This Frau’s Not for Turning

At Least Not Yet

By DoctoRx

The Telegraph has an opinion piece out titled Angela Merkel isn’t bluffing; like everyone else in Europe, she’s defending national sovereignty.  It compares her to Britain’s Margaret Thatcher in steadfastness and then says this:

"Take this extraordinarily prescient observation by the radical economist Wynne Godley, penned as early as 1992. “It needs to be emphasised at the   start that the establishment of a single currency in the EC would indeed   bring to an end the sovereignty of its component nations and their power to   take independent action on major issues…I sympathise with those (like Margaret Thatcher) who, faced with the loss of sovereignty wish to get off the EMU train altogether. I also sympathise with those who seek integration under the jurisdiction of some federal constitution with a federal budget very much larger than that of the Community budget."

“What I find totally baffling is the position of those who are aiming for  economic and monetary union without the creation of new political   institutions (apart from a new central bank), and who raise their hands in horror at the words “federal” or “federalism”.”

Twenty years later, these basic flaws in monetary union are there for all to see, cruelly and devastatingly exposed by the financial crisis. Yet still Europe wishes to cling to national sovereignties.

Oh, those clingers!

Somehow they believe that the sovereign nations of Portugal, Spain, Italy etc. should actually pay back the money they borrowed (fiat though it is).  What’s controversial about that?  They borrowed as sovereigns and used the funds for their own purposes.  Now these improvident sovereigns want to forget about that fact and change the subject.  That might work now and then, but not with the physicist Merkel who obviously is familiar with basic logic.