And while I do actively trade and invest on the ramifications of the…

In case we didn’t hear about it, the mainstream media wants us to know Greece is still trying to cut social services so that banks who lent the country money don’t have to recognize their losses.  And while a similar dynamic is playing out here in the US as we continue to subsidize the TBTF banks who have gotten trillions in welfare in the last three years while listening to conservatives and liberals and democrats and repubublicans all explain why we can’t afford social services because in a few decades they might be too expensive since our budget has been destroyed by bailing out and continuing to subsidize the TBTF banks.  And while I do think there’s still lots of pain to be dealt with as most of the TBTF banks would fail if not for all this continued welfare they’re getting from taxpayers around the world and I do remain short the XLF and the biggest scapegoat in the mortgage-securitization-robo-signing-document-fabrication debacle that’s only going to get bigger.

And while I do actively trade and invest on the ramifications of the US having created trillions of dollars of worthless dollars to enable the banking system to pass off its losses to the taxpayer, nothing that happens in Greece or in Ireland or in Spain is going to impact my trading here.  As a citizen of the world, my heart goes out to the suffering public and poor in all those countries whose suffering has increased as the austerity movement and skyhigh global unemployment wreak havoc on their lives.   But as an investor, let’s put some perspective on just how insignificant those countries’ economies truly are to investors here.

Greece’s GDP is about $330 billion right now and after all these austerity cuts in the face of a major recession, that figure will likely drop.  $300 billion or so is how much the entire economy in Greece will likely generate in 2012.   Meanwhile, here in the US, one little tech company in one little town called Cupertino, California, will generate close to $150 billion in 2012.   Yes, Apple’s annual sales next fiscal year will be half of what every worker at every company, big and small, in all of Greece will generate.

Apple will generate some $6MM in sales per employee.  Greece will generate some $30,000 per citizen.   Greece has a population of about 11 million people or about half as many people live in the New York City Metropolitan Area.   And while it would be awful for government of the city of those people to be facing possible default, it wouldn’t destroy our economy or our stock market. In 1975, as NYC and the Federal government were going back and forth exactly like Greece and the EU government have been going back and forth on “to bailout or not to bailout and just how much do we bailout and how much do they need to cut”, the US stock market was up some 30%:

In fact NYC itself has been in Greece’s shoes before, for example in 1975 when the US Federal Government under President Ford wouldn’t bail out a nearly bankrupt city and its budget until the city government started proactively making budget cuts.   It’ll probably happen again someday.

I am actively scaling into some of my favorite tech longs using both common stock and lately I’ve been getting more aggressive using some slightly out-of-the-money calls dated six months out or so.  And I continue to trade some of the TBTF bank ETFs and the foreclosure-gate scapegoat to the short side.  But none of that has anything to do with Greece and Greece has nothing to do with any of that.

Greece doesn’t matter.  Except to take the other side of whatever panic is supposedly about to ensue around our global economy because of it.