Guardian
June 21, 2011
What would you do this morning if you were a Greek? Would you agree to your government cutting public sector jobs, pay and pensions, and increasing taxes? Or would you do what thousands of Greeks are doing and take to the streets, calling the bluff of Germans and French and making them dig deeper into their pockets?
I would not hesitate. I would take to the streets. Britain may not have that option, but Greece does. Eurozone bankers have been lending the Greeks loads of money for years, knowing they could not repay and assuming Europe's taxpayers would come to the rescue. The rescue is now costing $155bn and rising. This is not to save Greece's economy but merely to service the loans it already has. Why should Greeks accept the anguish of austerity when they know their extravagance will be financed from across Hamlet's "bourn from which no traveller returns", from foreign taxpayers beyond the grave?
Closer European union, so called, was a bad idea for precisely the reason now seen on the streets of Athens. It was an attempt by a supranational economic authority to supersede national democracy. Bluntly, it assumed the commercial culture of "greater Germany" could be imposed on a wide variety of cultures by virtue of geographical propinquity. Countries with a high propensity to work and save would discipline those with a lower one. Banks would finance it all. It was fantasy born of utopia, the perfect precondition for a sovereign credit bubble.
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