Europe after the doomsayers

The EU’s hole plugging leaders will avoid collapse; but we are sleep walking into a tragic lost decade if politics continues on its current lifeless trajectory.

By OLAF CRAMME
Policy Network

The doomsayers are wrong. We have all read their pieces: throughout the second half of 2011, barely a single week passed by without an army of economists and would-be economists – predominantly in the Anglo-Saxon world, but also in other parts of the EU – proclaiming in no uncertain terms that the eurozone is doomed and its collapse imminent. They made their predictions based on what they thought the EU’s leaders would, or more importantly, would not do: no big ‘bazooka’ in the trillions; no introduction of eurobonds or other forms of debt mutualisation; no proper lender of the last resort that can step in to finance sovereign debts; not even a roadmap to a genuine fiscal union worthy of its name.

Read the full article in Policy Network.