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Which Euro Break-up Will It Be: Destructive Chaos? Or Glass Steagall?
8 June 2012
European bailout schemes are falling apart before they even are set to paper. The Fitch rating service blew out the latest one for Spain, with its announcement on Thursday that they had lowered Spain’s sovereign credit rating by three notches, to BBB, because of the cost of a Spanish bank rescue which they estimated at 80 to 100 billion euros. And 100 billion euros is peanuts compared to the trillion-plus in bad Spanish debt! Each proposed bailout more un-implementable than the next, the details of each scheme no longer matter. Obituaries for the Euro proliferated on Thursday. The Wall Street Journal reported China Investment Corp (CIC) chairman Lou Jiwei as saying that the giant Chinese investment fund would not buy any Eurobonds (should they ever be issued). "There is a risk that the euro zone may fall apart and that risk is rising." Two voices from London pronounced the project dead. Former UK Finance Minister (1990-1993) Norman Lamont told Reuters that European leaders must throw off the burden of the euro if they want their economies to grow. The London Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard pronounced in a "webchat" that only a European-wide Treasury and debt union which could "print, print, print and print" money could save the euro, but "the historic nation states of Europe" are not prepared to "commit suicide." Neither Germany, nor, in the end, would France do so. Angela Merkel "is massively constrained by the German constitutional court. It ruled in September that the budget powers of the Bundestag cannot be alienated to EU bodies. Fiskalunion would violate the Basic Law," Pritchard wrote. He suggested that the least painful way to break the euro, is for Germany to leave, and the southern states to keep the euro. That would be no less chaotic than the other. German Bueso party chairwoman Helga Zepp-Larouche elaborates the only possible grounds for a solution, in her introduction to EIR ’s just released Special Report, "There Is Life After the Euro!": A solution "is absolutely impossible within our current system... Re-attaining national sovereignty is the absolute prerequisite for both economic recovery and the preservation of peace.... Once we have psychologically digested the fact that today’s trans-Atlantic monetary system is beyond salvation... only then will our minds be equipped to turn to constructive solutions." Those solutions require implementing a two-tier banking system in the exact tradition of the Glass-Steagall standard established by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, cancelling the EU treaties, from Maastricht to Lisbon, re-establishing national sovereignty over monetary and economic policy, with national currencies, fixed exchange rates, and an economic reconstruction program for Southern Europe, the Mediterranean region, and the African continent. |