Forget economics. This was a political moment, and it will be remembered as the time the politicians failed.
Angela Merkel failed: The German Chancellor could have used her country’s nearly unanimous clout to confront the root causes of the euro crisis, which lie in inequalities of trade and a collapse in consumption, but instead chose to pretend it was a matter of overspending by Mediterranean governments, to be solved with future rules. Mario Draghi failed: The European Central Bank chief could have launched a bond-buying, expansionist rescue – in short, acted as if this were the emergency it very much is. But instead he stuck to a suicidally narrow interpretation of his mandate, pretending that inflation, rather than its opposite, is the threat.
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