The family Euro is quite large. They live in the same house, they share all common spaces, but they have separate quarters – a bit of privacy is always welcome.
In order to maintain the property, they all agreed to contribute to common expenses proportionally to something nobody quite understood, and which is always a source of quarrels. Some believe it is a question of space, some want it to be in relation to income, etc. Anyway, they got to the point where every year they give some money to a common bank account.
There are several interesting characters in the Euro family. Otto, for instance, is a squared, sturdy guy who lives to work and is quite wealthy. He is a bit of a nuisance as he believes in law and order, not much of a fun… appreciated however for the fact that he has the money and keeps its business in good order.
Andrew is a bit of an outsider. He belongs somehow to the family, but he keeps himself to himself, and does not share many of the habits and quirks of the others.
Then there is Antonio, Nikos, Francois, Alejandro, and a few others.
Things used to go nicely for the Euro’s. They were working together, trading with each other and with other families in the surroundings – especially with the large USD family. As a family, they were fairly wealthy.
At a certain point however bad news started to arrive, one after the other. Aengus and Alejandro building businesses go into troubles, both for the same reason. They simply built a lot of stuff, and borrowed a lot of money to do so, before they knew somebody wanted to buy what they were building. As a consequence, they ended up with a lot of empty buildings nobody wanted and a lot of debt they could not repay.
Nikos got in troubles as well. Without saying anything to anybody, he borrowed as well large amount of money, but instead of building something he used the money for parties and expensive stuff that was really not needed.
Nicola did something quite similar as well as Carlos (Alejandros’ cousin).
So within a short time, the Euro’s discovered that instead of being altogether quite well off, they were full of debt. Banks were knocking on the door every other day, and the other families started to become quite suspicious of the Euro’s… How is it possible they did not discover about Nikos? And, more importantly, how many other dirty secrets were still to be discovered within the Euro’s? Is Francois still ok? Andrew? Otto?
The Euro’s were quite embarrassed. They actually knew that Nikos was doing funny things, and that all others were living on borrowed money, but to keep up the appearances of a nice and friendly family, never intervened.
So the family council was called together, to discuss what to do. Clearly, the presence of so many disgraced members was not doing any good to the family… After long discussions, it was decided that the family would have paid the debts, but that the Nikos and other indebted members would have repaid the family in due time. The idea was to avoid that banks would have started to hit on the other family members (Otto and Francois in particular) and that the other families would have stopped their dealings with them.
So far so good, if it was not for the fact that unfortunately Nikos and Alejandro have a few more skeletons in the closet. Nikos in particular, despite the fact that a helping hand was thrown at him, keeps spending a lot of money in parties, more or less like before. Alejandro in the meantime keeps discovering that the amount of mess involved in the by now defunct building business grows with time, and needs a helping hand too.
Otto and Francois start feeling like a lemon – they keep paying to keep these guys afloat, but the more the time passes the more it looks like a black hole, and expanding fast.
The UDS family, and by now other families as well (the Yen one) grow increasingly worried. To them it does not make sense that such a thing could possibly happen, especially considering that they lent also money to the family to keep the same guys afloat.
After a while, the amount of people throwing money at the family is really large. All families, in a way or another, are now creditors and the amount of confidence in the family’s ability to get out of the mess decreases by the day.
It does not help at all the fact that the bean-counter hired by the family to make sense of the mess keeps shouting every other day that either things are quite ok despite appearances or that a fantastic new plan to solve the whole lot is in the pipeline and will be presented soon.
The real bummer is that the fantastic plan in question always resolves into lending new money to the by now bankrupt members of the family, and the fact that the money in question keeps coming from borrowing money from somewhere else.
To experts around the world it looks like everybody is feeding with cash a large black hole of nonsense, and instead of reducing it, it grows larger. BTW, this is what black holes do – the more they feed, the more they get bigger and need food. This simple matter seems to escape from all bean-counters now on the case, and loads of money keeps flowing in the wrong direction.
The whole story goes from bad to worse when, to save face, the various lenders, bean-counters, and the very same family members start to argue that they do not lend money anymore – they do something else and highly complicated that the mass cannot really understand. Lots of people look and smile, without actually understanding much of it, while others look with horror to the “solution” in question.
Without spilling the beans, everybody started to print money – as simple as it is. Since the whole show is now governed by bean-counters, and since they think in terms of figures and are quite comfortable in ignoring the plain reality of the issue, their priorities is to get the figures right.
Everybody knows that the more there is of something, the less it is worth. So diamonds are quite expensive, while manure is not worth a lot. Money works the same way, and an ever-increasing amount of money is “created” to be thrown in the black hole. The fact that the money get burnt in the black hole does not mean there is less money – in bean-counting terms, the way you use the money does not affect the amount of money around, even if you burn it into a stove.
So this is where we are today. The various families got entangled into a mutual game of borrowing each other money that is too complicated to follow anymore. The family members keep burning money in various ways and with different names, but it all go into ashes. Business does not get any better either.
What is worse is that the appetite to lending money to all these people is steadily decreasing. Even Otto, the richest one, start to have problems convincing others to lend them money to be thrown into the furnace. Francois is tight-lipped on the story, while a few others highly suspicious characters (like Antonio) are talking a lot but they do very little else than borrowing money themselves.
This dynamic is now well understood by the most. The only showstopper to actually fix the mess is what is arguably called “political”. It works like this.
The family simply cannot afford to say that a gigantic mistake was done and need serious correction. Otto would lose face (and a gigantic amount of money), Andrew and Francois idem, and by now also other families have put so much money into this circus that they cannot call it as it is – so it continues.
And yet, it would be easy enough to fix it. From a family perspective, kicking out the members who have created and continue the mess would zero the issue – banks would not knock anymore of the family’s door. Nikos, left without money, would have to go to sleep under a bridge for sometime, think long and hard how to fix its own problems, and come out of it, one day, clean.
Other family members in the same situation would be given a nice deal – the bridge, so Nikos does not feel lonely. Those who threw money into this sorry story would have to take a huge loss, but what is left of the Euro family is now guaranteed to be a lot more solid and reliable than before. Business can start again.
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