Guardian
October 9, 2011
The headlines are by turns apocalyptic ("Euro crisis threatens world economy") and, for many of us, opaque. They are stories that have escaped from the financial pages and made it on to the main evening news for reasons we don't entirely understand.
The euro, we know, is in trouble, essentially because the countries – and the economies – that use it are so different. A common currency is hard to maintain without all sorts of other common policies that Europe doesn't have. So to save it, the eurozone's higher-performing countries are having to prop up the lower-performing ones.
Understandably, this angers the high performers because they feel their hard work and discipline is being taken for a ride. It also angers the low performers, because in exchange for being propped up they're having to swallow some nasty economic medicine.They feel humiliated; under attack over the way they've always done things. The figures and issues economists habitually cite certainly look bad.
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