"The eurozone has recently been off our news radar. We Britons have become smug of late given our new-found growth, now that we’re the most rapidly expanding economy in the Western world (almost).
We certainly have a sense that the “Continental” economies aren’t doing as well as ours. Apart from those pesky Germans, of course, who are annoyingly good at making stuff the rest of the world wants to buy.
Yet, the fear of the euro as a tinderbox, which at any minute could spark financial meltdown, seems to have gone. The euro as a ticking-time bomb, about to explode, causing another Lehman-style Minsky moment on global markets – all that has been dealt with, we think, sorted, solved?
I would like to tell you that’s true. But I can’t, because it isn’t. The eurozone’s deep structural flaws remain as ever they were.
This jerry-built monetary union, for all the fanfare, arrogance and “solidarity”, is fundamentally just as vulnerable as it was in the summer of 2012, when, suddenly, everyone started worrying that the single currency wasn’t, as we’d always been told, “irreversible”."
The article concludes with.
Having contracted 0.5pc in 2012, the eurozone economy is likely to shrink by a similar amount this year. Sky-high unemployment in “periphery” nations means tensions remain very real.
In Italy last week, in an spine-chilling development, cash-strapped Turin riot police removed their helmets and holstered their truncheons, in a display of solidarity with the “Pitchfork Movement” protesters they were supposed to be controlling.
The eurozone remains on a knife-edge, and will be back on your news radar soon.
Ordinary working people and pensioners and the poor are being robbed, morning, noon and night, so many live in fear, but remember this, it is a construct, this has been planned. The $64,000 question is, when are people going to wake up and get mad and say I'm not going to take this anymore.
Full Telegraph story here.
Link to video of the Italian protest here.
Eddie
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