the promissory notes are coming due.
Promised pension cuts in Portugal were just declared unconstitutional and promised funding for the ESM may be declared unconstitutional by the German Constitutional court. Pleas for immediacy on an ESM decision were just rejected in Germany and it is likely ninety days before a ruling is declared. In the meantime the one Stabilization Fund in existence is a scant $65 billion from its outer limit and the refusal by Berlin to cough up more money resonates down the court hallways of Brussels. The echoes are becoming louder, hallower and the effects on the markets less pronounced. Believers are streaming from congregation and the remaining parishioners are quickly losing faith that the prophecies will come to pass. It is rather like a secular religion disappearing as the people once wooed by the words of the Evangelical Minister are not credible enough any longer to provide the hope for an entrance to Heaven or to deter them from turning towards Hell. Europe has entered Purgatory at the end of a long road to perdition and those willing to tithe to support the scheme are declining so that the offering plates passed around, once full, now only have enough to fill a small saucer and the church improvements can no longer be funded.
“Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, I hear them all at once.”
-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
It is the ring of the auction house; “Going, Going Gone” as the final bang of the auctioneer’s gavel is about to fall. It is the awful sound of the woosh of the guillotine manned by the Lord High Executioner that will fall upon ears and eyes wide open. It will be the final night of a failed play and the melodrama of the Operatic tragedy that will be documented in history books and perhaps recorded in some literary masterpiece that is yet to be written.
The economic conditions in Europe are deteriorating with an alarming speed and the affects, coming to the United States in this quarter, will be worse for the balance of the year. It is to be recession there, recession here and some measly cup of porridge for all. Those expecting Prime Rib for dinner are about to be disappointed as it will be gruel and the Petrus wine of last year will be Annie Greensprings poured from a plastic box.
“As to the play itself, I will only add that it is offensive in its morals, corrupt in its teaching, and revolting in its brutality, and yet everyone who admires acting is bound to see it.”
-Cecile Howard writing about La Tosca