Will we default? I don't think we have the gumption.

David McWilliams posts yet another interesting take on the current shenanigans affecting our economy at the moment.

I personally feel that if concessions aren't made by those who helped blow the bubble then we should default. Sarkozy and Merkel are desperately trying to look as if they have some kind of authority when it simply isn't the case. Merkel of all people should be have more than a passing awareness of the dangers of inflicting punitive sanctions on a country for mistakes it made.

I would love our government to put a referendum to us later in the year with a few choices:

1. Do what we're told by Europe. Sell off all our assets and end back up as serfs.
2. Offer Europe a take-it-or-leave-it best-effort deal
3. Screw the loan, pull out of the euro, start printing our own currency again and take back control of our economy.

It's especially galling that the very people offering us the loan are offering it to us on the basis of paying them back the money they pumped into the bubble in the first place, making a tidy margin on the interest earned (in effect, doubling their interest on the original loan?)

The other European countries' banks (primarily German and French I think) need to learn that their actions have consequences too and they can't push all the pain onto Paddy last just because they screwed up too.

HOWEVER, I don't think we as a country have the balls or the cop-on to make a stand like that. If we had, we wouldn't be in this position in the first place. You only have to look at the mentality of the people who tried to get 'free' money out of the ATMs when they went haywire in December last year. You can see that the mindset of hoping to get something for nothing with no regard for the consequences still persists and I don't think the lesson will ever be learnt.

You only have to think about why warnings like this still have to be made in 2011 to see what kind of state we're in. No wonder Europe thinks it can ride roughshod over us - It probably can! We could make a start by ending crap like "Arthur's day".