An "aside" about forces tugging at the euro:
Quote:
http://business.scotsman.com/economy.cfm?id=611292005
..........The other, is that last week's bonfire of assumptions about the common interests of Eurozone members could perversely work as a positive.
Even if the ECB is barred by treaty from bailing out profligate members, Italy for example, should its economy collapse, the markets implicitly assume that they would, hence the narrow spread between member governments' bond yields. Less solidarity means less fiscal co-ordination, and the chance the spreads between the bonds of Germany, with its 66 per cent debts, and Italy, with 106 per cent should widen.
If governments, tempted to over-borrow with impunity, have learned the folly of doing so from last week's effective political loosening, the euro may even emerge stronger.
ONE SIZE FITS FEW: ITALY ON THE BRINK
UNCHALLENGED as the sick man of the eurozone, Italy desperately needs to borrow more, and to devalue. But devaluation is the last thing needed by faster-growing euro members such as Spain and Ireland...........
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roachboy, hilarious observation:
"that this would escape the attention of conservatives in the states is no surprise: much of their politics are about self-disempowerment reframed through the language of hortaio alger novels."
IMO, never have so many Americans voted against their own interests and those of the economic well being and future economic opportunities of their own families, as they have in the red states in 2000 and 2004. This phenomena is the tip of the "self-disempowerment" iceberg that you so aptly phrase it to be.