European Central Bank
© James ShiellThe European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany.

Brussels - You're not broke, you're adjusted. You're not miserable, you're emotionally fluxed. You're not using meaningful language, you're finding excuses. The politically obsessive EU has decided that the word "bankruptcy" has too much of a stigma.

It would be nice to think that this is just another case of vacuous people producing verbal vacuums, but it's more complex than that, as The Daily Mail explains:
The EU is trying to erase 'bankruptcy' from the English language and replace it with the term 'debt adjustment'.

The idea is being considered as part of wider reforms to harmonise financial arrangements across the EU, including making it less troublesome to open bank accounts in different countries and easier to escape from debt and be 'given a second chance'.
Ah, er, um, hang on... "Making it less troublesome to open bank accounts in different countries and easier to escape from debt...?"

Less troublesome for whom?

Easier for whom?

Most people undergo a sort of virtual vivisection by financial institutions when they get even slightly into debt. They suffer, pay their debts, and limp off to another pleasant meeting with the financial Inquisition down the track. Escaping from debt in any form is the impossible dream for most people.

Since credit ratings were introduced, they've been making life tougher for practically everyone. Even a single unpaid bill can be a ticket to loan refusal. However desperate you may be, there's always someone prepared to make things a bit financially worse for you.

Is the EU, in its infinite, country-pillaging grandeur, saying that the poor of bankrupt nations should suffer appalling unemployment, but that bankrupt individuals, often including ex-millionaires, shady businesspeople and serial con artists, should have reduced stigma, and easier options? As it is, honest bankrupts are penalized more, if anything, for their bankruptcy than bankrupt corporations and embezzling maniacs. If your little business goes down the tube through no fault of your own, you can't get a loan or anything else.

The stigma for honest bankrupts is enforced by the finance industry. Yet others should have things made easier for them in other countries around Europe as a whole? People who've made lifetime careers out of being bad risks to everyone they've ever spoken to should have a second chance to do it all again?
Riccardo Ribera d'Alcala, the EU's Directorate-General for Internal Policies who drafted the plan, wrote: 'The use of stigmatising labels should be ended, and the pejorative term "bankruptcy" should be replaced with the more neutral "debt adjustment." '

...Mr d'Alcala believes the word carries such a potent stigma that individuals who have suffered it struggle to persuade banks to lend them money to fund new ventures. If the terminology is changed, he thinks, creditors are more likely to be forthcoming.
With all due respect to Signor d'Alcala, creditors and banks are more likely to be forthcoming due to actual use of heavy weapons or actual insanity. Who in the finance industry will be "forthcoming" to a bad risk? They could lose their jobs for lending to insolvent people, however well "adjusted" those people may be.

If the UK's politicians have been less than thrilled on principle, there's another reason for skepticism, and it's statutory. "Bankruptcy" is a legal state in every nation. All countries have Bankruptcy Acts, in some form. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of forms of documentation which use the term.

Simply changing the terminology would cost a fortune, and would not alter documented legal status. It would also do nothing to improve the snowball's chance in hell most honest bankrupts have of conducting financial business in a more "harmonized" way.

How about a more radical solution - Distinguish between serial fraudsters and people who are honestly broke? Penalize the fraudsters. Create a criminal class of bankruptcy to make them pay for the fantastic, multi-billion dollar amounts of injury they do around the world every day of every year.

Give the honest people a break for once. First time for everything.