Tag Archives: european crisis

A Thought on a European Polity

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I wrote about this a bit ago. Daniel Hannan, Conservative Party MEP for South East England, has a more recent thought.

Churchill [as early as 1946] makes clear that this United States of Europe should not include Britain:

There is already a natural grouping in the Western Hemisphere. We British have our own Commonwealth of Nations. Why should there not be a European group which could give a sense of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship to the distracted peoples of this turbulent and mighty continent and why should it not take its rightful place with other great groupings in shaping the destinies of men?

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The Meaning of the Recent European Union Parliamentary Elections

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Spiegel Online International wrote earlier in the week about the EU’s parliamentary elections. From those elections, there could be a power shift away from the European Council, made up of the heads of the EU member nations, toward the European Parliament, made up of Members of the European Parliament elected by the citizens of the member nations.

This power shift is possible because of two things: one is that the citizens cast their votes for their MEPs based in large part on dissatisfaction with the EU leadership in what in the US would be the Executive Branch—including the European Commission President—with the proximate outcome of a large increase in the number of MEPs representing various euro-skeptic parties at the direct expense of the pro-EU parties.

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Crimea and Sanctions on Russia

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Promptly opening the export spigot on our own oil and gas production and accelerating our development of those fields, including on Federal land (which will have minimal production effect today; although it’ll have significant effect in the near- to mid-term by significantly expanding the supply of oil and gas on the global market) will produce an immediate spike down in the global price of oil and gas, which will have an associated immediate negative impact on the value of Russian oil and gas exports.

Blocking Russian access to credit on the global banking system—even just on the American banking system—and requiring cash-only transactions will have a negative impact on Russia’s cash reserves.

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Sovereignty and Sovereign Debt

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Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit, is upset with Germany’s high court.  It seems that this court has ruled, again, against the European Central Bank’s President, Mario Draghi, and the ECB itself in continuing to note that ECB moves to buy member nations’ sovereign debt not only is a violation of EU foundational law, it violates the sovereignty of those nations expected to put up their peoples’ money to buy that debt.  Germany’s highest court also committed the dastardly deed of kicking the latest matter to the European Court of Justice.  All in the name of protecting German national sovereignty.

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Greek Bankruptcy

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Someone wrote about the efficacy of this some time ago.  It seems that George Soros agrees (is it the apocalypse?), albeit from an additional set of reasons.

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Political Honesty

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The German poet Matthias Claudius commented some years ago,

Say not all that you know, but know all that you say.

Spiegel Online International thinks that’s good advice in a particular circumstance today:

That would be a good lesson for those politicians who are handling the euro crisis.  Absolute honesty, which many are now demanding of the German government after its most recent comments on Greece, is simply not wise.

SOI justifies their position this way:

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The Consequences of Unintended Consequences

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It used to be that when Jeroen Dijsselbloem, President of the Euro Group, would talk to reporters, he’d open with

Maybe it’s good, if I say something.

And then recently he did say something.  He said that the Cyprus model of raiding depositor accounts to bail out failing banks—in addition to holding the failing banks’ investors and creditors responsible—should be the model for all of the eurozone.

In future aid packages, one must look into whether bank shareholders, bond holders and large depositors could participate so as to spare taxpayers from having to foot the bill.

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The Aftermath Begins

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Spiegel Online International is describing it, albeit with some misconceptions.

Not even savings accounts are safe, as was recently seen in Cyprus. Such deposits are actually guaranteed to up to €100,000, but the euro rescuers cared little about this as they desperately searched for funds.  Cypriot small savers may have escaped this time around, but the realization remains, even beyond Cyprus, that a state teetering on the edge of bankruptcy will resort to all available means to raise money—and a guarantee is only worth something as long as the entity that stands behind it remains solvent.

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A Thought on Cypress and the Euro

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After having offered his church’s assets to a solidarity fund proposed by Cyprus’ government pursuant to Cyprus’ efforts to find a way out of their current economic debacle, Archbishop Chrysostomos II, Archbishop of Nova Justiniana and All Cyprus (the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus), has one.  The Guardian quotes him:

The euro cannot last.  I’m not saying that it will crumble tomorrow, but with the brains that they have in Brussels, it is certain that it will not last in the long term, and the best is to think about how to escape it.  It’s not easy, but we should devote as much time to this as was spent on entering the eurozone.

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They All Could Learn from the Poles

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In the aftermath of the Cyprus Parliament’s rejection (wholly correct IMNSHO) of the troika’s “bailout” offer—a “one time” “tax” on bank deposits held by Cyprus banks—talks are failing (breaking down?) within the government, between the government and the troika, and between the government and Russia on a Plan B to avert Cypriot bankruptcy.

Amid this crisis, and exacerbated by the rejection and potential failure of the subsequent talks, panic is growing in the EU, and especially in the euro zone, that a Cypriot bankruptcy will force Cyprus out of the euro zone, and that will lead to the doom of the euro.

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