During the Oscar telecast one year, Johnny Carson wisecracked that if a terrorist were to blow up the auditorium and kill everyone in the audience, it would be the worst thing ever to happen to showbiz but the best thing to happen to Pia Zadora’s never-quite-airborne career as a singer and actress.  And so it is with the Pia Zadora of the currency world, the U.S. dollar. It is buoyant tonight as the muckety-mucks of eurobanking prepare to meet on the developing crisis in…Italy!  What with Greece garnering most of the headlines recently, we’d almost forgotten that what remains of the Roman Empire is in equally deplorable financial shape. The euroministers have roundly denied that an emergency meeting scheduled for this morning has anything to do with Italy’s worsening situation, but that’s the same as spelling out “Crisis in Rome!” on a marquee.

A Forbidden Question

And speaking of Europe’s debt problems, in the latest issue of The Privateer, editor Bill Buckler asks a forbidden question that puts things in lucid perspective:  “How can [Greece,] a nation of 11 million people expect to pay off a government debt amounting to 475 billion euros? We have read variations on this question many times in the mainstream financial media,” Buckler notes, but “we have yet to read this question: ‘How can a nation of 310 million people expect to pay off a (funded) government debt amounting to U.S. $14.5 TRILLION?‘  If you do the arithmetic, you will see the ratio of debt to population is slightly lower in Greece than it is in the U.S.”