Saturday 16 July 2011

Greek haircuts and the hairy ball theorem.

You can't comb a coconut flat- or comb a hairy ball without getting a cowlick somewhere- or can you if you selectively ply your scissors upon that cowlick? Another way of putting the same question is to ask if some sort of haircut for private investors (bad hat hedge fund types) in Greek bonds- or whatever- could comb flat the hairy ball of global finance? Presumably- on the analogy of no wind here means a cyclone somewhere else- a Greek haircut necessitates, dunno, say Chinese hair plugs?
My intuition is that there's real obvious reasons why a forced Greek haircut would be a bad thing though it might still be fun to try.

1 comment:

  1. I suppose the key question here is about inter-generational conflict- Greece looks like a country where the young can't or won't pay for their elder's bloated sense of entitlement. A settlement, here, revolves around the write-down off debt the old people contracted in return for a commitment from the young to pay something rather than nothing. The problem is that Greece isn't a floating exchange rate island. In other words, imperfect fiscal harmonization has created a problem for an over-hasty monetary union. Clearly, a sovereign debt haircut, under these circumstances, is populism gone mad. Instead, the drivers for fiscal harmonization- of which the most important is the invisible one of preference diversity reduction- need to be stepped up.

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