Thursday, November 06, 2014

The EU doesn't realize it yet but it's collapsing

Large segments of the EU have concluded that it's not in their interest. Chalk it up to the stupidity of the Euro. The breakup is going to be nasty. More here.

Evans Pritchard:
The ECB's North-South clash mirrors the political breakdown of monetary union after six years of depression and mass unemployment. France's Front National now has twice as many Euro-MPs as the ruling Socialists. Euro defenders invariably insist that the triumph of Marine Le Pen - currently leading presidential polls at 30pc - has nothing to do with her pledge to restore the franc and take back French economic sovereignty.

Whether or not this is true - and that smacks of presumption - she is snatching enough votes from the Socialists to threaten their survival as a political movement. If they let perma-slump drift on until 2017, they will meet the fate of Greece's PASOK, and deserve it.

Italy is also edging closer to an inflexion point. The Five Star movement of Beppe Grillo - which won a quarter of the vote in 2013 - has grasped the elemental point that zero inflation and falling nominal GDP is pushing Italy into a debt-compound trap. For a long time Mr Grillo wrestled with the EMU issue. There is no longer any doubt. "We must leave the euro as soon as possible,” he says.



Spain's insurgent Podemos party has come from nowhere to top the polls at 28pc. It is not anti-euro. Its wrath is directed against a corrupt "Casta". Yet the party's reflation drive and furious critique of Spain's "internal devaluation" is entirely at odds with EMU imperatives, as is its €145bn plan for a universal basic income, which would lift Spain's fiscal deficit to 20pc of GDP. Podemos reminds one of France's Front Populaire in 1936. Leon Blum did not perhaps intend to leave the Gold Standard, but he knew his policies would bring it about in short order
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