BBC News
October 26, 2011
Can European leaders escape from the mess they've got themselves into? It's the first question I was asked by John Humphreys this morning on the Today programme, as part of a lively discussion of the crisis with Martin Wolf, of the Financial Times.
I happened to draw a comparison with the 1992 ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism) crisis - that the writing was on the wall, not when politicians run out of things to do, but when they run out of things to do that investors believe they can actually carry out. (That was 15% interest rates in the middle of a recession, in the case of the UK in 1992).
The question was whether eurozone leaders have now reached that point.
As luck would have it, I later found myself interviewing George Soros, the global financier-turned-activist who is still best known in Britain as the man who bet against the pound in the 1992 crisis - and came out the process a great deal richer.
I asked Mr Soros whether this did now feel like a similar crunch-point to 1992. Not to put too fine a point on it - was he selling the Euro? He said no, European governments would find a way to hold the single currency intact, if only because the alternative was too ghastly to contemplate.
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