Wednesday 27 March 2013

Euro trainwreck update

The eurozone continues on its depressing path to destruction: we've now reached the stage where some people in the hard-hit countries of southern Europe are seriously proposing leaving the euro. The only thing that surprises me is that it took them so long, but people do tend to have a great fear of the unknown. But with Germany still refusing any real sharing of wealth with the southern countries, still insisting that the only solution to the crisis is years and years of massive pain and misery for the south, it's pretty much inevitable that those countries are eventually going to decide that leaving the euro will be less awful than staying in it. At the moment it looks like Italy will be the first to go, which isn't too surprising because it's big enough to be confident about surviving on its own. But who knows, Cyprus might even beat them to it. In any case, once Italy goes, the death of the euro must surely follow soon after. At which point Germany's export sector, subsidised for more than a decade by the relative poverty of southern Europe, will largely collapse. And that, I have to say, will look a hell of a lot like poetic justice. I wonder if many people in Germany will then be willing to admit that their government's policies were wrong? Will we get people saying, "Gee, maybe if we'd introduced some sort of Finanzausgleich for the entire eurozone, we wouldn't now be stuck with massive unemployment and economic decline?" I doubt it, somehow. People always find some way of blaming someone else for their own stupid mistakes, don't they.

1 comment:

Chefweeks said...

And we all remember what happened the last time the German economy spiraled.