Pour yourself an ouzo & face the drama, USA

GREECE is us. Both the US and Greece have too much debt. And not enough economic growth to generate adequate tax revenue to cover the debt.

Sure, there are lots of differences between Greece and the US. Some of those differences favor the US and some favor Greece.

For instance, over the weekend, Greece’s voters turned down austerity measures that would have gotten the country more loans from the European Union.

Since Greece is aligned with other nations in the EU, its problems become the problems of other countries.

When Greece catches a cold, all the other countries in the EU not only go for a tissue box but also have to pass one to Athens so its germs don’t spread all over that continent.

Greece is a tiny economy by world standards, but its troubles can reverberate throughout Europe. And if the EU gives in to Greece, how will the Union be able to control other beggar nations like Italy, Spain and Portugal?

Because of that, Greece, which has been foolishly described as an economically insignificant country, will have greater leverage than it deserves in the talks that will go on and on and on with the EU and Germany, its leader.

And there’s one other thing that’s scary about Greece, the US and any other financially developed nation: Nobody really knows who will get hurt if one of them fails to pay its debt.

Will a bank in the US suffer great losses because of Greece — even if it doesn’t have loans in that country— simply because the US bank does business with an Asian bank that’s involved in Greece? I purposely made that sentence complex because the situation is that complicated.

And how will Greece’s problems affect complex financial products called derivatives?

Derivatives aren’t very well understood even by the experts. And nobody really knows what sort of financial avalanche could occur because of trillions of dollars’ worth of derivative securities — securities made from other securities— that have been sliced and diced and spread around the world. What about the US? No country owes as much money to creditors as we do. And they aren’t necessarily friendly creditors.

China, Japan and OPEC — to name a few — have been buying US government debt in enormous amounts.

But what if China suddenly needs an extra billion dollars to spend at home and decides to sell its American bonds?

What if China also has exposure to Greece, and the situation in the Mediterranean causes Beijing to make decisions about its American debt holdings that it wouldn’t have made before the EU debt crisis? What if? What if? What if? What else do Greece and the US have in common? Both countries have reckless politicians who like to go to the edge of the cliff just to get a good view.

Wall Street took the crisis in Greece Monday in stride with the Dow Jones Industrial Average declining just 46.53. We’ll all care more when stocks take the situation more seriously.

China rigged its stock market again this week. The country is afraid that the market margin bubble is about to burst.

The only difference between there and here is that China is open about the rigging. The US does it secretly through surrogates on Wall Street — which is probably what happened on Monday.

Shouldn’t a democratic society be more open about government actions than a Communist one?

The price of WTI crude plummeted almost 8 percent Monday. Why? If you listen to the nitwits, you’ll believe that Wall Street apparently woke up over the weekend and decided that the world economy wasn’t doing so good.

Well, economic conditions around the world have been lousy for more than seven years.

Oil prices go up and down not because of some fundamental event like the economy. The volatility is because traders like to trade. They need action and don’t care if it’s caused by rising or falling prices.

In case you missed my Saturday column, the Labor Department reduced by 60,000 the number of jobs created in this country in April and May.

As I mentioned in the spring, the figures for those months were artificially inflated by assumptions and guesses that Labor is only now correcting. The latest number — June’sJ gain of 223,000 — will probably also be revised lower. July’s figures ( which will come out in August) will also beb boosted by statistical guesses. So it should be decent when first reported and then revised lower.

The August report that is released in September should be decent until it, too, is revised lower.

But September, November and December’s job growth should be stinkers and cause the Federal Reserve to again hesitate to raise interest rates.