Whether you're waiting for the fat lady to sing or your doggie to come home, the word snausages does not bring out the digestive juices quite like the word sausages does. Yet, in some ways, they're both the same thing. You take what you got and you make the best of it.
That's the beauty and (at times of crisis) the bane of democracy. Lots of cooks, lots of contention. The result is always a compromise.
So I'm not going to defend the details of the EU's latest rescue plan for Greece, which is also supposed to back-stop Italy and any other member country with trouble paying back its loans. The fact is, you got a deal. It may seem like snausages, a dog's dinner, but it's a deal.
With one cook, one vision, you get a better recipe. Our best businesses are, despite some democratic trappings, essentially dictatorships. When the visionary leaves, everyone heads for the exits. This can be either an orderly retreat (AAPL) or the last days of Pompeii (FSLR).
So we come back to Europe.
James Kostohryz says Europe is doomed. It's easy to see why, just as it was easy to become depressed in America over the health care debate or the deficit hostage-taking. We're watching a whole lot of infighting right before our eyes. We know we're going to get snausages, not sausages.
But that's democracy. Democracy is governing in the open, with lots of participation. It's a terrible way to run a government except, as Winston Churchill observed, for every other way. It's the only way to get a result everyone is willing to accept, and the best way to avoid war. Which is the alternative here. Economic war followed by the real thing.
The result of this week's European summit is a framework; Kostohryz calls it a stop-gap, perhaps insufficient to deal with the problem. The problem will remain. In any negotiation you have to go right up to the abyss, and look directly into it before the minds of everyone are concentrated toward a solution that's better than falling over.
It's ugly. Much better to have such things take place in a locked room, in a palace surrounded by soldiers, far beyond the public's sight than to have to watch it on TV. It would be much better for some European dictator to merely impose their will on the whole and make everyone dance to their tune – any tune – than to watch democracy in action.
But we've seen what dictators do. We've seen where dictatorship leads. It leads to war, it leads to utter disaster, or it leads to the dictator being pulled out of a sewer pipe somewhere and shot in cold blood because their crazy was allowed to control everything, and everyone, for too long.
Compared to any single actor's answer to the world's problems, the dance of democracy smells pretty good to me. And when you consider the alternatives it should smell pretty good to you, too.
Personally, I'm going to buy the dips. When everyone is most afraid that no solution will come from all this, that is when I'm going to buy a Europe ETF like WisdomTree's EU. And when everyone feels most certain that the crisis can be resolved, that is when I'm going to sell.
I'll make money that way, and you can too.
Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.
