# Southern Europe: Beyond a Demographic Point of No Return

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-europe-beyond-a-demographic-point-of-no-return/589407>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [July 18, 2011, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-europe-beyond-a-demographic-point-of-no-return/589407 "2011-07-18T02:54:36Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\
**Post date:** [July 18, 2011, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-europe-beyond-a-demographic-point-of-no-return/589407/1 "2011-07-18T02:54:36Z")

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According to David Goldman, buying bonds from these countries would be a bad itea:

> [@](#):
>
> The absence of the devaluation option within the Euro mechanism requires a great deal more theater on the part of feckless and incompetent politicians who made their careers by dispensing borrowed money to their voters.
> 
> That is true for the moment, when the elder dependent ratio for Southern Europe stands at around 25%. Between 2020 and 2045, however, the infertility of Southern Europe will catch up with it, and the elder dependent ratio will rise to over 60%–an impossible, unmanageable number. At that point the character of these countries will change radically; they will be overwhelmed with immigrants from North Africa as well as sub-Saharan Africa, who will not have the skills or the habits of civil society to maintain economic life. And their economies will slide into a degree of ruin comparable only to that of classical antiquity. Perhaps the Chinese will operate Greece as a theme park. Spain, which can draw on Latin American immigrants, is likely to be the least badly off…
> 
> Why would anyone buy a 30-year bond from any of these countries? By 2041, there won’t be enough taxpayers left to pay the coupons. And that raises a related question: what is time horizon of an equity investment in those countries? Although Standard and Poor’s calculates the duration of equities at somewhere between 20 and 30 years, that is a somewhat dubious estimation of interest sensitivity, not a measure of the horizon of expectations. Markets are notoriously short-sighted. But at some point markets must recognize that companies that have a rapidly-shrinking pool of workers as well as customers are in no position to earn profits. The real demographic crunch will start to hit in the mid-2020s, and it is possible that markets will ignore the inevitable demographic doom until then.

> **[All Analysis Articles | Seeking Alpha](https://seekingalpha.com/latest-articles)**
>
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**Author:** ![twickster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ec9cab/32.png) [@twickster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/twickster)\
**Post date:** [July 18, 2011, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-europe-beyond-a-demographic-point-of-no-return/589407/2 "2011-07-18T04:35:58Z")

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We don’t allow threads that are a link (or quote) with no indication from the OP what the point is, so I’m going to close this.

**Chen019** , if you had a point, let me know what it was and I’ll reopen the thread, perhaps moving it to a different forum.

**twickster** , MPSIMS moderator