EU doomed - collapsing monstrosity - smoldering toxic debt - pig nations

Source: Telegraph

Gerald Warner

May 19th, 2010

The EU is as doomed as its currency – let's get out from under this collapsing monstrosity

The European experiment has failed and is only artificially being kept alive on a life-support system of taxpayer-funded bailouts. The euro is now a zombie currency: only the political will of the European nomenklatura keeps it nominally in existence. That is the exact reverse of the proper relationship between a currency and the state: the currency should be the expression of a healthy economy testifying to the legitimacy of the government it represents. Instead, a synthetic European super-state is showing its non-viability and moribundity through the implosion of its currency.

Do you see that smoking slag-heap of smouldering, toxic debt? The polite name for it is the European Central Bank (ECB). It is a landfill site being used by bond investors to dump Greek waste paper and other unwanted garbage. It resembles the back yards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when the sub-prime time-bomb exploded. Steptoe and Son would turn up their noses at such a tip. As the ECB’s president, Jean-Claude Trichet, despairingly confided to Der Spiegel on Monday, Europe’s economy “is in its most difficult situation since World War II or perhaps even since World War I”.

That was an unwarrantedly optimistic assessment. The European economy is in its worst situation since 1789 and the eve of the French Revolution. Indeed, the parallel is uncanny. Jacques Necker, the Vince Cable of his day and similarly the darling of every armchair fiscal reformer in France, was the father and paradigm of all the debt-loving, statist, spendthrift finance ministers of today.