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The end of old Europe

The indispensable Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf says that Europe is out of options. Excerpt: No good choices remain. The risks involved in the proposed actions are big. But the alternative of financial collapses and sovereign debt crises that ricochet across the globe is vastly worse. The need for such a rescue may be viewed […]

The indispensable Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf says that Europe is out of options. Excerpt:

No good choices remain. The risks involved in the proposed actions are big. But the alternative of financial collapses and sovereign debt crises that ricochet across the globe is vastly worse. The need for such a rescue may be viewed as the price of having entered hastily into an indissoluble monetary marriage, tolerating the emergence of huge imbalances, failing to discipline the banks and then dealing with the emerging crisis so incompetently.

The eurozone has still to decide what it will be when it grows up. But first it needs to reach that stage. The costs of a meltdown would be too grave to contemplate. The members simply have to prevent that. They have no sane alternative.

It would appear that the spectre of financial apocalypse is going to compel the Eurozone nations to sacrifice what remains of their sovereignty to Brussels. An enormous tragedy, and the cost of believing in the secular utopianism of the Eurobelievers, and their faith in a rational homo economicus. As is now plain, you cannot have monetary union without fiscal union — and you cannot have fiscal union without political union. Thus will the European superstate be born out of crisis and desperation. A rough beast disguised as a man of peace and stability is slouching towards Brussels to be born.

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