Our European neighbours used to sneer at us Brits for our apparent obsession with World War Two. But the unfolding Eurozone crisis has shown that those same feelings have been always been present in continental Europeans, they just hid them behind a wall of rhetoric about shared futures and broad smiles at places like Maastricht. The question of wealth has shattered the façade.
Back during the wars that it’s now ok to mention again, the Germans used to worry about fighting on two fronts, quite rightly as it turned out. Now the struggle over the future of the euro is also settling down to a war on two fronts: the monetary and the fiscal. At the heart of the struggle is the question of whether, and if so, how German wealth can be transferred to heavily indebted PIIGS.
On the monetary front the Germans are trying to hold the line that the job of the European Central Bank is to fulfil its mandate of price stability.
On the other side of the hill are those – the PIIGS, most eurocrats (though few have the bottle to stick their head over the parapet), the Obama administration, and the British government – who think it should be focusing on employment or GDP growth. To accomplish this they want the ECB to print money which, the Germans believe, would be inflationary and scupper the ECB’s price stability mandate.
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