24/06/2012
Echoing a shared sentiment, Zerohedge acknowledges that everyone is tired of bad news. Nevertheless, the financial system is in crisis and there is no sugar coating it. Thus, says ZH, we have to stop listening to politicians and central planners who continue to downplay, obfuscate and flat out lie about the current economic reality. Stop listening to them.
Unfortunately, people are only too ready to stop â but the broader effect is that they have stopped following the news altogether, while the media obliges by restricting coverage and relegating substantive reports to the business sections.
Even then, the minimal amount produced is often trivial or superficial, witness the piece today from
Iain Martin, who bases his analysis not on events but on the
Guardian renditions of them, taking a misleading headline as a statement of fact.
If one were to rely on the English media, it would be easy to miss the significance of the events to come, and it is thus helpful to have
AFP description of Thursday and Friday's European Council as "a mother-of-all-summits".
As a reality check, this tells me that I am not getting the meeting out of proportion â this
is a massively important event, even if it is being understated by our media. It is meant to sketch out a roadmap towards economic union and "to send a message to the markets that the continent's leaders are united and determined to do whatever it takes to restore confidence in the battered single currency".
Another signal of its importance comes with
the report of a meeting on Wednesday nest between Merkel and Hollande. "They will discuss the upcoming EU summit, the international situation and future Franco-German exchanges", the French president's office said in a statement.
Now, when the Franco-German "motor of integration" gets together prior to a European Council, on top of all the other activity, we know they are serious. The "colleagues" are not playing games and â as we keep saying â Cameron is going to be in for a wild ride.
And nor can there be any illusions about the process â the "colleagues" are playing for keeps. Only today,
Spiegel warns that a euro-crash would cost five million jobs in Germany, with a decline in growth of up to ten percent.
But if the British media is emulating the fabled myopia of
Struthio camelus, not so
Welt am Sonntag which is devoting its lead item to the crisis, informing us that Van Rompuy will submit proposals to the Council.
What Europe needs, says Rompuy, is "not only to make recommendations and then anyone can do what he wants, but to make them mandatory". There is no equivocation here. The Council president is talking about a new phase of European integration, with the meeting set to discuss what integration steps can be tackled.
In a
separate piece, Jesuit-trained Van Rompuy talks of his "master plan", or as he calls it, "four building blocks" for a new monetary union. There are, we are told, long-term plans, but "some elements could be implemented quickly into reality".
One of those is increased banking supervision, with the ECB creating a
new super-agency (
Superbehörde), with Van Rompuy already claiming he has the approval of all 27 member states, despite it meaning the end of the European banking authority in London.
Back in Britain, though, the idle Iain Martin thinks that the UK will be "largely a spectator when Germany, France and the others meet", but he stands to be disabused. If he read more than the
Guardian headlines, he might understand why.
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