Argentina update–Ice cream cone melting

If you haven’t yet seen the ice cream cone story coming straight out of a VERY metaphoric Project August dream, then you’ll want to read that one for sure, because it has world-altering potential.

This is merely an update to that story. Argentina is making everyone worried with the looming default of their national debt. If you haven’t heard about credit default swaps (CDS), those are the totally corrupt and bastardized insurance policies that anyone can put on ….well, pretty much anything, including countries, states, corporation, etc.

The CDS market is like a house of cards, because once someone BIG goes down, then all these banks have to start paying out their insurance policies to the “investors” (more like gamblers) who bought the policies. But the insurance policies are huge amounts; in fact, some people estimate the whole CDS market to be in the quadrillion dollar range worldwide (hundreds of times bigger than the combined, global GDP).

So, someone goes bust, the banks have to settle. If the busting entity was big enough, the banks will go broke trying to settle, which then kicks off the next hierarchy of CDSs, and the next banks have to start paying out, and then they go bust, and on and on.

The CDS market is a ticking timebomb, and the epicenter (or at least the fuze) might be Argentina.

Funny how the CDS market represents only one of several ways that the economy can and will eventually fail. Perhaps we’ll get into more of those options in later installments.

However, the big thing about the Argentina ice cream cone analogy is that it was a Project August dream, and therefore, the economic house of cards might all go down in August.

Stay tuned….

Copyright 2014 Chris McCleary. All rights reserved.