17 October, 2012

It's all OK!

YES! It's summit time for Europe! Hungry Responsible leaders will gather together on Thursday 18th  for another decisive....er....lunch. This time it's in Luxembourg.

To summarise what's going on:

François Hollande of France is impatient: he wants a quick implementation of the decisions of the last summit (he's new to this game) which broadly means telling the Germans to hurry up and guarantee everybody's debt. You never know when a country, say, to the West of Germany, might need it.

The Germans, meanwhile, want some controls over how their money would be spent, but François reckons that can wait for a couple of years.

Oh and François is fed up with Britain. In fact it's probably all our fault.

President Rumpy produced a plan which involved structural financial development and, c'mon guess, the Germans guaranteeing everyone's debts. I think it took 20 minutes for the German Government to dismiss it as nonsense, but it might have been less.

Mariano Rajoy of Spain has come up with an ingenious idea: that the ECB should give it a massive overdraft which, of course, it wouldn't use, no, in return for no conditions. No brainer.

Greece has not stopped being Greece: it has made almost no effort to collect the taxes of the rich and well connected, deciding to raise taxes and cut entitlements for poor people. The economy is in free fall, they need 2 years to implement the last conditions (not the present set) and will run out of money to pay staff and keep the lights on in about a month.

The European Commissioner for consumer policy, a Maltese called Dalli, has resigned, having been found out by the anti-fraud agency. He will have to be replaced by another Maltese, until we run out of them.

So, it's all going to be OK.

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