Euro crisis: Chucking spears at a nuclear threat

Guardian
Editorial
September 18, 2011

For all the incremental advances and technical details of the euro crisis – a loan to a French bank here, a rise in Italian government bond yields there – the big picture remains the same: the leaders of the eurozone are using spears to take on a nuclear threat.

Sometimes they turn up with enough spears to look curiously menacing. That's what happened last week when the European Central Bank (ECB) led the Bank of England and other central banks in a pledge to keep the continent's private banks topped up with dollars. Sometimes the Eurocrats brandish just a few blunt spears and the markets ignore them – as was the case on Friday, when finance ministers gathered in Wroclaw, Poland, and pledged to exert greater budgetary discipline. More recently, the political leadership of the single-currency club have been talking about turning in their spears for a few small nukes – in a couple of years, maybe. And all the while, the growing chorus of voices outside the golden triangle of Paris, Berlin and Frankfurt urges Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and their counterparts and officials to go nuclear. Last week it was the turn of US treasury secretary Tim Geithner, plus George Osborne, Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown – all of them urging the democratically elected representatives of the single-currency area to wake up to the gravity (or "catastrophic risk", as Mr Geithner correctly referred to it) of the euro crisis – and act with commensurate power and authority.

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