Via Mark J. Grant, author of Out of the Box,
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
-Rudyard Kipling
- If the Central banks are done printing
- If there is to be no more flood of liquidity spilling into the world that required Noah’s Ark
- That buoyed the equity markets; that compressed the bond markets
- If the ECB will never do one thing because the EU cannot agree on them to do it
- If Greece cannot agree on the mandated austerity measures and so new elections are called
- If Spain asks for money and Germany says it is a legacy issue and it is Spain’s problem
- If money for Cyprus cannot be agreed to
- If Portugal appears back at the till
- If Catalonia decides that it no longer wishes to be part of Spain
- If China has a slow-down which is far past the common thinking
- If a new leader appears in Germany who wants to retain the nation for its people
- If the nations in Europe cannot agree on a banking supervisor or while funding the ESM refuse to hand over their country’s money to other nations any longer
- If the recession in Europe is worsening and deepening and broadening and the distance across the Atlantic shrinks by the recession’s intensity
Then “If” is no longer “If” and it grows up and becomes “When” and perhaps that moment has begun and the consequences will be soon enough.