Euroland is the new Schleswig-Holstein Question. Nobody knows the answer except for three people: one has forgotten, one is dead and one is mad. Mad and dead may be farcical, but pretending to know the answer is just plain bad. When one man from the government says they have a plan, you run; when seventeen say they have a plan, you hide all your assets. This is the latest deliverable from the currency union that brought you Berlusconi's austerity (avec marocaine) and youth unemployment that devastates a generation.
The debt cycles are feeding upon themselves, each pressure point cascading to the next in linked feedback loops. The diseased arteries of finance in Euroland are drying up: undead institutions sucking lifeblood from the sovereigns, and under the radar, from their own customers. The causes of this financial-political complex are opaque, but its parasitism was launched after the financial crisis in 2008. Unable to accept the necessary pain from deleveraging, politicians and financiers joined together in extend and pretend.
The danger lies in those problems abjured during the good times, and now festering ever closer to the surface. If the banlieues light up at a time of growth, what will a true downturn bring? Acquiescence? Further isolation from the host society or an eruption?
