The global craze for austerity will result in more pain (abc.net.au)

[BadgerKid]

We shouldn't be surprised. For much of the northern hemisphere, the bad economic news this year has been unrelenting. A series of sovereign debt crises have wracked Greece and Portugal. Now Italy and Spain are also coming under sustained attack from bond markets, with investors pricing in the possibility that these countries will not be able to pay back their debts either.

...

All of this has been occurring at the very time that a bizarre political dispute has gripped Washington over the US debt ceiling. An arcane provision of US fiscal law relating to how much debt it can issue, the debt ceiling controversy was really all about politics. Stoked by intransigent Republicans taking advantage of the US constitution's well-honed tendency for legislative gridlock, it absorbed huge amounts of political energy and media attention and ended in a bipartisan commitment to cut trillions in US government spending - at the very time America needs more stimulus.

...
How did we get here? Recall that US and European house prices inflated into a massive asset price bubble in the 2000s, driven by trillions of dollars of cheap debt. When the US sub-prime mortgage bubble burst, hedge funds, merchant banks, mortgage lenders and even giant insurers failed across the world. For a week in September 2008, the entire world's financial system teetered on the brink. Eventually, most of the banks were saved, but only at the cost of trillions of dollars of debt being transferred to the budgets of rich nations such as the US, UK, Ireland, Iceland, Germany and Spain.
...

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2826334.html

A good read and global perspective.

[lumpy]

1. If some miracle doesn't occur, most likely all of us will be

facing 'austerity' whether anyone likes it or not. Many people are experiencing it we speak.