Gwyn Morgan is a very successful top drawer exec who is now the Chairman of the Board of SNC-Lavalin, Canada's biggest international construction conglomerate. Sort of a "Bechtel North" outfit that's famous for landing the big deals in the shadier realms of the global economy.
When he's not busy in the Chairman's chair or out on the lecture circuit, where he likes to spread the gospel of "corporate ethics," Gwyn pens a column for Canada's newspaper of record. It's a somewhat preachy column, all things considered, and I found today's effort typically stinky.
He's tossing turds at the Euro-zone dumpster-divers, those benighted citizens who have been reduced to finding their next meal in the dumpsters of Europe, from Athens to Barcelona to Lisbon to Madrid. The reason they're in those dumpsters scrounging for their next meal is because Angela Merkel's "austerity enema" has made that dumpster their last best hope.
Gwyn takes exception to the fact that these folks are blaming the lenders or the politicians for their plight. They are "blaming others," when it is so patently obvious that it's their fault. After all, they are the ones who were living large off all those " extravagant programs that drove debt to astronomical levels."
That's right! It wasn't those guys with the 100 foot boats in the ubiquitous Mediterranean yacht basins and the Bentleys and the Manhattan and Belgravia apartments. It was the grubby-fisted school teacher who thought he was entitled to retire at 62 WITH A PENSION!!!
Now that they've hit the debt wall of course, these coddled malcontents are looking for someone to blame, and their first instinct is always, you know it, blame the Bentleys-in-Belgravia crowd! And if those guys have hoisted anchor and sailed for the Caymans, well, blame the bankers!
Gwyn does a sterling job of setting the record straight. Debts are debts and if they're not repaid, well, God Himself fears what could happen next. So stop your whining, starving children of Spain and Greece. Suck it up! In two or three generations, if you keep your noses to the grindstone, the bond-holders should be paid in full and we'll let you out of the dumpster.
This is in stunning contrast to how excess debt is dealt with in the private sector. First of all, once you're deemed "too big to fail" you get a bail-out courtesy of those folks now rummaging through the trash.
If you weren't quite too big to fail, if you were an Enron or a Worldcom or an Olympia and York or a Lehman Brothers, hell, you just pulled the plug and moved on! Hundreds of billions of dollars of debt just go away!
It's magic! And neither Dick Fuld or Paul Reichman has ever been spotted climbing out of a dumpster.
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