Mr Monti yesterday warned that Mrs Merkel’s entire economic agenda “risks being undermined because of lack of promptness in setting up the necessary instruments to limit the contagion.”
That\’s from the people who have failed to set up the basic structure necessary to keep the euro going for well over a decade. You know, that thought that such a currency union will only work with full fiscal and economic union? Which they were told before they started and yet they went ahead assuming that when push came to shove it would simply appear because it needed to?
Aww, give them some credit! They’re trying to save the dream. And their jobs.
How many generations of Germans are going to have to live under the assumption that every mistake the rest of Europe makes its their fault and they have to fix it?
I think the current generation of German politicians were deeply involved in the mistake Europe made.
The member states wanted the single currency but didn’t want Brussels to have control of it and their budgets. That is why it is how it is.
The Euro is a very strict system which in order to work without explicit fiscal transfers required northern states to undermine their own competitiveness and southern states to reform their labour markets to be more flexible and their systems of government to be less obstructive and corrupt.
They were supposed to be coordinating their economies but didn’t. They were also supposed to be regulating their banks and nobody really was doing that. That doesn’t mean Brussels should do those things for them nor that Brussels doing them would make things better.
Getting out of Euros and buying CHF’s as we speak……
They all wanted the benefits of the Euro but none of the responsibilities. Now they all want to keep the gains but someone else to pay for the losses. I’m afraid I include Germany in this – it has built its prosperity through beggar-my-neighbour policies and is now trying desperately to hang on to the wealth it has acquired at its neighbours’ expense.
The fiscal compact fails to recognise that if Germany keeps its trade surplus, about 40% of which is generated by trade with the Eurozone and a further 20% with the wider EU, other Eurozone countries can only return to trade balance by developing export markets OUTSIDE the Eurozone – which is much more difficult than selling luxury goods to your profligate Eurozone partners and providing them with unsustainable finance to fund their excessive spending.