Mad Hatter's tea party that is the eurozone crisis

by Larry Elliott

Guardian
October 2, 2011

Curioser and curioser, as Alice said in her adventures in Wonderland. The longer the crisis in the eurozone has gone on, the more it has come to resemble something penned by Lewis Carroll.

Here are just a few of the surreal aspects of the current state of affairs. The answer to a lack of growth in struggling countries such as Greece is austerity of such ferocity that recessions deepen. The solution to a financial crisis caused originally by the over-leveraging of banks and individuals is to turn Europe's bailout fund into a leveraged €2tn hedge fund. Meanwhile, many of the politicians in Britain who battled long and hard to keep the pound – George Osborne and Ed Balls to name but two – are now born-again evangelists for full fiscal union.

How to make sense of all this? It's hard, but as the king says as he presides over the court in Alice in Wonderland: "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

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