Bang

It is obvious: a trigger is a dangerous thing.

I have defended and attacked economists.  They draw graphs and fit them to nice curves to predict the future.  In a stable world that has validity.  They also cannot analyse for the effect of triggers.

I have wrriten about it earlier, but I maintain that the conditions for a ‘crisis’ are in place nearly all the time.  ‘Crisis’ is a euphemism or shorthand for a dreadful mess where a lot of people suffer in one way or another, most importantly, including me.  It just needs a trigger event to make it happen.  Trigger events are not in any way predictable and neither are their effects.  All you can do is, smugly, nod wisely after the event.

THE volcano has stopped air travel.  Bad enough and it may go on for some while, or they will start flying and planes will start dropping out of the sky.  Greece relies on tourism for a large part of its income and there is not a lot of that at the moment.  If you are Greek and unhappy with a Greek bank you can walk in, walk out with a pocketful of euros and walk in to…some other bank that you trust more.  (I had difficulty with that sentence as I tried to think of any bank I trust at the moment.)  There is no currency change charge.  You are clear of the Greek banking system in short order.  Greece has no money to pay bank collapse insurance claims and has got less each day because of  THE volcano and consequent reduction in tourist activity.  So Greece is set on a downward spiral.  Almost a perfect storm.

Just as an aside, if Greece went out of the euro, who would buy and use a drachma?  The only people would be those in Greek banks, which have collapsed because of runs, where the government would forcibly convert the euros to drachmas.  We could have a country running on a currency other than its own (viz Zimbabwe, Vietnam) – the drachma is official but everyone uses euros.

It is obvious: a trigger is a dangerous thing, especially when it is not your finger on it.