Ten Days to a EuroZone Collapse?

So says a piece in the Financial Times, here excerpted from behind the paywall.

Things are moving very fast indeed on the Euro front:

  • U.S. banks stop lending to European governments. While this is good news, the possibility that the Fed may rescue Europe is very, very bad news. Our own life raft is barely treading water, and now liberals want us to invite a dying elephant to climb aboard.
  • And not the Fed, then the IMF, which America also funds to a large extent.
  • This article from Der Spiegel is a good roundup on consensus wisdom, which boils down to the rest of Europe wondering why Angela Merkel won’t just give in and pay their bills.
  • There’s word she might even do it, but only if she can get France, Finland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Austria to join Germany in issuing “elite” Eurobonds. I mean, what’s another trillion in taxpayer equity flushed down the toilet in comparison to the beautiful dream of European integration?
  • Even Poland wants Germany to take a more active role, something that has not traditionally brought Poland tidings of comfort and joy.
  • Daniel Hannan at NRO provides a nice summary of the state of play:

    From the beginning, the Brussels elites made it clear that, to adapt Abraham Lincoln, their paramount object was to save the Union. Never mind if that meant imposing epochal poverty and emigration on the southern members, and unprecedented tax rises on the northern. Never mind if it meant toppling the elected prime ministers of Italy and Greece and replacing them with Eurocrats (respectively a former European Commissioner and a former vice president of the European Central Bank — two perfect specimens of the people who caused the crisis in the first place). They were prepared to pay any price to keep the euro together — or, more precisely, to expect their peoples to pay, since EU employees are generally exempt from national taxation.

  • How expensive will a Euro bank bailout be? Keep in mind that at one point during the 2008 meltdown, Morgan Stanley owed Uncle Sam $107 billion. With a B. For one bank.
  • In the mid-1990s, Bulgaria got a good look at a currency meltdown first-hand. They only recovered by adopting a currency board for the Lev (which is exactly what Steve H. Hanke and Kurt Schuler had suggested in 1991.)
  • The British Foreign office is already planning for a Euro collapse.
  • A general strike shuts down Portugal.
  • Finally, one Irish commentator puts things in purely mercenary terms:

    The only beneficiaries of the State’s assumption of [Anglo Irish Bank]’s liabilities are taxpayers in the countries whose banks were the reckless lenders to Anglo. Anglo, for all the guff at the time of the bank guarantee, had no systemic importance to the Irish economy. Irish taxpayers had no moral or other liability for its debts.

    The sole reason for saving it was the ECB’s insistence that no euro zone bank should fail. Had Anglo failed, the costs would have been borne primarily by European banks and consequently by European taxpayers.

    So the undertaking by the Irish State to stump up €47 billion to pay those private debts is an act of extreme (if extremely demented) euro-altruism. We are Europe’s ragged-trousered philanthropists, bailing out the euro with money we don’t have and that our European partners are kindly lending us at penal interest rates.

    And this single act of insane generosity wipes out every red cent we’ve got from Europe since 1973.

    [snip]

    And for what? For less than nothing. For a moment of panic, a daft notion, a stupid indulgence in bluster and bravado. Some bleary-eyed fools decided, in the middle of the night, that they could bluff the markets by throwing all the chips we might ever have on to the table. It didn’t take long for the markets to realise that their hand contained nothing better than a pair of deuces.

    But the gamble failed for Europe too. There might be some kind of (very expensive) pride in being able to say that little Ireland took the hit to save the euro zone, like the starry-eyed gal who takes a bullet for the outlaw in a corny western. But we saved nothing. All we managed to do was to buy the euro zone leaders more time in which to delude themselves that there was no real crisis.

  • Tags: , , , , , ,

    Leave a Reply