And in Other News, You Can't Stop a Freight Train Quickly

From Bloomberg, with emphasis added by me.

Nov. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Borrowing costs for Europe’s most indebted nations are at record highs as Ireland’s capitulation in accepting a bailout of its banking industry stokes concern that other countries also will have to seek aid.

The average yield investors for 10-year debt from Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy reached 7.57 percent today, a euro-era record. The average premium investors demand to hold those securities instead of German bunds widened to as much as 492 basis points, the highest level of 2010. The average cost of insuring against default by the five nations using credit- default swaps reached a record 517 basis points on Nov. 23.

It's time for a Marc Faber encore.

You can't have the kind of debts (Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy) has with (olive oil, sardine, tourism, lousy Italian cars) income. This is like a runaway freight train and the bondholders and European Central Bankers keep getting surprised every time the thing smashes through another flimsy barricade.

Jerry Brown's election as governor of California was the high water mark of the progressives across the Western world. This freight train of debt was started when we began making social spending promises we knew to be unsustainable and it picked up speed every time we launched another doomed-to-fail War on Poverty program.

It won't stop until many of those social spending programs have been dismantled, either deliberately through austerity measures, or involuntarily through the inflation that comes with printing money to pay for them.