No, but it is a late start. Much of what is now happening should have happened long ago. It is clear that none of the indebted countries can pay what they owe and at the same time grow their economies.\u00a0 It is not clear, yet, whether the package for Greece will work, nor whether the concessions to Ireland and Portugal will be enough, nor whether all of it will relieve pressure on Italy and Spain. At present there is optimism everywhere.<\/p>\n
What is clear, however, is something of such significance, that it ranks above all other considerations. The Euro countries now accept that they cannot have a currency without it being underpinned by centralised financial governance and economic policy. Once you hand over the management of you financial affairs to others, you lose a degree of control of your life. The extent to which the member counties are willing to surrender that part of their sovereignty and the extent to which that financial structure is democratic, will determine whether the euro\u00a0 survives as a currency\u00a0for multiple nation states. In the end that will determine the final\u00a0outcome for Greece, Ireland and Portugal.<\/p>\n
For the UK the issue of financial governance in Euro land\u00a0is not our direct\u00a0concern. The controlled Greek default, since this is what it is, should be. We are not at all sure what the knock-on exposure of our banks actually\u00a0is. We do half our trade with Euro zone countries. We also have extensive business ties with the US. Whereas in Europe, politicians are gradually waking up to the need to act and are\u00a0now actively planning resolution to multi threaded problems arising out of past folly, in the US no such coherence to tackle equivalent problems exists. That might need to concern us a whole lot more than anything else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No, but it is a late start. Much of what is now happening should have happened long ago. It is clear that none of the indebted countries can pay what they owe and at the same time grow their economies.\u00a0 It is not clear, yet, whether the package for Greece will work, nor whether the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-malcolm-blair-robinson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4045"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4047,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045\/revisions\/4047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}