Douglas Carswell's Blog

The fed-heads are in denial

“Astonishingly” complains EU President, Herman Van Rompuy, in the Guardian, “since our summit the cost of borrowing has increased again for a number of euro area countries.” 

What is truly astonishing is that Van Rompuy should be astonished. He could have read it on this blog.

Despite issuing a communiqué in Brussels and declaring the crisis over, those pesky markets aren’t doing what our top Eurocrats would like. ERM déjà vu?

According to Van Rompuy all those private investors around the world who are failing to lend their money to Italy and Spain without demanding high rates of interest have got it wrong.   Rather than question the effectiveness of his bailout-and-borrow response to the debt crisis, Herman assures us that the European political elite “stand ready to do all it the takes to safeguard the financial stability of the euro area”.

When the history of this financial crisis is written, future historians will marvel at why when in such a debt hole, the leaders of Europe (and America) refused to stop digging. In Van Rompuy’s article they will find plenty of clues.

The vanity of the Eurocracy – the assumption that their attendance at a summit was enough to solve problems. The arrogance - indignation for those who fail to see the “macroeconomic indicators” and high rates of growth make European debt a bargain buy.  The economic illiteracy - some Eurozone economies are “being cut off from funding through vagaries in the markets” apparently, while “debt levels and deficits are going down”. The blinkered dogma – “this is not a crisis about the euro.”

One day, too, it will be seen as an extraordinary failing by the “official mind” of Whitehall that we did nothing to discourage such dangerous Euro delusions, and played along with it as Herman and co to kept digging.

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