Neither a borrower nor a lender be...

Jesus said that "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil," but many of our Randite friends were more inspired by Pancho's soliloquy in Atlas shrugged, where he proclaimed it "the root of all good." It is pretty clear that money is one of the most important human inventions, and credit is not terribly far behind. JC and Pancho were both speaking great truths, I think, in Bohr's sense (a great truth being a statement whose opposite is also a great truth, unlike ordinary truths which have falsehoods as their opposites).

Money and credit provide the crucial lubricant for economies of every advanced sort, but they bring their own darkside. Just as we were about to recover from one credit crisis, the Euro provides us with another. The Euro was a great invention until it wasn't. Unfortunately it turned out not to be stable. Thrifty Germans and others saved their Euro's and spenthrift Greeks and others borrowed and spent them, and everybody was happy until it became clear that the borrowers could not afford to pay. Where have we heard that story before?

The problem is that everybody winds up a lot poorer - the savers because they don't get their money back and the spenders who can't get anybody to lend them more money. Even more serious is the sand that gets thrown in the wheels of commerce. The losses amplify because jobs and production get lost everywhere. That tends to make borrowers poorer, on average, and less able to pay their bills.

The amounts are not small. Italy reputely owes France an amount equal to 1/5 the French GDP.

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