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Monday, December 12, 2011

An EU Debt Ceiling: Imporiting Bad US Ideas

     It's not like we have no good ideas, like having a real lender of last resort that does something other than dither while Rome burns. You look at the EU agreement for tighter fiscal union and it was long on more austerity guidelines-no country may exceed this level of deficit or there in trouble-and short on bailout money-they increased the fund only slightly and are trying to get the IMF to do it.

    How clueless can the EU be, or where they living under their rock during the debt ceiling fiasco during the Summer? This is what they want to emulate? The U.S. Congress?

    There is no end to the sanctimonious chutzpah of the Germans. They obviously not only missed the debt ceiling stalemate they have conveniently forgotten that they were the country that only got into the EU by having the deficit as a percentage of GDP rules relaxed. Do they remember the time when they voted to not sanction the French for violating the deficit limits in exchange for the French voting not to sanction them?

    The Obama Administration is trying to get something going here and Obama rightly pointed out that more commitment is needed than was pledged last week. The French and others are pleased about this but the Germans are griping that the US has it's own problems that hurt the world.

   That may be true, at least you can say that we largely created this whole mess in the first place with the subprime debacle. But our economy is turning around now and at this point right now Europe is the drag. They are the ones causing the problem with their faulty EU structure. Within the EU Germany is the main problem, they are the drag within the drag. They should get serious.

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