Without a growth plan, the EU faces financial Waterloo
The latest eurozone rescue scheme may save Greece for now, but it fails on a basic rule of classical economics
Without a growth plan, the EU faces financial Waterloo | Simon Jenkins | The Guardian
(Guardian) This really matters. It matters more than party conferences or Libyan wars or terrorist scares or Olympic games. Europe faces a Waterloo moment, perhaps even a Munich one, as 17 of its finance ministers dither over whether to rescue its economy from the financial wreckage of the past three years, or let it plunge into renewed depression.
A bad-tempered weekend at the IMF in Washington has reportedly led to a ghost of a plan that makes sense. It involves halving Greece’s debts to German and French banks, repeating the 21% “haircut” default of last July. This in turn will hurt the banks more than they might stand, so the second part of the plan props them with urgent subsidies. In a third part, some 2 trillion euros would be tipped into the European central bank, somehow to “firewall” the sovereign debts of Portugal and Ireland and perhaps even Italy and Spain. (more…)

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