Greece; where the beer is free and the markets are not

The EU has cobbled together an agreement based on article 122 of the recently enacted Lisbon Treaty that allows bailouts to EU member states in the event of a natural disaster.

This is an interesting concept, and though I would agree that Greece's statist Euro-binge is certainly a disaster of epic proportions, it is far from natural. For some reason, I can't get the image of Clark Griswold in National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation out of my head as he bet and lost his family's life savings at the blackjack table and resorted to borrowing money from his ne'er-do-well cousin to gamble his way back to wealth with predictable results.

The new EU mechanism is meant to reign in market forces that drove up the spread on Greek bonds to unmanageable levels after several months of eurocratic foot dragging. Additionally, the Eurocratic elite has waged a fierce war of words against rating agencies like S & P for downgrading the status of Greek bonds to junk. I guess these nefarious doers of evil must have forgotten that their job was to help prop up bloated welfare states and not to give investors a picture of the risk involved. We'll certainly see how the markets will react when they open today, but here is my best guess. If we could somehow see Adam Smith's "invisible hand", I'm pretty sure it would be giving the EU the finger.