What better way to release some steam than to explain what this crisis is about to layperson not well versed in all these mumbo-jumbo. You can't know shit of what's really going on there, or for the matter 'anywhere', from the newspaper, online mainstream, tv and radio news even if you read/ watch/ listen to them every day.
Also as i grow older, i realized knowledge is something that nobody can take away from you. Not that i know a lot myself but i did read a lot from various printed and online sources. One thing with explaining the crisis is there are too many variables which are connected. So that makes searching for the "cause" of the crisis all the more difficult.
If one take the 'mainstream' view of looking at things, then the cause may be 'different' from one who takes the objective view. i can't say i could state the cause with perfect accuracy but it is close. Maybe no one could except the people who are directly involved in it. i also want to make it clear that the objective view is not the conspiracy theorist view although it is closer to it than the mainstream view.
"Greed is Good" - The Cause
First a very short history- in 1999 the Europeans implemented a common currency, the Euro to improve trade between the European Union, EU countries. Member countries that have the euro as their common currency are called the Eurozone. The currency is centrally managed via a central bank called the European Central Bank or ECB based in Frankfurt, Germany. It is similar to the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States.
One of the main function of the ECB is to print money- the euro. Besides that, it will also make sure the currency doesnt lose its value via monetary policy like controlling its inflation rate. Each of the member state of Eurozone is also a member of its Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).
Just think of the EMU as a group of European EU countries that are tied together economically and sharing common economic policies. Go read it up if you want to know more details. But personally i am not interested. The interesting point is although the members of EMU share the same currency and policies, each of them are still a sovereign state on its own. That means they could each issue their own debt through the issuance of government bonds, and manage their budget (explanation of bond below).
Germany, as the world's fifth largest economy is the strongest economy in the Eurozone. So, it has the lowest cost of borrowing in Europe. Put another way, it is cheapest to borrow money for the Germans.
All this makes sense in a way. If one is strong financially, then it is so much easier to borrow money from others. Let's say i am filthy rich, not only will that make it easier for me to get credit (a loan) but i get it at a good interest rate too (read: lower interest). Say i make a million dollars a year. If i were to borrow $10k for some personal consumption, i am going to get a very good interest rate from the bank. We have all heard of the phrase about bankers- they lend you an umbrella when it's sunny, then take it away when it rains. Since i'm
Let's use the same analogy on a micro level- the individual. Let's say i'm the rich guy with a good credit rating. The bank now give my teenage son a $200,000 consumer credit line with the same interest rate as i was entitled, just because we lived in the same house. The reason the bank lent money to my son is because there's an implied promise that i will pay for his debt if he doesn't. In effect, i have become a guarantor for my son. If he cannot pay or default on his loan, the bank will come after me.
So, i am the government of one of the economically 'stronger' countries. My son is the govt of one of the 'weaker' countries. The bank that lent to my son are the European investment banks (mainly German & French banks) and to a certain extent connected to the Wall Street banks, or well in another word, the predatory banks.
Now, the same applies to Germany. The banks will line up to lend money to the Germans. Banks are comfortable lending cheap money to Germany. Germany is a member of eurozone. Using their logic, banks will assume other eurozone countries have good credit standing too. And so they lent money to the other "weaker" eurozone countries at the same interest rate as Germany.
The weaker countries are Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain or collectively known as PIIGS. Initially these countries are not economically weak but they became so after the 2008 global financial crisis (or GFC) - more explanation below. We know that the GFC did not start in Europe but in another 'now almost bankrupt' country just across the Atlantic Ocean.
The above chart taken from HERE together with a simple explanation of the crisis.
So, those weaker countries could now borrow money from the banks at the same interest rate as Germany, and borrow they did- in massive amount. What did they do with those cheap (loan) money? Why, buy stuff of course and create a false sense of prosperity while they're at it. Also, they cut taxes and increase their welfare spending. They did this for more than 10 years from 1999-2010. All these 'prosperity' is bought and paid for with cheap and massive debt.
In a way, the Germans and the French via their banks encourage this profligate spending by lending money to the PIIGS. Why? Goods from Germany (and France) are now cheaper (because they all share a common currency- the euro) and they now have lots of moolah (courtesy of cheap loans from the banks). German and French banks lent money to the PIIGS so that those countries can buy German and French products. Brilliant idea right!
Well, we all know how addictive cheap and easy credit can be ya. Greece went "kaboom" first in 2010 followed by the others, and the rest is history.
So, who is to blame in this financial zero-sum game? The governments are motivated to spend and they in turn encourage their citizens to consume more. The "too-big-to-fail" banks (if they're too big to fail on the other side of the Atlantic, it is the same in Europe) are encouraged to go into more leverage (borrowings) by betting on financial instruments called 'derivatives' in order to make more profits for themselves.
And the public is made to think a) the low-income homeowners (subprime borrowers) in the U.S., and b) irresponsible governments eg. the PIIGS (specifically Greece) in Europe, that are to blame. But if we think about it, they're all to blame.All of us are motivated by one thing: greed and power. They're one and the same- you can't have one without the other. The real victims are the people who has no part in this game and so they have no say in how it is played.
In the real world, the TBTF banks and the government are in this together. In fact, they are the same entity. Explaining it is another topic altogether and i don't intend to do that as there are dozens of more articulate articles on this on the internet. If you are still ignorant, i would suggest you do a search for this and read about it to know more. To be ignorant in today's world is a dangerous thing.
Now all this indebtedness is reflected in the sovereign bond markets.
We moved on to the symptom of the Euro crisis...
"The name is Bond" - The Symptom
You need to understand what is a "bond" before you can understand the rest of this post.
A bond is a piece of paper (just like a piece of paper money), that is traded just like shares (or 'stocks' in US-speak). But unlike shares, which express ownership in a company, a bond is essentially a promissory note; an IOU note that we used to play as children where you lend me money and i write you a piece of paper promising to pay you back in a future date. This govt IOU note/bond however also states the face-value (principal) and interest rate it carries. A person who buys the bond at the market price gets the interest and receives the principal of the bond on its maturation. Just like the share market, a person can own, buy & sell bonds in the bond market.
Governments issue bonds to pay for public infrastructure projects eg. making roads, public schools & universities, govt buildings, power plants, etc. It is also used to finance deficit spending (or budget deficit) ie. by borrowing from other governments because their expenses exceeds its revenues. Besides the govt, companies also issue bonds. Big companies issue bonds mainly to pay for hard assets like factories, machineries, etc.
The only abc to know about bonds are (a) the face value, or par value, of the bond, (b) the periodic interest the bond pays (the 'coupon')- this is the interest (the borrowing cost) that the borrower (the bond issuer) has to service, and (c) the return-on-investment of the bond ie. the market interest rate of the bond or 'yield' in industry speak.
The most important, (for people like me whose only acquaintance with bond is of the British spy variety) is point (c) - the yield of a bond. The yield of a bond is the interest rate of the bond, times the face-value of the bond, divided by the market price of the bond. It is expressed as a percentage value.
The yield has an inverse relationship with the price of the bond. That is, the higher the price of the bond, the lower is its yield; the lower the price of the bond, the higher its yield.
Let's do an example.
i sell you a bond for $1,000 with an interest of 5% per year. The bond is trading in the open market at $900. So, 5% x $1,000 ÷ $900 will give you a yield of 5.55%, which is higher than the interest rate of 5%. The yield has gone up since the price of the bond has gone down. In industry-speak, the yield is said to have 'widened'.
Now, let's say the bond has risen in value. The price is now S1,100 per unit of bond. So, 5% x $1,000 ÷ $1,100, gives a yield of 4.54%. The bond yield has 'narrowed'.
This is a simplified calculation of yield. In real markets, the yield is called yield-to-maturity' or YTM. You can go here for an explanation.
As all bonds are different in terms of interest rate, maturation period, etc, it is much easier to use changes in yield to express if a government can repay its borrowings (remember, it's the govt that borrows our money by issuing IOU notes or bonds). So, when we hear news that the yield of govt bond is going up, then the price of the bond is going down and vice versa. We'll look at it a little more below.
Why do bond prices goes down? Because investors (which is the creditor) thinks that the person who owes the debt (the bond issuer or debtor) is not good for the debt. In other words, the debtor may default on its payment. So, the owner of the bond (investor) sells them at a lower price because they dont want to risk a default. Therefore, raising the yield of the bond.
And why do bond prices goes up? The opposite is true. If investors has confidence the debtor will not default, the bond becomes attractive and the investors are willing to pay a higher price for the bond. This will drive up the bond price, and lowering its yield as a result.
Taking it to the macro level and simplifying, when the yield of govt bond of a country rises, the people are selling the country's bonds because the price of the bond is falling. A bond with a face-value of S1,000 paying an interest of 5% are now trading at $900 so that the yield is 5.55%.
Now, if the yield rises to 7%, the bond is now said to be trading at distressed level. For a $1,000 bond with 5% interest to be yielding 7%, the bond is trading now at around $715 (5% x 1,000 ÷ 715 give us 7% yield).
Using the above market yield of 7%, let's do a simple scenario. Say you’re a government, and you have to fund $1 million for a road. You will issue bonds to finance the road, bonds that will pay an interest of 5% a year. In order to raise those million dollar, you have to sell not a thousand $1,000 bonds; you have to sell 1,400 bonds with a face value of $1,000 - totalling $1.4 million. (To get the new face-value at the market yield of 7%, we divide 1 million by 5%, then times 7%. Or working backwards, ie. the face-value of 1.4 million times 5%, then divided by 1 million will get you a market yield of 7%).
And therefore, you have to pay interest to your investor/ lender/ creditor on the 1,400 bonds (of $1,000 face value each) instead of 1,000 bonds. And when these bonds mature- that is, when they have to be paid off in full, the government won’t be paying out $1 million in principal. They’ll be paying out $1.4 million in principal, on what was supposed to be a $1 million road. Bonds are paid full on their face-value on maturation.
To conclude, the govt cost of borrowing will rise when the yield rise. That is what is happening with European debt. The yields of bond there has risen sharply because investors/ lenders feel there is a high likelihood that the bonds will not be repaid in full. Now this alone should not cause great concern but for another fact.
Most all of these eurozone nations (with the exception of Germany) especially the PIIGS, are so heavily in debt that they will have to rely on deficit spending to pay off their obligations. Mundane things like public sector salaries, pension benefits, health care subsidies and also one very important thing- interest servicing on those bonds they had already issued. If a country is selling its bonds at a steep discount, then it cannot issue enough bonds to pay off its obligations and at the same time allow the country to finance day-to-day function at its current level. If bond yields continue to rise, then the risk of bankruptcy is high.
This is just one symptom of the disease. The cause lies in humans, as always.
Greece again and it's all connected - another symptom
After the GFC (again the global financial crisis, aka the subprime mortgage crisis, aka the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, whatever), Greece's cost of borrowing rose so much because the lender banks now knows that those Greece govt bonds are not "risk-less" but subject to speculative attacks too.
Of course that is normal as the lenders are now scared and the logical response would be to raise the borrowing cost of Greece. Cost of borrowing is just another fancy word for "interest servicing" in our layman term. That means Greece now has to use up most of its borrowings to pay off loan interest, and therefore they no longer had the ability to raise cash to pay off their other obligations (as stated above) which incidentally includes the interest they have to service!
The lender banks worried their loans may not be repaid by the PIIGS. If those huge loans held by both the PIIGS central banks (in the form of sovereign bonds issued by the PIIGS govt to the lender banks) and also its private banks are not repaid, the lender banks will go bankrupt too.
It's like a vicious cycle where a person borrows to meet his daily needs, and at the same time, to repay his borrowings but never able to do so because of the high interest charged by the lender, so that he has to keep on borrowing more!
Those Greek bonds are also tied to other financial instruments called "financial derivatives" (details below). So in a way, it is not a separate crisis and is all connected.
In 2010, the Troika consisting the International Monetary Fund IMF, ECB, and the EC rolled out a bailout package to save the Greece economy. This package includes austerity measure. Austerity (which sound suspiciously like "prosperity") is a polite word for very impolite actions. The people get cuts in public spending and tax increases which will negatively affects them.
While Greece's debt is massive it is still a very small percentage of the eurozone's GDP. But the Troika hesitated in releasing these bailout loans. Why? Because it is clear that the only way to fix the Greek problem is by debt haircut. Haircut proves to be impossible at first as it would caused the European banks and the American ones to become insolvent. You can bankrupt the country but you must never bankrupt the big banks. This is what we all learned from the US crisis.
Haircut (no, not the type one gets from the barber!) and Credit Event
So what is debt haircut and debt restructuring? Debt haircut is simply debt repayment to lenders of less than the full 100% of a debt owed. Most of you have heard or know of the term "refinancing". "Refinancing" is replacement of old debt by new debt when an individual or company is not under financial distress. Well, "debt restructuring" is renegotiation of old debt to new debt when an individual or company is under financial distress. Sometimes we can rearrange some wording to get a new meaning. Lawyers should know.
Say i owed $10,000 to a girlfriend for a new hi-fi set i bought last year. I go bankrupt and my now ex-girlfriend will get a percentage of the money left after all my assets are sold off. She wont get the full 10k (maybe she'll get 2k perhaps) that i owed her because i'm 'pokai'. i can't pay her full as i owe more than i own. That's a haircut.
Debt haircut and debt restructuring summarized: "in debt restructuring agreements, a haircut is a percentage reduction of the amount that will be repaid to creditors."
A credit event is defined as "any sudden and tangible (negative) change in a borrower's credit standing or decline in credit rating." The analogy applied to an individual would be that every adult has a credit rating too. They called it "credit worthiness". If i pay my house loan on time then the banks will consider lending me more money, or making it easier for me to borrow money the next time, or giving me a favourable rate when i borrow from them.
Let's say if i suddenly default on paying my housing loan for 2 consecutive months. What would happen? Besides sending the debt collector after me, the bank will downgrade my credit rating. A 'credit event' just happened to me. Now i have become not so credit-worthy as a person. And if my self worth is dependent on my being credit worthy, then it will definitely affects my well-being.
Now credit event is a bad thing- for the banks that is. If there is a haircut on the Greek debt, the lenders (banks, financial institutions, insurance companies and private lenders, but predominantly German & French banks) would have to write a loss on those loans in their books. Huge losses that are bigger than the bank's capital.
Not only is the Greece govt going bankrupt but the banks would go bankrupt too if there is a credit event in Greek debt. Even if the banks did not go bankrupt, they will have to sell off other Eurozone's sovereign bonds they hold to raise cash to avoid bankruptcy. And the banks would have to sell these Italian, French, Spanish government bonds at a loss to raise the cash to stay solvent. This massive sell-off will cause a contagion effect.
Before we go on, let's make one thing clear- sovereign bonds and government bonds are synonymous- they're referring to the same.
Now the connected part to this crisis. Now, American banks- the TBTF variety do not own much of these eurozone bonds directly but they certainly do make huge profits from under-writing these bonds (but they're not really insurance- a very important point). How?
American banks like JP Morgan and Bank of America have written a lot of "insurance" on these sovereign bonds, especially Greek bonds. These insurance are packaged from those eurozone bonds and re-sold to the financial market as new type of assets. They're called financial derivatives and these new type of derivatives based on countries defaulting on their loans are solely the creation of the American Wall Street financial "geniuses". The most infamous of these financial derivatives is the Credit Default Swap (CDS in short) and it is what caused the collapse of AIG group and is one of the precursor to the GFC.
Let me just touch on CDS a little as the "little" is all i know. CDS looks like insurance but it is not insurance. It is a derivative of a real assets and not real assets themselves- like cash, property, shares or stocks, bonds which has a value and which a person can hold (eg. a property). A derivative like CDS has value only because the real asset
It works on the principle that if bad things (a credit event/ bond default) happened as stated on the terms of the CDS agreement, then the seller of the CDS (the Wall St. banks) will pay the buyer of the CDS the value of the bond that is stated in the CDS agreement. In insurance, the insurance companies will pay the insured when bad things happened. Normally, the insured would not want bad things to happen to them.
The problem with derivatives and CDS is the buyer of the CDS would want bad things to happen. If bad things happened (a credit event), then those buyers will get their money. There is incentive for the buyers, and sellers i may add, to want bad things to happen. Add to this, the derivative market is not regulated unlike the insurance and other financial markets. This is the difference between insurance and CDS. It's an important difference. Today the derivatives market is another catastrophe waiting to happen. It is not without a reason that Warren Buffet once called them "financial weapons of mass destruction". He should know.
Yes, those American TBTF banks has issued lots of CDS from 2008 to 2010, and made tons of money from selling them. If those damned Eurozone sovereign bonds defaulted, those Wall Street banks will have to pay off these CDS. And so, not only will European banks go bankrupt but their American counterparts will do too. That is how it's all connected. And the world will get a repeat of the 2008 GFC but on a larger scale. No happy ending too. But does the Wall St. banks lose money from their CDS if those sovereign bonds (take Greek bonds) defaulted, or do they somehow make more money if those bonds defaulted? i will leave readers to find out the answer for themselves. Just keep in mind the TBTF Wall St. banks are predatory in nature and the role of those banks doesn't only have to be the seller, and the answer could be staring back at you.
Back to Greece. It took two bailout packages to calm Greece's water. After the first bailout failed to improve their condition, a second one was proposed. This time, the Germans felt angry and asked why should they be paying for other people's mistakes. German chancellor Angela Merkel faced enormous pressure not to save Greece. Finally the crisis was settled by imposing a bitter dose of austerity measures on the Greeks in exchange for bailout money. This was after the Europeans went around the world asking emerging markets, especially China, to help with the bailout. The Chinese politely refused because they're not stupid.
However the second bailout loan includes an official fifty percent voluntary haircut on Greek debt. As it is not a forced haircut, a credit event is averted. The second bailout got into more drama as then Greece prime minister George Papandreou on Nov 2011 called for a referendum on the bailout. It means asking the Greeks whether they would agree to get less services and entitlements from their govt by accepting the austerity measures.
The Greeks who had already protested heavily the austerity measures during the first bailout, would never agree to another. The whole bunch of EU officials together with Merkel and the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy got angry and so the Troika suspended the €8 billion payment of the first bailout package without which Greece will go bankrupt in Dec 2011. Papandreou had no choice but to backtracked. Greece was a just haircut away from bankruptcy.
As financial markets are very sensitive to these type of news, so does the bond markets fear the next country to fall.
Italy next? - the never-ending symptoms of the crisis
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| Source: HERE |
But unlike Greece, Italy as a whole is in better shape. Besides their all-too-often sex scandal, the then Silvio Berlusconi govt's problem is a weak economy (low growth) that could not support its needs to pay off its huge debts.
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| Source: HERE |
Also, most derivatives require yield rate to stay below a certain level. If yield rise above this threshold level and remain there for a fixed period of time, a credit event would follow. Again, this would trigger the financial derivatives market (eg. the CDS's) and would lead to bank bankruptcy.
There are hints the Italian drama is coming up again after Cyprus looked like it had "seemingly" finish its play. But we know that it is not finish yet as ordinary, decent people there are now suffering due to the policies enforced (forced?) upon them.
Go HERE to get a handle on the continuing drama of Italy's sovereign debt problem.
QE for the Eurozone - "Monetization" the solution?
Wikipedia defined Quantitative Easing, QE as "buying financial assets from commercial banks and other private institutions, thus creating money and injecting a pre-determined quantity of money into the economy. This is distinguished from the more usual policy of buying or selling government bonds to change money supply, in order to keep market interest rates at a specified target value". Whoa, quite a mouthful right.
However there is a much simpler definition that i'm sure many people already knew. QE is quite simply a monetary policy of printing paper money by the government. Everyone who has done Econs 101 knows that printing of currency debase or devalue the currency of that particular country. Too much supply of one goods (paper money in this case) reduces the demand (devalued currency) for that particular goods.
The ECB did not print more money to save the troubled countries of the eurozone because of the Germans. Mario Draghi aka Super Mario is no fool. Why? The ECB*, the central bank of the Eurozone is controlled by the Germans. Remember that Germany is the strongest economy in Europe. Everyone borrowed from them. They're a creditor nation. Doing a QE will only weaken the euro and if euro's value erodes then Germany will lose its purchasing power and perhaps its trade surplus too.
Nothing is written in stone yet and things are always volatile in the financial world. The ECB will always have this option available to them. But would a European version of QE save the eurozone? i have no answer for that. The answer could be found in the U.S. version of QE. Did it solve their financial and economic problems? We all know the answer to that is a big "No".
As an aside, there's a popular song by the group Dire Straits with lyrics that goes, "get your money for nothing..." Never has it been more true than in QE as it is exactly that- central bank creating new money "out of thin air". Who needs to earn wealth the old-fashioned way from work when you can have this kind of "new wealth" just by printing as much money as you like, right.
Suffice to say that banks and their bankers does not work for the betterment of humanity as a whole. One must remember this important point.
More symptoms - Cyprus and beyond
What happened in Cyprus?
Earlier we learned the word "debt haircut". The banking crisis in Cyprus introduced us to a new 'financial' term - "bank accounts haircut". Well, how does it work? It's simple actually. Take bank depositors' money and give them back less. In short, confiscate some or all of depositors money.
An example will make it clearer.
A depositor placed $10,000 in a bank account. Say the bank implement a 40% haircut. Voila, at the end of the day, the depositor can get back $6,000. A 10-year-old can do the arithmetic. It's like magic. Only thing is the depositors will not feel very happy seeing this kind of magic. That is what is going to happen to the many ordinary Cypriot depositors.
Now why would the banks there do this? If you have gotten this far, you would have known the answer already. The word to describe it has been used the most times in this piece. Cyprus's banks are bankrupt. The banks there went to the Eurozone with a hat in hand to ask for a bailout.
What did big brother said to them? You want money, sure, you have to follow our instructions. So they followed and did what you have just read. Take honest depositors money and make believe it's necessary to save the country from going bankrupt where all the while it's the banks that are so.
What happened there is a test ground for the bankers to see if they can do this to normal bank depositors. They got their answers. And it had started a precedent which they can implement in other troubled countries should the needs arise in the future. Click HERE to learn more.
For those decent, hard-working citizens of Cyprus, life's drama is still at play as they will still need to carry on their daily lives. The funny thing with reading other people's misfortune is the detached feeling we get that somehow these things will not happen to us, especially if these unfortunate events happened in a faraway country far removed from our reality.
But waht we failed to understand is these events are all carefully planned by the powers that be. It is not some random acts borned of confusion, or policy mistake or trial-and-error because those who make the policies do not fully understand what is happening or maybe they don't know how to solve all these problems.
Unlike decent people who lived ordinary lives making our daily life decisions, nothing happened by mistakes or chance at the level of the powers that be, not when these people have all the knowledge of what the problems really are.
Conclusion
There is only one conclusion to all this drama. i hate to say this and i will be brief, "it will all go up in smoke and the scary part is that it will be within our lifetime."
It does
At this moment, it is one of two major points that could cause the coming economic collapse. The end result is still the same no matter if the next crash happen in Europe or the U.S. or even in some small and seemingly insignificant country.
The outcome may not be immediately imminent but rest assure it is inevitable. And it will greatly affects me and my family too. The only thing left to do is take steps to protect ourselves and our loved ones. That is the only sensible thing.
All these alternative websites saying the global economy is going to crash are not saying it to frighten ordinary people like you and me. They're the messenger and not the cause of what is going to happen. They're doing it because it is the truth and they're trying to warn us. The signs are there hiding in plain sight. We only need to open our eyes to them.
So there. It is not only my opinion but many others who understand how the system works. This is the age we lived in. Take it or leave it.
* Update
Here is another perspective to the role of the ECB as the central bank of the Eurozone. I have decided to include it after much consideration because it is, perhaps, closer to the truth than what i have explained above.
You can read about it, "The Euro Is Not In Trouble. People Are" - HERE.
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As a small diversion from the topic but connected nevertheless, look at the chart below of capital flight from developing nations to tax haven located around the world. If we take the data in the chart as correct (Source: HERE and HERE), a total of $21 trillion is transferred to these offshore tax havens, out of which $9.5 trillion are from individuals.
That means $11.5 trillion are transferred by big corporations (including U.S. companies) or perhaps governments to evade taxes in their own countries? Food for thought ya.
Now, if the economies of Europe, the U.S., and the rest of the world are insolvent as many experts are saying, why is there still so much money hidden in these safe tax haven?
There, i hope this simplified explanation will enlighten readers as to what the Euro crisis is about and a little extra information of what's happening there.
Someone once said, “we do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are”. The phrase can be interpreted in a positive or negative way- positive that it may be good to "see the world as we are" in some situation, and bad if this positive interpretation is used to justify that there is no objective truth. But in the context of what we are talking of here (the Euro crisis) requires a person to "see the world as it really is".
Let us all open our eyes and at least try to see the world as it is, for once. If we could not see the world as it is, in all its ugliness, how could we even dream of making it beautiful for our children?
Source: all over the Internet, mainstream or otherwise.
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This essay is dedicated to both my parents who, in a better world, would have understand and explain it to me better, and a dear online friend, MWS for her encouragement without which i will definitely be too lazy to write this.
GR.GIF)