Posted on 10/16/2012 9:42:26 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Germany has stated its exorbitant price for keeping Greece in the euro and agreeing to mass bond purchases by the European Central Bank.
There must be an EU “currency commissioner” with sweeping powers to strike down national budgets; a “large step towards fiscal union”; and yet another EU treaty.
Finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble dropped his bombshell in talks with German journalists on a flight from Asia, and apparently had the blessing of Angela Merkel, the chancellor. “When I put forward such proposals, you can take it as a given that the chancellor agrees,” he said.
Officials in Brussels reacted with horror. “If that is the demand, they are not going to get it. Nobody in the Council wants a new treaty right now,” said one EU diplomat.
“We’ve got the fiscal compact and quite enough fiscal discipline. Not even the Dutch want a commissioner telling them how to tax and spend,” he said.
The new demands risk another stormy summit in Brussels on Thursday, pitting Germany against the Latin bloc. The last summit in June ended with an acrimonious deal in the small hours on a banking union that began to unravel within days.
Mr Schaeuble said the currency chief should have powers similar to those of the EU’s competition commissioner, a man “feared around the world”.
The competition Tsar is the arch-enforcer of the EU machine, with powers to launch dawn raids, deploy SWAT teams, and block mergers on his own authority. The job was the making of Italy’s Mario Monti a decade ago when he blocked the GE-Honeywell merger after it had been cleared by Washington.
The Schaeuble plan is highly provocative. The EU can set deficit targets but it cannot manage budgets, unless a country requests a bail-out and gives up fiscal sovereignty.
Nor is it clear
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Nobody in Europe is a credible military threat to anyone (except Russia). Might that change? Who knows. One thing is clear. Greece will never be free of misery unless it defaults and starts again.
Re: “Greece will never be free of misery unless it defaults and starts again.”
Agree.
No country is going to voluntarily leave the Euro Zone.
And no country is going to work harder just so it can send its surplus earnings to Germany or the EU Central Bank.
Printing your own currency and inflating your way out of debt is absurd.
It’s just a more complex and more long term way to default.
Default now, Greece!
No interest to pay, no principal to roll over.
You will have to borrow short term at very high rates to keep your banks liquid and your government functioning.
But in a year in two, tax receipts will equal government spending, and yes, you can start again.
The Kaiser and German Government were looking to achieve global domination: they were extremely happy to launch WW1.
When they invaded Belgium the Germans threatened to take control of the Scheldt and so gain the ability to amass an invasion fleet.
The Scheldt (easily as strategically significant in its way as the Golan heights, the Rhine or the island of Okinawa) is the key reason why Belgian neutrality was guaranteed by Britain in the first place, and why the invasion of Belgium forced Britain into the war.
Four years later the Germans were starved into signing the Armistice by the naval blockade. But twenty years later they were at it again with the same mad dream of conquest.
Isn’t it a real belly laugh that the EU just won a Nobel?
Such is the hubris of the elites.
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