...to bring their balance sheets in line with the US and Japan, threatening to trap the region in a credit crunch and chronic depression for a decade.A little day brightener from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph:
Europe's lost decade as $7 trillion loan crunch looms
The risk is "Japanisation" without the benefits of Japan: without a single government, or a trade super-surplus, or 1pc debt costs, or unique social cohesion.
Even today, the jobless rate for youth is near 10pc in Japan. It is already 46pc in Spain, 43pc in Greece, 32pc in Ireland, and 27pc in Italy. We will discover over time what yet more debt deleveraging will do to these societies.
Stephen Jen from SLJ Macro Partners says the loan to deposit (LTD) ratio of Europe’s lenders is 1.2, much like Japanese banks in the early 1990s at the onset of the country’s Lost Decade (now two decades).How Europe allowed this to happen will no doubt be the subject of many enquiries. Suffice to say that it was an intellectual failure by everybody: lenders, economists, regulators and the European Central Bank. The ECB misread the implications of the global capital surplus in the middle of the last decade (like the Fed) and gunned the M3 money supply at double-digit rates (like the Fed).
This great error further juiced the fatal flood of lending from North Europe to Club Med. Interestingly, it is what US lending did to Germany in the late 1920s. When the music stopped -- when Wall Street cut off loans, as Germany has now cut off loans to Spain -- trouble ensured within two years. Weimar limped on, but not for long....MOREThat first sentence pretty much spells it out, eh?
