Something Thoroughly Surreal

... lies at the heart of the Euro crisis, our own crazed borrowing and spending and Japan's positively staggering level of debt.

Money is just a symbol. It's a proxy for actual wealth. Getting more of it is the result of producing value. If you're running out of it, then you're not producing enough. Printing money, making money cheaper through low interest rates, spending money in stimulus porkgasms, it's all just a fantasy if you don't produce value.

Europe is running out of people and doesn't create enough to sustain its spending model. That's all this crisis is. It's not about the "end of the Euro" or "fiscal union" or whether or not Angela Merkel got up on the wrong side of the bed and wants to kick the Greeks while they're down.

Every morning, I read the Wall Street Journal, Real Clear Markets, Der Spiegel and other such sites. There's a constant drumbeat about money as if it really was something. When you realize that money is just a proxy for real things, the articles and blog posts come across as a colossal overthinking of the problem, which is this:

If you don't produce something others want, you can't have what you want.

On the plus side, we can always cruise the ocean on a ship with butterfly sails.