Good News: Greece May Implode Before California, Helpfully Deflecting Criticism From Suicidal Policies of Democrats, Albeit Temporarily

Tyler Durden:

Greek taxpayers are not happy, and in this clip from Bloomberg, they make it painfully obvious...

With parliament now having officially passing austerity measures, the question remains: will strikes and demonstrations persist, or will the Greeks tire out and go back to their old, and much poorer, ways?

Observers like Barrie McKenna think that California is a far worse threat to the world economy than Greece. What's Greece compared to California? Like, a pancake in relation to Michael Moore's breakfast?

Commenter B9K9 offers the long-term analysis.

I've got news for you: everyone is going back to their old ways, some poorer, some richer. It's all simply a function of productivity - the efficient application of capital + labor. The only thing the last 20-30 year period of credit-leveraged asset-inflation accomplished was creating a false sense of entitlement amongst an awful lot of people.

And I don't mean just foreigners; I'm referring specifically to many of my fellow Californians. A lot of immigrants (including my dear wife - a NYC transplant) only know the California of the last generation - the cleaned up, gussied version.

I've told her, and I'll tell the board, if you want to know what California really looked like as recently as 1975, there is no better snap-shot of that period than the original "Gone in 60 Seconds". Shot on the streets of LA County's South Bay, today home to some of the most expensive real estate in the USA, it looks no different than a generic suburb of a mid-western city such as Chicago.

The reason for this appearance, of course, is that the Bay Area & SoCal were NO different than generic mid-western suburbs! We're talking major extractive industries like oil, gas & commercial fishing, large scale manufacturing (not the least being aerospace), huge military bases and construction. High-tech (my biz) & entertainment (i.e., Hollywood) get a lot of attention (because it sells media), but they represent a fraction of the 'real' economy.

But as California shifted away from a productive economy, towards one centered around financing serial debt expansionary bubbles, we saw the effect that old magic of asset (housing) inflation had on the overall demographic composition. Middle-class moved out, to be replaced with lower class immigrants to serve those who had carved out a slice at the top.

So now we have nice 'clean' FIRE industries with none of that hurly burly going on. The gardeners & nannies are allowed in during the day (special dispensations are granted to evening restaurant workers) and everything seems hunky dory. Except it isn't.

The opportunity, which I've hinted at on other threads, lies in identifying not only the resulting applications, but the processes by which we will return from whence we came. These will provide the core drivers for goods & services as we all take this collective journey back to our roots.

A quick viewing of Back to the Future may do the trick.