This post is really a stub end to my series on Greece and Europe. It’s purpose is to suggest that, much as we might snicker – okay, guffaw – over the preposterous shenanigans across the Atlantic, we actually have our own mini-Greek problem right here in the USA. Puerto Rico is becoming our own version of Greece, though perhaps with the example of Europe before us we can avoid slipping from calamity to debacle to fiasco.
The term “realpolitik”(1) was coined in the mid-nineteenth century by a fellow named Ludwig von Rochau.(2) If you asked ten people what it means today, nine and a half of them would say something like, “It means the sword is mightier than the pen,” or “Might makes right,” or “He who has the power makes the rules.”(3)
My last post garnered a lot of comment. Some readers assumed I was advocating for an immediate Grexit, while others wondered where I stood on the issue. Just to set the story straight (spoiler alert!), here are my views in a nutshell:
You have to admit that that’s one hell of a pompous title for a humble blog post. A guy’s got to lie awake nights to think up stuff like this.
We’ve evaluated most of the arguments put forth by neo-Keynesians who claim the US economy – and probably Europe and Japan as well – is mired in so-called secular stagnation. The notion first arose in the mind of the American popularizer of Keynes, Alvin Hansen, who assured the world that the US had fallen into secular stagnation at the precise moment that the US economy was poised for spectacular growth.
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