greece so what's greece's problem? you borrow money. you pay it back. or you default. and suffer the consequences. seems they don't want to do either. which is pretty understandable. seems like they're gonna default. which is one of the two available bad options. so anywho, what is the real fundamental problem? glad you asked. cause ima gonna tell ya. the governments of the world haven't wrapped their political heads around the fact that the real world economy has stopped growing. but wait. timmer yer wrong. the world economy is growing. heh. the world economy is the real world economy plus the bump it gets on paper from all the borrowing. so yeah, that total is still growing. and if you believe paul krugman you can borrow forever. which isn't quite right. you can borrow for as long as the real economy grows. which in the past sure looked like it was going to forever. but it's stopped. why? cause energy has stopped being cheap. energy production has plateaued. and as that goes, so does the world's real economy. which means you can't take on more debt. which means government services need to be cut. or taxes need to be raised. or both. which is political suicide for whatever party adopts that platform. so no party ever will. so we're going to keep seeing states default. hopefully a new state will rise from the ashes that is more in tune with the world's new fiscal realities. and hopefully these failures will be isolated and independent of each other. cause it'd be really bad if an entire region goes under at once. like say the entire eurozone.  ¶ 8:00 AM