HJ: This article ran in Der Spiegel, perhaps the most respected newspaper in Germany and similarly important on the larger global stage. Sure, we have heard it all before, but now all the stop-gap measures have been instituted and failed and we are left with a growing black hole of debt that is threatening to suck the entire eurozone into it. We live in interesting times, that is for sure. – Truth
Investors Prepare for Euro Collapse
By Martin Hesse
Otmar Issing is looks a bit tired. The former chief economist at the European Central Bank (ECB) is sitting on a barstool in a room adjoining the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. He resembles a father whose troubled teenager has fallen in with the wrong crowd. Issing is just about to explain again all the things that have gone wrong with the euro, and why the current, as yet unsuccessful efforts to save the European common currency are cause for grave concern.
He begins with an anecdote. “Dear Otmar, congratulations on an impossible job.” That’s what the late Nobel Prize-winning American economist Milton Friedman wrote to him when Issing became a member of the ECB Executive Board. Right from the start, Friedman didn’t believe that the new currency would survive. Issing at the time saw the euro as an “experiment” that was nevertheless worth fighting for.Fourteen years later, Issing is still fighting long after he’s gone into retirement. But just next door on the stock exchange floor, and in other financial centers around the world, apparently a great many people believe that Friedman’s prophecy will soon be fulfilled.
Banks, investors and companies are bracing themselves for the possibility that the euro will break up — and are thus increasing the likelihood that precisely this will happen.
Read the rest of the article here: Der Spiegel
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August 13, 2012
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