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Tag Archives: ECB

Exit the Eurocrisis – Slowly

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Now that the Eurozone Crisis is over, we can all breathe a little easier. Right? While it’s good to not be loping along from one crisis to the next, the aftermath of the flood that lasted from 2008-2012 in drips and drops is still being mopped up. The hits are just being absorbed by the banks and growth is going to be sub-par through 2014, meaning that the lingering unemployment problem is not going away.

There are two parts left to this clean-up – what comes next and what can we learn? They are both important and will dominate 2014 in Europe and the developed world.

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Meanwhile …

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A continuing resolution which re-opens the federal government was passed along with a debt ceiling increase that keeps everything hummin’ along until February. It’s good news, at least until the next manufactured crisis comes. We can’t be sure what kind of economic damaged was done in the 16 day shutdown until … well, until the workers in the government that tabulate this stuff get back to work.

So what stories have we missed during the obsession over the limits? Quite a few, actually. Here’s a rundown of some of the interesting stories that were easily lost over the last two weeks.

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May You Live in Interesting Times

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There is an awful lot going on in the world right now.  It’s hard to find any one thing that is worth writing about, given all of the news.  So let’s run down everything all at once.

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The Euro Forced Marriage

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The time was a year before the Euro launched, the place was the tiny town of Burghausen, Germany.  Busloads of people from their sister city in France were welcomed with fluttering tricolors silently proclaiming liberty, equality, and brotherhood. It was declared “French Week” through the town as menus in German gave way to French and the whole town celebrated unity.

I asked Herr Mitterer, the owner of the Hotel Post, if this grand “Eurozone” idea was going to work.  “It has to,” he replied, “We’ve seen the alternative.”

Underneath the giddy celebrations at the end of a long period of expansion, the Euro was launched in 1999.  It was always a forced marriage, a necessity blessed like any marriage with talk of happiness and great times ahead.  But at the first sign of trouble the cracks are showing.  Fourteen years on it is at a turning point – move closer or forget the whole thing?

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The Cyprus Disaster

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I have been slow to write about the Eurozone crisis of the moment, Cyprus, for one important reason – I didn’t understand it.  I read about how the big banks became under-capitalized and as the central government contemplated default like so many other European nations and thought it was about the same as we’ve seen repeated in far too many nations.  Then, it got weird.  What was so hard to understand?  It was the way the European Central Bank (ECB) put the hammer down that pretty much forced a run on Cypriot banks and guaranteed a major depression.  Was there something in this that I missed?  Or was the ECB really that unbelievably stupid?

After looking this over for a while, I have come to a very frightening conclusion – the ECB really was that stupid, and more.  This isn’t about Cyprus anymore, it’s about how the ECB is unworthy of any faith at all.  If that scares the Hell out of you, welcome to the club.  I certainly didn’t want to come to this conclusion, but here it is. It all starts, like everything Euro, with Greece …

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