Churchill also expressed his desire that day for a future United States of Europe: “it should be built by the English; if the Russians built it, there would be communism and squalor; if the Germans built it, there would be tyranny and brute force.”
The Churchill War Papers, p. 38
yitbos
Not much relevance to today..
These pinheads are going to sweat sooner or later.
Germany’s financial leaders are only now finally beginning to understand what those of us who have done the math on EU-zone debt have understood for a year+: Germany simply does not have the resources to prop up the ECB to the extent necessary to prevent the Euro from imploding.
As such, Germany now has two paths ahead of it:
1. Back up the Euro with their own money and debt rating, which will work (now) for, oh, perhaps a year. Then when the numbers become apparent, they lose both their money and debt rating... for OTHER countries’ debt, not their own... or
2. Start planning for a significantly reduced Euro-zone, where they go back to the letter of the Maastrict Treaty and start enforcing the deficit limits therein, on *everyone*.
The brutal truth is that no common currency can work in Europe. The Med nations are spendthrifts and have been economic basket cases for debt holders going back to WWII or even further back (eg Greece). The northern states have both economic power and financial responsibility bred into them, which cannot be imparted to southern tier countries with any amount of lecturing.
Whoopee. He wrote those while drunk as a skunk.