The stars are fading fast in Euroland and there are fears that France – a Euroland core member – faces disastrous contagion if the emergency EU summit called for July 21 again fails to deliver.
No stars for European leadership
David Blanchflower, a professor at Dartmouth College and Bloomberg Television contributing editor, discusses the euro-zone debt crisis and talks about the results of the European bank stress tests and the U.S. debt ceiling. (Source: Bloomberg).
Twelve months after Greece hit the debt buffers — thanks to a financial crisis triggered by north Atlantic finance and the subsequent abject failure of US and UK governments to hold the bankers to account — the sovereign debt crisis, is set to engulf Europe and then, they tell us, the rest of the interconnected global economy. Its make or break time the pundits in all the major media are telling us and if Europe’s navel gazing politicians once more fail to compromise we should absolutely prepare for the worst. Boom time for sales of Armageddon bunkers.
Here is Andrew Simms, of the UK’s New Economics Foundation: “Timidity and collusion on banking reform will be even more dangerous … If there is one thing we have learnt, it is that when profits are to be made, self-regulation doesn’t work. Government timidity over banking reform has left us with an arrogant and overly powerful elite in the banks we bailed out who feel able to award themselves huge bonuses, while the public pays the price for a crisis they caused. This can’t go on. Government can still get ahead of the game with the banks, but they must act quickly.”
We couldn’t have made it plainer ourselves. Was Eric Cantona right all along?
UPDATE: Most unhelpfully, for market sentiment anyway, are these remarks in Der Spiegel attributed to Angela Merkel, kingpin in the efforts to resolve the crisis: “German Chancellor Angela Merkel has dampened hopes that the special euro zone summit on the common currency crisis on Thursday will break the impasse over a second bailout for Greece. Spain and Italy, whose economies are under threat of being engulfed by the crisis, are pushing for a swift deal to calm financial markets, and senior German economic advisors joined a chorus of warnings that the survival of the single currency was at stake … Merkel said there was “a big yearning” for a “single large move — preferably spectacular” to solve the crisis. But there won’t be one, she said.”
Why not? Well it might just be that the Wutbürgers – the grassroots movement of largely independent “angry or enraged citizens” that is disrupting politics all over Germany — are not happy with demands that Germany continue to underwrite the European bailout.
According to the New York Times, the populist Wutbürger movement– roughly the German equivalent of the Tea Party in the US — “… has become so entrenched that the German Language Society in December named “Wutbürger” word of the year for 2010. ‘The word reflects a particular mood’ , said Andrea-Eva Ewels, managing director of the German Language Society…”.
For more on this grassroots phenomenon that could spell the end of the eurozone, read this perceptive piece: Birth of the Rebel Citizen in Germany in Eflux magazine.
Related articles
- Scoundrels Disguised as Bankers (french-news-online.com)
- Europe’s PIGs: Waiting for a miracle (finance.fortune.cnn.com)
- Euro Crisis a Death by A Thousand Day Trades (thepressnet.com)
- The crisis in Euroland is far from over (thejc.com)
- (ADIEU) IMF slams Europe’s handling of the crisis #no2eu (dreadnoughtuk.wordpress.com)
