Global statism - wherever you go on this planet, you run into the same wall.
I am not sure I understand everything Bass says; however, having blogged much about the US', Europe's and a little about China's highly unsound economic conditions, I welcome the reminder of the terrible and undignified state of Japan, and the rare voice that (beginning at time mark 4:45) points out quite correctly that my native Germany is not the giant of economic wisdom, discipline, and power that everybody seems to think she is. Like the other "great" powers mentioned above, she is a phase-out model, unfortunately, however, one with an outstanding record of repeating the mistakes of the past.
I elicit shock with my (Germany-experienced) American acquaintances when I suggest that Germans are the most "religious" people I know. My compatriots uniformly and fanatically believe in the state, any state, Imperial, Fascist, Communist, Democratic, as long as it is impressive and imposing enough, the divine state, subliminally so paternally awesome as to make people give up the inconvenience of self-responsibility for unconditional compliance. We have not learnt the most important lesson of our history, when we got rich after the second world war, we did not understand why, calling the phenomenon das Wirtschaftswunder (the economic miracle), and now that things are turning bad, we do not know why either. What scares me most is that at the core the wish for authoritarian leadership is as strong as ever, and the ridiculous fiction of democracy (in its present form) has only helped to veil the danger. But this latter point deserves a post in it's own right.
And below a more lengthy (24 minutes vs. 6 minutes) interview, where Kyle Bass repeats most of his points made in the above clip, and adds lots of good ideas.
