The final failure of the political euro project is getting closer day by day. And it is not only the eurozone countries that are being hurt:
A eurozone recession could almost halve Chinese growth this year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The IMF forecasts China's economy will grow by 8.2% this year - but warns that a recession in the eurozone could cut this to 4.2%.
It said Beijing should get ready to inject billions of dollars into the economy to fend off any downturn.
China's economy grew by 9.2% in 2011, but growth was slowed by Beijing to avoid over-expansion.
Read the entire article here
Austerity programmes are worsening the situation in several EU member countries:
Romania's prime minister quit on Monday after a series of at-times violent nationwide protests against budget cuts and declining living standards, as deepening political turmoil fueled by Europe's prolonged economic crisis spreads across the Continent.
Thousand of Romanians have taken to the wintry streets of Bucharest and other cities in recent weeks to vent their anger at the center-right administration of Emil Boc, who has implemented tough austerity measures in an effort to shore up state finances.
Neighboring Slovakia, also hit by Europe's downturn, was shaken on Friday by the largest protests since the end of communism there in 1989, as people demonstrated against alleged government corruption against a backdrop of cuts to health care, transportation and other state services.
Such upheavals are increasingly calling into question the longer-term political viability of the kind of austerity programs prescribed by the European Union and International Monetary Fund for Europe's struggling and indebted nations.
In Greece, whose debt problems have dragged on the entire euro zone, politicians on Monday struggled to reach agreement on a set of painful steps required for the country to avoid default with a second, large international bailout package.
But the leader of the most powerful - and succesful - eurozone country, Germany, still keeps on repeating her mantra: "There is no crisis of the Euro itself, there is a debt crisis."
Frau Merkel - and her assistant M. Sarkozy and almost all other minor EU leaders - refuse to recognise that there would NOT be a euro/debt crisis of the kind we are now experiencing without the euro. But sooner or later they - or at least their successors - have will have to. And that will be the end of a failed political project.
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