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  1. Wealth
June 25, 2012

Only a Fool Would Try to Save the Euro

By Spear's

Have you noticed how anyone who supports the euro or thinks it’s the answer to anything inevitably ends up to be seen as an errant fool?

Have you noticed how anyone who supports the euro or thinks it’s the answer to anything inevitably ends up to be seen as an errant fool?

Don’t let’s bother to dwell on those who told us during the battle over the Maastricht Treaty – Hurd, Howe, Heseltine, Sutherland and the heads of Vodafone, BT, Unilever and hundreds of others – that if Britain didn’t join the Euro-zone it would be finished, that Frankfurt would take over from the City and that our industry would be deprived of its biggest market. Well, ‘They’re not singing any more …’

Now we have the world’s leaders, the entire G20, urging Germany et al. to save the euro, when it is clear that it is a job-destroying, debt-inducing and deflationary cancer, which is threatening the world economy. Even more extraordinary is the fact that the euro has destroyed democracy in Greece, Italy and Spain, and yet the leaders of these EU-satraps and their voters are all determined to go on living with this cancer!

And then the most ridiculous – and dangerous – image of them all, was the sight of the British prime minister flying to Berlin and actively pleading and encouraging Germany to create a giant political and fiscal union across the continent! Try explaining that one to the queues of BEF soldiers waiting on the beaches of Dunkirk, or the brave men who assaulted the last German “union” in Europe on the D–Day beaches. And this PM got a double first at Oxford! It’s enough to make old Champagne Charlie – Von Ribbentrop himself – laugh out loud in his grave.

Now the IMF joins in the nonsense, determined to save the euro as well. Mme Christine Lagarde of France, who inherited this international money-pot from the Frenchman who couldn’t tell a roomful of nude women from a euro bail-out, seems determined to break every rule in its proven rule-book, namely devaluation + bail-out = recovery, because no country in the Eurozone can do devaluation! If she wasn’t French, she wouldn’t be arguing for the impossible, and misusing IMF funds to save a currency zone as opposed to a country with its own currency. No wonder the US has refused to provide further funds to its coffers.

Arguing for the impossible? Well, let’s do something all those running around on taxpayers’ money trying to save the Euro, but paying no taxes themselves, are not doing, namely let’s fast forward another decade and ask how those who couldn’t keep up with Germany in the last decade hope to do so in the next ten years. They have to claw back their lost ground on productivity and pay for all their bail-outs, sovereign and banking, all at the same time, as well as suddenly upping their game and keeping pace with Germany! You only have to spell it out to show how utterly absurd the whole bail-out game is. Thank goodness the betting is on the whole rotten edifice collapsing in recriminatory ignominy in the near future.

Talking of which, the 19th crisis summit meets again this week to work out Spain’s €100 billion bank bail-out, but this will depend on other over-indebted countries like Italy and France coughing up billions they haven’t got, and any funds will increase Spain’s national debt through 100% of its declining GDP, adding to its interest rate on its existing debts. You don’t have to be an economist to see that this is total nonsense, bailing out busted banks with borrowed money. The lesson of history is that saving bust banks is a mug’s game, and the less than hallowed halls of the EU is certainly full of plenty of mugs. The disaster that is the Eurozone, incredibly, is about to get a whole lot worse.
  
  
Read more by Stephen Hill

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