from Truthdig:
Euro’s Crisis Has American FingerprintsPosted on May 11, 2010
By William Pfaff
The obituaries written of the European currency, the euro, have demonstrated divergences in national and cultural temperaments, the European funereal and laden with gloom about the future, but unyielding, and the American and British cheerfully and self-satisfiedly shoveling earth onto a casket of euros already six feet into the ground. Defy the markets, will they, these Europeans! Suddenly, the lid of the casket flew open early Monday morning, and the euro burst forth, bigger, better and brighter than before!
Sunday night, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was prudently off in Moscow to watch a V-E Day parade in Red Square, rather than witness electoral humiliation in North Rhine-Westphalia (where her party lost because of voter resentment of pleasure-loving Greeks squandering German wealth amidst permanent sunshine!). Britain was politically decapitated, without a functioning government.
Before Merkel was back, the German government had run up the white flag. The euro crisis was over. If any individual was a winner, it was temperamental and widely derided French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has insisted since his election in 2007 that Europe (or the euro’s users) requires a politically sophisticated decision-making authority.
Europe now has Sarkozy and the French government, which put this deal together while the Germans gnashed their teeth. He insisted that a self-governing currency was as dangerous as a market left totally free to regulate itself, expected to do so in the interests of all because it infallibly pursued the interest of each—otherwise known as the Reagan-Greenspan-Ayn Rand-School-of-Chicago fantasy. Now the world has Dominique Strauss-Kahn running the IMF, Jean-Claude Trichet running the European Central Bank, and Sarkozy performing a miracle in Brussels. ............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/euro_crisis_has_american_fingerprints_20100511/