To: tejek who wrote (126201 ) 11/2/2012 1:57:44 PM From: RetiredNow Read Replies (4) | Respond to of 149317 It was not the gov't of Spain that lived beyond its means but its the gov't of Spain that is getting punished with German austerity. - tejeck This is only a half truth. You are correct in saying the Spanish gov't didn't live beyond its means...at least not catastrophicly, but it was the Spanish people and the Cajas and Spanish banks who engaged in much of the same risky real estate behavior we did in the US. That toxic debt is now being absorbed by the Spanish gov't. It's the same in the US. The banks and financial industry spun real estate debt and derivatives into monumental toxic assets, which landed on the US balance sheet. Anyone who knows how debt based currency works, knows that this debt creation is the same thing as massive money supply expansion. The wealth created is ephemeral and prone to sudden evaporation. Now the taxpayers are on the hook. Instead of paying it back, we're printing money, which impoverishes the 99% to save the asses of the 1%. In Spain, it's a bit of austerity, which once again impoverishes the 99% to save the asses of the 1%. Your flawed thinking is that you believe that inflation is not a tax, but it is. It's insidious and "not one man in a million can diagnose it" as the cause of their impoverishment. - mindmeldIf austerity was the problem, then why is it that fiscally responsible countries like Australia don't have the same problems as the southern European nations? - mindmeld Because their bankers did not do what Spanish and American bankers did. - tejek Correct. You see, you know quite a bit about the root causes of this disaster. Too bad your solutions are not accurate. Bankers are at the epicenter. Bankers are the cause. So banking solutions aren't going to work to get us out of the hole. - mindmeldIncidentally, I put my money where my mouth is. 5% of my portfolio is in Australian sovereign debt (AUNZ). Nice yield and it will benefit not just from the dividend, but from the currency devaluation of the dollar. - mindmeld Good for you................may you die and be buried in gold. You are so money hungry you can't see the forest for the trees. - tejek I have posted to you about my own investments to try to help you. It is precisely because I am focused on the impact of all this mess to my retirement that I am UNbiased. I see politics through the lens of economic impact to the country and to me as an individual. That makes me inherently anti-partisan. I am not greedy, but I am within a few years of retirement. When you get to my age, you take these things seriously. I'm sure you already take it seriously at your age. You've commented as much. So if you don't want me to help you by posting to you where I think you can safeguard your assets and earn a decent return while the financial crisis continues to unfold like a slow motion freight train headed towards a collision with a brick wall, then I won't do so anymore. Perhaps it was a bit presumptuous of me to think you'd be interested in that. My apologies. - mindmeld