In praise of default | Hacker News Reader

In praise of default

blogs.reuters.com

23 pointscwan10 comments

It's historically interesting that we're talking about a general default in the context of Greece, given that arguably the most famous default in history - Solon's "shaking off of burdens" in ancient Athens - ushered in a golden age of wealth and prosperity amid rising international trade.

Yet these days we're more inclined to a Draconian than a Solonian approach to our economic and political woes.

My impression is that as far as Greek public opinion goes, "will it work?" is currently the biggest open question. If Greece is going to end up defaulting anyway, a lot of people are in favor of just defaulting now and getting it over with, instead of paying huge interest bills on a loan that they'll never be able to overcome anyway. Selling the austerity plan requires selling people on "yes, it'll work", which so far many people don't really believe.

I think as long as Greece's economy is resilient to a default, and the government able extract taxes from it afterwards, it will work.

The creditors will be screwed, but new ones will be ready to lend again to a government with tax revenues and no debt.

It depends how much of the defaulted debt is foreign-held, and how much is domestically-held. If too much the latter, the economy may not recover right away, putting them in a pinch.

We’ve already printed money, the fifth option, and in my opinion may well print a whole lot more.

This is said so matter-of-fact yet not given much more weight in the argument presented for default. As I see it, default and inflation are the only two ways out of this (and I'm not sure they are binary and mutually exclusive). Both seems to penalize the affluent with assets and benefit those with debt.

Why people not talking more about inflating our way out of this? Wouldn't a devalued currency also increase jobs as things are brought back on-shore?

The problem here is secondary effects of default. I.e. it's widely perceived that a default by Greece would result in a lot of more northern European banks going insolvent and having your banking system break down is ... really bad. Its one of the things that made the '30s a "Great" Depression.

A general but not very satisfactory solution has been to drag things out for a decade slowly building bank capital so that they can finally officially realize their losses without closing down.

Some people rather experience an extreme loss in employment but rapid gain in employment, instead of a slow misery that last for a decade. By defaulting banks, we could reallocate resource quickly as banks' assets get sold to healthy banks.

Rather than trying to avoid pain, we should acknowledge failure as a part of a healthy free market system and optimize for a robust system that can handle failures instead of having "too big to fail."

It should be like when circuit-city falls, there isn't much damage to the economies, instead of the fear that comes from when financial institutions are failing.

The problem of course is when you allow too many "too big to fail" institutions to exist and suffer a cascading failure such as the ones started by Creditanstalt in May 1931 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creditanstalt) and Lehman Brothers in September 2008 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_crisis_impact_timeline...), the latter fortunately got stopped.

One obvious solution is outlaw "too big to fail" although that seems to be hard (the current US financial regulation bill enshrines them), and it still doesn't address the lemming like behavior you see in bubbles which allow near total systems failures.

In fact, wasn't the US banking system of the '30s mostly comprised of small banks (as I recall, 8,000 of them had failed when FDR closed the rest, but my memory of that number could be off or maybe that was the total???).

> The problem of course is when you allow too many "too big to fail" institutions to exist

Folks keep talking about certain financial institutions as "too big to fail", but what about countries?

Here are some earlier items on this subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175576

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011716

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=726110 <- This has lots of comments

There are more, but my search-fu isn't up to it. "default" is a common word.

My initial thought was that this was going to talk about default settings, like for computer applications.

I was disappointed. (And I don't like the situation the markets are in now anyways, but this article and plenty others have already voiced all I can think of.)

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