Consider this an info-dump of Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman's latest postings at the New York Times. If this seems like something of an antidote to EurAmerican's atypically hawkish and euroskeptic posts from this week's Wall Street Journal, so much the better. Balance in partisanship -- that's what we like!Krugman's pieces grow from the spark provided in this piece, also from the NYT, which takes the pulse of the current "we told you so" debate going on between Europe's solvents and debtors. It traces the germinations of the euroskeptic debate back to an obscure 1992 report from the Financial Times. In it the politologue Ed Balls observed a crucial and possibly disastrous difference between the nascent euro currency project and the environment of the US, another continent-wide monetary zone. The report concluded, to borrow the NYT piece's shorthand, that "Europe lacked the type of federal taxes and transfer payments used in the United States to ease economic divergences among its many states."
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| Courtesy The New York Times |
The NYT piece goes on to juxtapose prominent voices from the euroskeptic and the pro-EU antipodes. Speaking about the current troubles, Norman Lamont, the former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, had this to say about the euro in the near future:
“I have always said that the euro will break up,” Mr. Lamont said in a recent interview. “Not after the first crisis today, but after the second crisis, which could be 10 years away. This is, after all a political project, not an economic project.”
In contrast, Jerzy Buzek, the current head of the European Parliament, used with these words during December's opening of the Europe House, headquarters of the European Union delegation in London:
“We remember what happened in the last big crisis — it was something horrible, and such a threat is always waiting for us... Let us answer by having more solidarity. Overcoming history is an imperative for us.”
It bears noting that Buzek's tone on the euro crisis -- which is far from finished ravaging great swathes of Europe and the world -- suggests that the "last big crisis," as he puts it, is already past, and belongs to history. These pictures provide a markedly more compelling argument that the euro crisis is both ongoing and far more serious the Buzek's seemingly clueless tone would indicate.
