15/06/2012
Blink and you miss it â such is the speed of events. For a blogger, this is a nightmare scenario. The pace and complexity of events require more time than there is in a day. When the historians come to write of current events, these few days will take months of study.
Anyhow, a day away from the keyboard and it feels like a month, as one trawls through the unread material. It was five-thirty in the morning when I started, after four hour's sleep. An hour later and I'm still only skating over the surface.
There is no point in trying to sleep though. One thing they don't tell you about open heart surgery is that, when they slice into you, the heart sac is destroyed, and with it the fluid buffer that acts as a sound absorber.
Lie in bed less than comatose and, with the heart resting on the rib case, and the din of the pounding makes sleep impossible. Mrs EURef frets about my lack of sleep but there is no point in lying there. You might just as well get up and write. It's no big deal.
We start with this â
curiosity offered by a reader:
Me Cago de Dios: Die Völker scheissen auf Europa, - the mixture of of Spanish and German making a wry comment on our present predicament.
Would anyone like to offer a better translation than Google can offer of the last line:
Ein Europa der Völker scheint vorläufig verpasst: Sie scheissen drauf? I thought it was the other way round. Either way, the
Völker ain't happy. There is no sign here of the master race trying to re-conquer Europe. This is pain speaking.
Picking up from there, and playing catch-up, the next place to go is this
Spiegel piece. A few days old, already, it takes a peak at what the "colleagues" have in store for us with their new treaty. This really is the end game. Look at what the paper is saying:
Even before it has been officially presented, however, the new Euro Pact faces extremely high hurdles. National parliaments would have to be amended across the continent and several countries would be required to hold referenda. Such a poll might even be required in Germany, as hinted at by the Constitutional Court ruling on the Lisbon Treaty. Should Berlin seek to transfer more power to Brussels on financial questions, according to the most common interpretation of the ruling, then a referendum would become necessary.
It would be a momentous decision for German voters. Were they to vote no, it would likely mean the end of the euro and the entire continent would be plunged into a deep recession. Were they to vote yes, future German financial policy would be made in Brussels.
Before we go further with this, though, Ambrose is the
Failygraph makes sombre reading. This should be the lead story, instead of the obsession with Leveson.
"Spain's borrowing costs have surged to record highs and are perilously close to the point of no return, threatening a full-blown sovereign crisis unless the European Central Bank comes to the rescue", his headline tells us.
That is the backdrop to the
Spiegel piece and the new plans of the "colleagues". What are they doing to cope with this existential crisis - the "approaching abyss"?
Well, one of the first things on offer from the "quartet" beavering away in Brussels is the creation of what we are told is a "real fiscal union". It isn't actually. It's a debt union. New rules would prohibit member states from taking on new debt on their own.
Governments would only have complete control of funds that are covered by tax revenues.
Those needing more money than they generate themselves would have to register their needs with the eurogroup, made up of eurozone finance ministers.
They would then analyse the financial needs and the amount of funding requested from the different countries before deciding which were justified and which were not. Eurobonds would then be issued to finance the debt.
The group of finance ministers would be led by a full-time chair - and not, as is presently the case, by one of the finance ministers. The chair would ultimately become a kind of European finance minister.
Now let's just take a reality check here - if you can call it that. Ambrose if citing Spanish finance minister Luis de Guindos, who says: "We're facing maximum tension. The situation is unsustainable over time," Yields on 10-year Spanish bonds yields punched to almost seven percent, above levels that triggered ECB intervention to back stop Spain last November.
"The ECB needs to intervene very quickly or it is game over," then says Nicholas Spiro from Spiro Asset Management. "There is a whiff of capitulation in the air."
And now, down on the ranch ... in Brussels. The quartet's response is to argue for "A new European body". It would include representatives from the EU parliament, created to oversee the proposed finance minister board.
The model favoured would essentially become a construct that Germany has long rejected: a European club in which all members would be liable for the debts of others. But there is an important limitation: That liability would only apply to new debt.
Am I the only one to see a disconnect?
The pic at very top, by the way, is the Cathedral at Durham, taken from the bridge over the River Wear ⦠another of those "grim ooop North" reminders. Below is the sight that greeted us on the bridge - a yellow drummer and a black piper. They also do weddings and bar mitzvahs
if you ask them nicely.
Back to "reality", which gets even more surreal
with Mervyn King announcing emergency measures to help banks and boost business lending. This is after a warning from the preposterous Osborne that the "debt storm" raging on the continent had left the UK and the rest of Europe facing their most serious economic crisis outside wartime.
With one Spanish minister warning that the future of Europe could be decided within hours, we are told, both King and the chancellor used the backdrop of another day of financial and economic turbulence in the eurozone to express deep concern about the threat to Britain posed by Europe.
The announcements were designed to shore up confidence before this weekend's elections in Greece, seen as a possible trigger point for a new phase in Europe's debt crisis.
But it did not end there. In a speech to parliament in Berlin, an exasperated Merkel bluntly told the rest of Europe to get real about the crisis, dismissed calls for Berlin to share responsibility for other euro countries' debt, and rejected charges that Germany was not doing enough to stabilise the euro.
"Germany's strength is not unlimited," Merkel warned. "The way out of the crisis in the eurozone can only be successful if all countries are capable of recognising the reality and realistically assessing their strengths".
Well, at the forefront in assessing strengths is Italy, with
il Giornale reporting that support for the euro is plummeting (above) and there is real discussion about leaving the eurozone.
Completely oblivious to this, it would seem, Barroso and his merry persons, are focusing on "democratic legitimacy". So, while Rome fiddles, and the euro burns, Brussels wants a new Caesar, turning the office of commission president and European Council president into one - a kind of "European president".
Then follow presidential elections, an updated version of "bread and circuses" that lacks the bread. Let them eat euros, goes the cry.
Before we get anywhere near that, however, we have the Greek re-run. The
BBC tells us that "Europe is on edge, its leaders nervous and divided. The days ahead are full of uncertainty". Syriza is neck-and-neck with New Democracy, although our sources say it is unlikely that New Democracy will win.
"Uncertainty" though, means what it says. Nobody is betting on much these days. There is too much going down, too much to try and absorb, and far to much to analyse. We're back to where we started â I guess this is mushroom news reporting. There's a lot of it about.
COMMENT THREAD
