The capability of the stability facility has three times the validity of the liquidity, but ONLY WHEN the lucre in the bazooka avoids the sieve of the Spiv. However, IF the leverage is the beverage from the Scotch Mist of the alchemist, then the money will be funny in inverse proportion to the net of the debt, AND the fate of the State will be subject to the rancour of the banker.

Slog’s First Law of Sovereign Borrowing

Over there in the increasingly democracy-free eurozone, power is zooming with great centrifugal force towards a smaller and smaller Privy Council. In the Beginning there were 17 europeddlers, but Merkozy looked down and saw that this was bad. And so emerged the Groupe de Francfort – or GdF – consisting of 1 German, 1 French person, 1 Central Banker, 1 IMF plonker, and 1 Olli Rehn – the point of whom remains not entirely to the point. The group is named in memory of Sarko’s dash to the Trichet Memorial Dinner in Frankfurt in order to peel She Who Must be Obeyed off the ceiling. Other invitees are rare, but this newest Politburo made an exception for the President of the United States at the latest G20 meeting…..which once again, for those who need to catch up, achieved diddly-squat.

On his arrival in the GdF’s inner sanctum, Brain of America Barack Obama listened for three minutes to the summary of the eurozone situation, and then said he didn’t understand why the EU leaders weren’t going to use “the firepower” of the ECB. This question was obviously a plant from Tim Geithner. It was politely batted back by Angela Merkel and Mario Draghi.

Another eurozone ‘outsider’ David Cameron has publicly been saying to anyone who will tape his words over the last few days that this is what he thinks too.

So now we know what Cameron and Obama have in common: le maladie Anglo-Saxon, aka “as the real banks won’t cough up, let’s rob the taxpayers’ bank”. Sarkozy may be French, but il souffre aussi de l’Anglo-Saxonisme.

The Americans like big bazookas and powerful fire. It’s that shock and awe thing they have. But snippets like those above (gleaned from folks close to the action) make international relations absolutely fascinating. For while Cameron and Obama are for the borrowing, Merkel and Draghi are for the saving. The answer almost certainly lies somewhere in between – while promising never to do the borrowing on such a scale ever, ever again….that latter vow in turn suggesting everyone should take a long, cold, hard look at the economic model to which we’ve been addicted for the last 30-odd years. But there is no sign in any of the feedback – nothing at all – that suggests anyone even thought about doing that.

Other snippets that slipped through the G20 without most people noticing included ‘Greece’s debts will be reduced by roughly a third’. Ah-haaa….so then, the bankers didn’t deliver 50% after all. (33% off the Greek debt load is nowhere near enough).

Addressing the full assembly of G20 Ministers today, and assuring them spending  austerity would remain at or near social disorder level, was none other than Evangelos Venizelos, shafter of Papandreou, and that man slated to be getting ‘a major post’ in the new Athens  Government. He was also the bloke who overspent the 2004 Olympic budget by 40%. I wonder how many US credit analysts know this.

In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi’s Coalition partner Umberto Bossi says he will only transfer his support away from Bunga-Bunga Man after new elections. This has thrown the markets into a panic, as everyone insists that to do this “would paralyse Italy’s economic reforms”. What form of Time are we dealing with here – human or geological? What on earth chance is there of economic reforms undertaken in Italy at 8.01 am tomorrow bearing fruit before 2014?

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Do you find these facts a mixture of depressing, funny and incomprehensible? Good: you are sane, and on the way to understanding that none of these people are special in any way at all. Unfortunately, this reality is also terrifying. Consider:

Five people named after an emergency meeting between cheese and dessert during an average meal in a provincial German town are calling the shots for upwards of 200 million citizens. The American President suggests to this group that they should solve their debt crisis not by getting the budgets in order – nor even by applying to the bank manager for a loan – but by robbing his bank. The British Prime Minister is too dense and uninformed to realise that his main antagonist in Europe would be empowered by robbing that bank.

The system all these nonentities sign up to has cost upwards of $35 trillion in write-offs around the world to date, 99.5% of which was paid for by people who were nowhere near the scene of the crime, and have 5.75999 billion cast-iron alibis. It has caused the middle classes in the West to drop their living standards by between 7 and 11%, enriched a mere 7% of its total population, indebted every Government around the globe apart from China and Norway, and caused higher inequities of wealth than existed between the aristocrats and the sans-coulottes in pre-1789 France.

Managing the one budget between mere euromeltdown and global bankruptcy is a fat Greek toad who just stabbed his boss in the front, and six years ago caused several members of the International Olympic Committee to have nervous breakdowns as a result of his budget mismanagement. Meanwhile, 300 miles to the west of that man’s country lies another one being run by a guy who shtupps under-age kids, holds bunga-bunga sex parties when he isn’t bribing the judiciary, and whose Motherland is going to go banga-banga with such a noise, it would make a disorderly default in Athens seem like an especially subdued meeting of Trappist monks.

None of these people know what they are about, but we are in their hands. They are sacking a Prime Minister in the hope of reviving a corpse. They are starving a Nation in the hope of saving five banks. They are ignoring the imminent collapse of another nation in the hope that others too might miss the event. And at some point, they hope to fleece their citizens again by a banking tax they know those banks will pass on in customer charges to the people who elected them.

They are mismanaging their economies, taking backhanders from privileged megalomaniacs, neglecting their fiscal management, lying to their constituents, lying to their legislatures, lying to their Heads of State, lying to their Armed Forces, and lying to themselves.

But for what?

Why, nothing more or less than the desire to hide from all of us what we already know: that we are all going to have to take an enormous drop in living standards, and change the way we think, in order to move on to more fulfilling lives. They think that hiding what we already know will get them reelected. But because they are too thick-skinned and wrong-headed to know that we already know what they dread us knowing, few if any of them will be reelected. Indeed, after 2015, I doubt if any if the elected representatives in this sorry herd will still be in a job.

The awful irony of all this is that we could jump up and down in front of them 24/7, and shout, “Yes, we know what you don’t want us to know, we do, we do” and they would still ignore us. Because that’s what European democracy has become in the age of the EU: surviving in power by ignoring everything those who elected you have to say.