by
Eurointelligence kicks off today with an FT story which makes depressing reading: European finance ministers appear to have turned down Larry Summers’ eminently sensible call for a coordinated global macroeconomic stimulus package. The eurozone is not the gold bloc, to be fair, but one wonders whether a political generation that has invested so much political capital in the SGP will be capable of averting the disaster that faces Europe. (And even if individual policy makers do understand what is needed, European fiscal fragmentation appears an almost insuperable obstacle to the Europe-wide Keynesian policies that are needed now, as events in our own little country dramatically illustrate.)
Europe may be a second class political power on the world stage, but it is a first class economic power, and so all of this is very bad news indeed. Has the April conference failed before it even opens?
