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Posted on 05/03/2012 11:38:30 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
With Europe plunging back into recession and unemployment soaring, Francois Hollande, the French presidential candidate, is calling for growth objectives to be reprioritised over the chemotherapy of austerity.
Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has meanwhile continued to insist that on the contrary, Europe must persist with the hairshirt. What's needed is political courage and creativity, not more billions thrown away in fiscal stimulus. Stick with the programme, she urges, as the anti-austerity backlash reaches the point of outright political insurrection.
Hollande and Merkel are, of course, both wrong. What Europe really needs is a return to free-floating sovereign currencies. Only then will Europe's seemingly interminable debt crisis be lastingly resolved. All the rest is just so much prancing around the goalposts, or an attempt to make the fundamentally unworkable somehow work.
The latest eurozone data are truly shocking, much worse in its implications both for us and them than news last week of a double-dip recession in the UK. Even in Germany, unemployment is now rising, with a lot more to come judging by the sharp deterioration in manufacturing confidence. For Spanish youth, unemployment has become a way of life, with more young people now out of a job (51.1pc) than in one. In contrast to the US, where the unemployment rate is falling, joblessness in the eurozone as a whole has now reached nearly 11pc. Against these eye-popping numbers, Britain might almost reasonably take pride in its still intolerable 8.3pc unemployment rate.
There is only one boom business in Spain these days – teaching English and German. No prizes for guessing where these students are heading.
Hollande's opportunism in calling for a growth strategy he must know cannot be delivered looks like being answered only by intensifying recession. Maybe Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, will
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
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The European Commission’s top economists warned the politicians in the 1990s that the euro might not survive a crisis, at least in its current form. There is no EU treasury or debt union to back it up. The one-size-fits-all regime of interest rates caters badly to the different needs of Club Med and the German bloc.Just because the beneficial crisis is getting more crisis-ier (sic) doesn’t mean that the sought-for benefits evaporate; rather, it means that they become closer to being within reach.
The euro fathers did not dispute this. But they saw EMU as an instrument to force the pace of political union. They welcomed the idea of a “beneficial crisis”. As ex-Commission chief Romano Prodi remarked, it would allow Brussels to break taboos and accelerate the move to a full-fledged EU economic government. …
I still say the only way out of this mess is with autonomous android robots and AI.
Sounds a lot like Obamacare, or anything else he has decreed.
That, of course was Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.
There were grand threads about the euro and EuroZone before it was introduced at the turn of the century.
The resident FReeper EUSSR expert at the time was MadIvan (UK), also creator of "The Winston Churchill Chapter of The Vast Right Wing", who presciently noted, "The euro is stealth capitalism. We shall witness the grand battle between socialism and capitalism. The outcome has already been witnessed."
yitbos
Another whacked-out economic piece from the Telegraph. They’ve been doing it for roughly two years, and the doomsday episode hasn’t gone like they predicted.
Where are they going to get the Euro’s from? Each other? Please give austerity a chance being it is the only real option. Don’t spend yourselves into a hurricane of debt like Democrats in the USA have!
“is calling for growth objectives to be reprioritised over the chemotherapy of austerity.”
reprioritize
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reprioritize#English
To arrange things in a new order of importance; to prioritize again
Are you sure MadIvan said THIS? Or is this some kind of typo or Freudian slip?
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