"The Axis of Upheaval"

Niall Ferguson suggested, a year and a half ago, that major western countries were on the cusp of going bankrupt in a crisis he said would play out over the next eighteen months. "Forget about the axis of evil", he said. "Welcome to the axis of upheaval."

Right on cue...

(Note: Ireland said as recently as Friday that it would not negotiate a bailout from the EU or the IMF and even denied such a bailout was necessary. Must have been quite a weekend.)

How long before Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Spain crowd into the lifeboat with Ireland and Greece? How about the United Kingdom? When does the lifeboat reach capacity? And when it goes down with a colossal sucking sound, what will it drag down with it?

The idea that an entity as large as a country can go bust is terrifying to me. Talk about "too big to fail". What's interesting to me about Ireland is that as recently as three years ago, it was called a Celtic Tiger. The boom of its economy was heard around the world. And now look at it: reduced to beggar status, its unemployment rate at a whopping 14.1%, it's no more a tiger than my pet cat.

Greece is another case entirely, done to death by lavish social programs and legacy costs that anybody could have told them were unsustainable. (When the Constitution guarantees you can't be fired from a government job, your country's probably doomed. When a father's pension is automatically transferred to his daughter upon his death, and said daughter can hold that pension in perpetuity so long as she remains unmarried, your country is definitely doomed.)

We are witnessing the first stages of a slow-motion collapse that I can only hope is slow-motion enough that I'm safely dead before the endgame...