Every now and then a word in our vocabulary gets to be very popular - if inaccurate - in its use. The current word du jour is "Contagion" as in "We need to contain the Greek contagion before it spreads to the rest of Europe". This, of course is as if the financial troubles of Greece are some sort of  contagious disease.  They aren't.  In fact the very idea that Greece can cause problems for other economies and needs to be somehow isolated is, well, silly.  This isn't some sort of flu that you can catch if you stand too close to the sick person.  This is, if we are going to use a disease analogy, a cancer that almost everyone is carrying and it is only a matter of time before it becomes serious.  

To carry the analogy a little further, it is true that 100% of men who live past the age of 65 will sooner or later get prostate cancer.  It is also true that for most men this cancer is so slow growing that it is usually left untreated because old age will kill us before the cancer will.  However, for a significant minority of men, prostate cancer becomes a silent killer - growing more rapidly than is usual and needing to be cut out, radiated, or treated with chemotherapy. Countries, of course, are not men and they do not have life spans that are genetically pre-determined.  They either last or perish because of cultural decisions that cause long term side effects.

Virtually every country in the world right now has the same kind of cancer. These cancers include government entitlements (meaning that they are paying current benefits to their citizens that cost much more than they collect in taxes) and covering the difference entitlements create by borrowing money or printing it up.  To one extent or another we have it, the Europeans have it, the Asians have it, and it is growing and spreading. The Greeks have a Stage 3 tumor, meaning that they are in real trouble of dying sooner rather than later, but we have a Stage 2, meaning that it is spreading and creating more and more trouble. We could either cut it out now or face the same type of illness now being suffered by the Greeks. Pretending that we don't have cancer will not make it go away any more than an actual human being can avoid being sick by not having regular checkups. This checkup might make them face the illness that they have growing inside them – and deal with it.  Recognizing the problem or not, the disease is going to kill us no matter how we pretend otherwise.

So here we sit, just waiting for the government and financial markets to do the right thing while the disease grows.  We must as individuals protect ourselves from, well, ourselves, the sick government and poor economic structure that we have created.  The good news is that there is an effective vaccine for your money and it is called gold.  It is the only treatment which is guaranteed to prevent total shut down and financial death.  Get some as fast as you can.  While the idiots in Washington and Wall Street pretend that the Greek Flu is being contained, the tumor inside us continues to grow faster than ever and they are not going to acknowledge it until it kills them.