The European Currency is Dying on its Feet

By William Spearshake. Many film directors emphasise the complexity of a sequence by showing it in slow-motion. It often helps us ordinary folk to understand complex issues if we can do a similar thing in our mind’s eye. This applies to watching the death of the Euro.

The multiple issues involved, and the complexities of each issue, often make a clear and simple vision of the European Currency’s Frankensteinian lurching towards the cliff edge difficult to rationalize.

However, we all know that the Euro is certainly diseased, and we have all witnessed the cascade failure of a succession of high-priced corrective treatments which have not worked.

The Single European Currency is, in fact, nothing less than an actual financial cancer. Like cancer, the best cure of all is never to let it start.

The second-best cure is to spot its malignant presence in the very early stages and remove it urgently.

The worst and most pathetic option is to allow it to grow and fester and then try to cure it with chemotherapy, which can produce side effects as bad as the disease. In respect of the Euro, the chemotherapy stage has now been reached.

Today, an emergency summit conference of European commissars takes place to try to find another solution to the Greek financial catastrophe.

On the agenda is a second cosmic-sized loan by the European Union to Greece, the first cosmic-sized loan having failed to work. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for one, is so unconvinced a second loan will hinder the spread of the financial cancer in Europe that she has stated that she may not even bother to attend the conference.

In her web blog, BBC News Economics Editor Stephanie Flanders has summed up the situation succinctly in two sentences: “Nearly everything that eurozone leaders have done in response to the euro crisis has been done in the name of preventing contagion. But guess what. It’s already here.”

Greece is already on the receiving end of a supposed “financial rescue” of 110 billion Euros (£96 billion).

To put this in perspective, this is almost enough to give one million people a hundred thousand pound lump-sum each. We are not talking peanuts here!

Let’s look at it another way – the most recent available figure for the population of Greece is about 11 million people.

Therefore the loan already advanced to Greece amounts to £8727 for each person if it were divided up equally amongst the Greek people. Of course, this also means that each person in Greece – including women and children – has now been obliged by their European masters to individually repay £8727 in extra taxation, plus whatever interest is levied on the loan.

If the summit agrees a further bail-out, this tax burden on each Greek citizen will increase accordingly. Small wonder that the Greek people have rioted.

Small wonder, then, that the Greek government has had to introduce crippling cuts in public services and expenditure, such as radical pay-cuts, selling-off of public utilities and massive redundancies.

Small wonder that Poul Thomsen, the International Monetary Fund’s Athens executive, has stated that Greece’s debt situation is balanced “on a knife edge.”

And just like cancer, the lump which shows is not the whole of the disease, which increasingly spreads its tendrils throughout the system. The total amount of Greek national debt at the present time is far greater than just the recent £96 billion loan.

The current Euro debt of Greece stands at over £308 billion, and the IMF stated a week ago that, on top of last year’s loan of nearly £100 billion, the country now needs another top-up loan of a similar sum.

This will mean that Greece will have about five hundred billion pounds worth of Euro debt outstanding, without even considering the interest payments.

So, to get Greece into a suitable condition to remain a proud member of the European Union, the rest of Europe will need to lend the crippled country a total of about five hundred billion pounds – which means that each Greek man, woman and child will then have a personal tax debt to be repaid of nearly £50,000, plus interest!

Another way to judge this sum is to say that, with a population of about 500 million people at the latest count, every man, woman and child within the entire European Union will in effect be charged a thousand pounds just to pay for the total Greek debt and nothing else.

Now let us widen our view. Portugal has also received a Euro bail-out of £70 billion. The Irish Republic has received a bail-out of £72 billion. Spain and Italy are both already tottering on the edge of the bail-out cliff.

So where is all this money coming from? It is not a widely known fact that the European Commission has no actual money of its own. All the money has to be raised by passing the hat round to the 27 countries who have been enslaved by the European Union.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has proudly squawked that Britain will not be contributing to the Greek bail-out.

However, he somehow neglected to also mention that the European Commission can draw funds from the overall EU budget, to which Britain is the second largest contributor after Germany!

Whatever Cameron may say to attempt to stay in power, this results in British taxpayers being forced by EU rules to make the second largest payment toward the Greek loans, as it did towards the Portuguese loan where Britain is responsible for £4.2 billion of the total.

The big question now being furtively whispered throughout the European grapevine is: how would the utter collapse of the European financial system – the Euro – affect the member countries, including us poor peasants in the United Kingdom?

How does cancer usually affect its victim if all treatments fail? Every treatment attempted so far to cure the cancer within European finance has merely ended up making the disease even worse!

In respect of the European Union, the old phrase “The patient is not expected to live” seems to be appropriate.