6 days of protesting over austerity measures. 6 fucking days, not a word in the nooz.

Speaking of protests over austerity measures, I actually had a convo about this last night. (It’s so nice when the reality proves my babbling correct). Austerity doesn’t work as an economic driver because riots and protests over basic things like jobs and food tend to discourage foreign direct investment(FDI). Foreign investors see the country as unstable (rightly so) and put their cash in other places. FDI is important because it is the only way to increase the overall surplus in a closed loop economic system. To shorthand that for you- imagine a country’s resources are a pot of soup and that soup has to be divided among all the people. Regardless of how you divide the soup (equally among everyone, more going to some people and less going to others, whatever) you only have the soup you have in the pot to play with. FDI adds extra soup.

Keynesian economics tries to avoid the riot problem during downturns by having a country borrow from itself during downturns to keep everyone in soup and paying itself back during upturns by increasing taxes. This not only creates a more stable country, but a more stable investment environment. (And yes, I am aware of the problem of speculation creating a vampire investment economy that sucks the life out of the real economy. And yes, I think financial products should be extremely limited and regulated to death. But this post is about a quick and dirty explanation of what we’ve got going on right now and not what a better way of doing things might be).