STUMP » Articles » Public Finance Disaster Watch: Greece and Puerto Rico Lunchtime Roundup » 30 June 2015, 13:25

(Don’t worry, I will be getting back to Chicago soon enough.)

I’ve got a back up of good links, so I will list the stories below:

GREECE

Pulling what I’ve been looking at today at lunch:

• The Moral of the Greek Story – Megan McArdle
• Megan McArdle’s article on the impending Grexit from December 2009, so she beats my coverage from this morning’s post.
• Greece Rejects 25th Hour Request to Change Course; Tsipras Asks Eurozone for Third Bailout; Rajoy Seeks to Save His Own Ass – from Mish
• Not everybody saw this coming – via Powerline
• Greece: A Financial Zombie State
• George Will stating A Greek Default Would Be a Valuable Lesson in Basic Economics
• Twitchy covers a dumb headline from the NYT: “Trillions Spent, but Crises Like Greece’s Persist”

….Uh.

I want to comment a little on the supposed cluelessness of the retired Greek public ex-employee, the NYTimes, and everybody else who was “surprised” by the course of events.

There seems to be a “history started 5 minutes ago” fallacy going on in some of these cases. One is used to the post hoc fallacy where a cause-and-effect is posited because one thing happened after another (even if there was no actual connection).

In this case, there’s a blatant connection, where pretty much everybody says DUH. But these very interested parties looking on pretend they cannot see the cause right in front of them. Perhaps the elephant in the room situation is what I’m talking about here.

Still, it makes one wonder just how stupid the people proclaiming surprise are, or how stupid they think their audiences are.

PUERTO RICO

• Obama Urges Congress to Pass Law Letting Puerto Rico Declare Bankruptcy; Great Idea, Let Illinois Do the Same – from Mish
• White House: No federal bailout for Puerto Rico
• Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis Is Big Business for Washington Lobbyists — an article from the end of May at Bloomberg
• Puerto Rico Has No Easy Path Out of Debt Crisis – from the WSJ
• Things in Puerto Rico are getting really bad: What you need to know, from the Washington Post.

It’s got a nice graph:

And one extra tying Greece and Puerto Rico together — as well as Illinois: ILLINOIS POLITICIANS SHOULD TAKE NOTE AS GREEK, PUERTO RICAN DEBTS BLOW UP: ‘THIS IS NOT POLITICS, THIS IS MATH’

It is politics, by the way — because the politics are how we got this math. The point, though, is that there is no bargaining to be had to continue on as before, because there is no Magic Money Fairy ™.

FRIENDLY GAME OF PASS-THE-GRENADE

I will put up one quote from the Illinois Policy Institute piece:

1. Kicking the can down the road is no longer a solution. It is the problem.

Springfield and Chicago politicians have kicked the can down the road for decades. All they’ve done is put off the problem and make it bigger.

Continuing to make pension promises that cannot be paid is an immoral and unjust way to treat both taxpayers and government workers. This process is perpetuating financial uncertainty for every worker, taxpayer and businessperson looking to invest in Illinois, and is nothing short of scandalous.

People keep using the “kick the can” metaphor, but I prefer hot potato. Or, rather, live grenade.

Politicians keep tossing the grenade to the next one in line, hoping they won’t be holding it when it goes off.

But they had to know it would go off eventually.

Compilation of Puerto Rico posts

The State of the States: a Compilation