Source: Merriam-Webster.com
If you ever wondered why the US public has so much trouble discerning what’s what during an election year, perhaps a clue might lie with their media. In particular, this throwaway piece from the New York Post:
Americans, you just got a peek at what socialist monetary policy looks like, and it’s not pretty.
For all you kids looking for a free college education should Bernie Sanders make it to the White House, this is what you have to look forward to.
In Europe, where there is widespread unemployment, socialism is now taking hold in ways almost unseen before.
A spectre is haunting Europe! Oh myyyyy.
Ahem. And what does that oh-so-socialist spectre look like? Well, an awful lot like, uh, CAPITALISM:
On Thursday, European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi announced a gargantuan stimulus and economic funding package to help mend Europe’s banking system.
Draghi raised monthly bond purchases to €80 billion ($89 billion) in Europe’s rendition of quantitative easing and lowered the prime borrowing rate to zero: All OK so far.
But then Draghi went a few steps further than any central banker has ever gone. The ECB will now be buying corporate bonds of European nonbank companies as well.
At this point, I got the impulse to write to the piece’s author, one Jonathan Trugman, to tell him to go back to school and learn the differences between two very different words and two different — one might even say diametrically opposed — concepts. But I suspect that such an education would be over his head, and those of his paper’s target readership as well.
But wait! It gets, uh, better:
Of course, that raises all sorts of issues. Will the ECB be buying bonds of Airbus, which is Boeing’s largest competitor in airline manufacturing? That has the potential to effectively enable the ECB to give unfair advantages to Continental companies looking for financing.
And will German automakers like Mercedes Benz, BMW or Volkswagen be sellers of bonds? The funding costs of these companies could be dramatically reduced, enabling them to sell their cars more profitably than American or Japanese manufacturers.
The second socialist measure: The ECB will lend money to banks at zero percent interest rates, and pay them 0.4 percent of the amount of euros lent. So theoretically, if Deutsche Bank or any other bank in Euroland lends €1 billion, it will receive a stipend of €4 million from the European Central Bank.
That said, maybe Draghi is “feeling the Bern” and auditioning for a spot in Treasury in a Sanders administration.
Ha, ha, so funny. The Bern, geddit?
I’m really not sure what role banks and bond traders have in a socialist economy, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the one Jono and his boorish Trumpeteer readers have in mind.
And after all that silly crapitalist twaddle, I’m quite certain that even a free education — which they sorely need — wouldn’t help them much. But hey! If they ever do decide to go back to school, I’ll cheerfully drive the bus.
