The Euro: Dead

[John Skelton]

Thanks aeolium - that's a very helpful if very gloomy read.

On the politics, I reckon Steve Bell captures them nicely here http://www.belltoons.co.uk/hotoffpress (Scroll down to If .... 6809-9-11-11_SHITKEBAB)

He's updated hot off the press Try http://www.belltoons.co.uk/bellworks...1-11_SHITKEBAB

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

love the Steve Bell site John Skelton .... must be summat up with me browser just can not get the Indie site to work at all well ...


watching This Week last night .. a moment of clarity ... O'neill to Portillo 'but the consequences of that will be horrendous'; Portillo ' ...it is going to be horrendous any way. it is which way do you want it ...' with apologies for a not too good and very nicotine deprived memory this am ...

this is also interesting ... more of the not in front of the voters lets put in the technocat fix ... it is really bad i think and we deserve the clarity and straight talk of Mr Bass from our politicats ...

[aeolium]

Yes, the Bell cartoons are very good. Does anyone remember the Revolutionary IF from another grim time about 20 years ago? It had some great cartoons of a climate-changed topsy-turvy calendar - e.g. a man waiting for a London bus as a huge tidal wave looms high behind and above him. Not perhaps so funny now....

The politicians don't want to tell people how bad the situation is, though they are keen to appear to be on top of it. Letting unelected technocrats take over and try to sort out the mess does give the elected people something of an excuse to fall back on if things go badly wrong.

While Mr Bass did not seem to be a very attractive character, his analysis did seem clear and persuasive. I have found in recent times that the analysis of what is happening in Europe (not necessarily the prescription for action) has been clearest and most searching from those of a more Eurosceptic disposition (or indeed those with no particular feeling either way) rather than from those of a more Europhile sentiment.

[Simon]

Check out the fantastic speech by Farage - says it all.

Of those who voted on it on my ISP a massive 94% supported him - even more than I would have imagined.

The Euro is dead, though the Eurocrats and Europoliticians have stuffed it and are pretending it's still on its perch. Blinkered, corrupt and obstinate, they will hock the next 10 generations to preserve their sinecures and fantasies. The people, of course, aren't allowed a say in anything, cf the Greek referendum that wasn't. Democracy in the Eurozone has disappeared - indeed, referenda are the things the Eurofascists are most frightened of.

With luck, the EU will soon be dead too, and they'll get rid of 110,000 pointless, wasteful bureaucrats and lawyers and save a few billlion quid a year.

Then we can get back to normal, friendly trading relationships within a "Common Market" - just like it was supposed to have been before that fool Heath sold us all down the river.

[MrGongGong]

Check out the fantastic speech by Farage - says it all.


Then we can get back to normal, friendly trading relationships within a "Common Market" - just like it was supposed to have been before that fool Heath sold us all down the river.

Oh dear me
that's two deluded fantasists
I guess you belong together

I love the idea of "back to normal" eeeeeer I don't think that's likely is it
maybe in 1950's rural Derbyshire but the rest of the world .........

[Serial_Apologist]

I love the idea of "back to normal" eeeeeer I don't think that's likely is it
maybe in 1950's rural Derbyshire but the rest of the world .........

"Millstone grit" might be a good description..............

[MrGongGong]

[scottycelt]

Then we can get back to normal, friendly trading relationships within a "Common Market" ...

You really think so, Simon?

I would think the remaining EU members would then be much more likely to simply put two huge fingers up to us and, in truth, who could really blame them?

The champagne corks may also be popping on the continent in wild celebration of a surly and rude tenant who has finally gone, hopefully (for the remaining members) once and for all ...

[ahinton]

Check out the fantastic speech by Farage - says it all.

What it says is
(a) all - about the manner in which most if not all of us here might expect you to react to it and
(b) all that you would expect from the chief practitioner of "UKIP if you want to; the lady's not for sleeping" (which indeed she rarely was).
The number of UKIP MPs in the British Parliament seems somehow to tell me rather more...

The Euro is dead, though the Eurocrats and Europoliticians have stuffed it and are pretending it's still on its perch. Blinkered, corrupt and obstinate, they will hock the next 10 generations to preserve their sinecures and fantasies. The people, of course, aren't allowed a say in anything, cf the Greek referendum that wasn't. Democracy in the Eurozone has disappeared - indeed, referenda are the things the Eurofascists are most frightened of.

I do not pretend to possess the expertise in economics that your boldly confident and dogmatic pronouncements and predictions suggest that you do, but I still believe that what you write is at best grossly over-simplistic. The recent attempts to promote a transaction tax, whilst not the same animal, of couse, nevertheless remind me of all those fees, commissions &c. that used to be levied by banks every time currency exchanges occurred; you start in UK with, say, £1,000 in cash, visit, say, eight west European countries within the space of a week and then return to UK and, even if you'd spent none of that cash, its value would have depleted by as much as 25%. This is only one good reason for a common currency. Another is that, since UK has itself managed to maintain its own common currency for many decades, why would it be such a problem elsewhere? and, when the union dissolves, is there much likelihood that any of its currently constituent parts adopt the Euro or some other currency besides sterling? I doubt it!

Referenda undoubtedly have an occasional part to play in democratic operations but, were every governmental decision to be held up by reason of being subjected to one, nothing would ever happen - a situation that is just what you seem to be railing against!

With luck, the EU will soon be dead too, and they'll get rid of 110,000 pointless, wasteful bureaucrats and lawyers and save a few billlion quid a year.

Whilst such a scenario is highly unlikely and would in any case not come about as a consequence of "luck", good or bad(!), has it occurred to you just how much it will cost to dismantle the Euro and replace it with 17 different currencies AND to dismantle the EU itself and replace it with - well, whatever it might be replaced with?

Then we can get back to normal, friendly trading relationships within a "Common Market" - just like it was supposed to have been before that fool Heath sold us all down the river.

Was that a river of blood, by chance? Sorry - ignore that. Utterly tasteless! But the event to which you are obviously referring is the occasion on which Sir Edward Heath as PM got Britain into EU, not when EU began life, which was much earlier - not long after the end of WWII, as you surely know - so, given the aspirations that Churchill developed following his considearble direct experience in one of the worst known conflicts in European history (not only European, I know, but we're only discussing Europe here), it is no more than sheer fantasy that the dissolution of the Euro and the EU would automatically and immediately give way to "friendly trading relationships within a "Common Market"", any more than such relationships existed in the years prior to the foundation of what we now know as the EU. Even the arguments that are going on at present over the Eurozone crisis are already prompting some to fear that Mr Cameron might one day soon return from a trip to Berlin, Paris or somewhere uttering the words "as no such undertaking has been given..."; God forbid!

Now I'm not for one moment suggesting that the EU and the Eurozone is without fault - far from it, indeed - and I don't think that anyone in his/her right mind would do that; however, the very fact that endemic global national indebtedness alone demonstrates beyond argument the extent of inextricable national interdependency makes it abundantly clear that the idea that each and every European country that's currently an EU member could suddenly go it alone without fundamental gross upheval is patently absurd; furthermore, in pre-EU days - and most especially in pre-internet times - there were no such things as instant transactions and communications and the place and operation of global markets was almost unrecognisably different to what they are today. Where one of the major problems lies has been in the timing of various nations' entry into EU; the 27 (so far) nations' economies are very different from one another. That said, this might soon change if one casualty of the current global economic crisis turns out to be a substantial levelling of nations' wealth, GDP, etc. Another issue (though not quite a "problem" as such) is that talk of "Europe" and that of "EU" and the "Eurozone" does not always sufficiently well recognise these as three quite distinct entities; "Europe" comprises many more nations than just the 27 current EU members or the 17 current Eurozone members. I consider myself to be an inhabitant of north west Europe and an Iranian colleague living in Shiraz to be an inhabitant of south east Europe. Whilst what constitutes "Europe" is to some extent a matter of personal opinion, to me it begins with Morocco in the south west and Iceland in the north west and extends eastwards to Kyrgyzstan, including Afghanistan (which the Brits have almost adopted as their own territory anyway over the past decade or so!) and what's still described as "north Africa" but obviously excluding Pakistan, Nepal, etc.; you probably regard it as someting quite considerably smaller, but I have no idea where you would place the boundaries between Europe and Africa and Asia.

[aeolium]

I think this essay by authors from the pro-EU think tank The Centre for European Reform is a powerful argument about the seriousness of the crisis facing the eurozone, the causes of that crisis and the wrongheadedness of the policies currently being pursued to address it. The authors put forward proposals for the action they think is needed, but are pessimistic about the prospects of that action being taken:

"On current policy trends, a wave of sovereign defaults and bank failures are unavoidable. Much of the currency union faces depression and deflation. The ECB and EFSF will not keep a lid on bond yields, with the result that countries will face unsustainably high borrowing costs and eventually default. This, in turn, will cripple these countries’ banking sectors, but they will be unable to raise the funds needed to recapitalise them. Stuck in a vicious deflationary circle, unable to borrow on affordable terms, and subject to quixotic and counter-productive fiscal and other rules for what support they do get from the EFSF and ECB, political support for continued membership will drain away."

[scottycelt]

I think this essay by authors from the pro-EU think tank The Centre for European Reform is a powerful argument about the seriousness of the crisis facing the eurozone, the causes of that crisis and the wrongheadedness of the policies currently being pursued to address it. The authors put forward proposals for the action they think is needed, but are pessimistic about the prospects of that action being taken:

"On current policy trends, a wave of sovereign defaults and bank failures are unavoidable. Much of the currency union faces depression and deflation. The ECB and EFSF will not keep a lid on bond yields, with the result that countries will face unsustainably high borrowing costs and eventually default. This, in turn, will cripple these countries’ banking sectors, but they will be unable to raise the funds needed to recapitalise them. Stuck in a vicious deflationary circle, unable to borrow on affordable terms, and subject to quixotic and counter-productive fiscal and other rules for what support they do get from the EFSF and ECB, political support for continued membership will drain away."

The real problem with the current EU (as I see it) is that the members all seem to have different ideas what the organisation is supposed to be "about".

In its "extreme" forms the Germans want moves towards full political union (which I personally support) and the British see it merely as a convenient trading club. These two views are wholly incompatible and something here has to give eventually.

Big decisions will have to be made shortly by the leaders of all the member countries, and cannot be postponed any longer, whether one claims to be 'europhile', 'eurosceptic', or simply sitting on the fence.

Interesting, if challenging, times ...