Europe needs to move into a serious economic integration. They have more to gain together if both the political will and pro active leadership is willing adopt common economic discipline in all EU countries.

The Greeks and others need to live within their own means to avoid contagion and collect taxes from all the rich tax evaders.

It is unfair to expect the French and the Germans to foot the bill for other countries. It is high time Europe establishes The Federal Reserve Bank of Europe to coordinate the inter governmental fiscal discipline and enforce a strict and consistent system.

It is important for the Euro to survive or back to the old days of high inflation and poor inter trade system that does not bode well for common good of Europeans. So please get you act together and stop being reactive..be pro active! You still have a chance!

In order for the turtle to move, it has to stick its neck out sometimes!!

Mahmoud Lamadanie
Executive Associate Vice President for International Affairs,USA

pedro

How about a draw and let's have another one?

Its time to be a real captalist with free trade and open markets all-around.

Euro would survive... but at what cost? Europe isn´t only Germany and France, just take a look at the actual austerities plans applied in Italy, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, etc. Not forgetting the poor Greek citizens.
The citizens of a Country are who really sort the economy out, the workers and those citizens are suffering big brain damage day by day with these measures, for example today, in Italy (a G7 Country) they don´t have buses, trains and trans to go to work.
The Euro has destroyed and continues to destroy EU´s domestic economy.

il pedro,

you should stop execusing ipad for your mistakes.

MartinZaimov
"If all of us Europeans do not make the necessary effort and stand behind the euro it is my view that we would head into a most devastating World war."

Germany does not have nukes. She cannot invade France. France won't start a war. World war will happen only if USA and Russia exchange nukes!

Setubal= santarem

(obviously)

Excellent.

Today as I was driving down to Lisbon with my sister beside me, we settled things. It's ok. The world isn'y
T going to end, nor is all this a conspiracy theory.

'People have just lost reason' I keep repeating to my sister.. the philosopher though, challenges my statement, saying that mankind was never ever ruled by reason anyway, and never will be. Who am I to discuss with such a brilliant woman?

'It's not reason' - she says but 'giving importance to what truly IS important'. society's inability to criticise itself according to her has been systemic all along.

We both agreed though that the whole problem was ideological at its basis. An ideological war with many facades each trying to prove itself right. A chimera whose only fate is doom . 'put the beast down' I say, as we drive past Leiria, my sister smiles. She sometimes reminds me of our great-grandmother who We had the pleasure to meet.

Childhood memories. Happy memories of a time where fantasy and reality we married and never divorced. We learned years later that they did.

'It's ok' says my sister. The only important 'patrimonio'' (inheritance) we pass on to the next generation is immaterial.

Again who am I to argue.

We drive past setubal and I am still thinking about all she said.

When we get to Lisbon, I feel safe. Secured.

'this woman could save the world' I think to myself.

And then my great-grandmother's face smiles at me, at the back of my lobotomised brain.

I realise, I was wrong all along. Importance, is where we want importance to be.

I don't say this to my sister. I don't have to. She knows that I know that she knows that I know.

@Viva

Did you hear that?

Newt speaks French. Now I find it a bit suspcious that while Romney's French speaking skills have been reported, Newt's knowledge of French has been hidden.

I smell a rat in this ; )

Sherryblack

It is quite amusing how the Europeans have whitewashed their own sordid long 3 centuries history of slave trade...The European moral preening over slavery in the south is laughable considering these facts.

This time I did read your post.

You are quite right in your criticism of slavery in Europe.

But, please, once more, study facts before making comments.

Slavery did exist in Europe far longer than the 200 hundred odd years you mention. It existed in Greece, Rome, what's today Germany or Britain for well over 2 millennia.

Even Portugal, almost certainly the first modern country to abolish slavery around the mid 1700's, used it for the previous more than 400 years and was one of those that profited from its trade the most and for longer. Even after abolition at home.

Having lived in Europe at least 70 of my 80 years, knowing literally thousands of Europeans and having read millions of words published I have heard dozens of criticisms of America characteristics, real or imagined: from lack of manners and deep culture to the Iraq war and city violence.

Yet, I don't ever remember having heard a European badmouthing, as you would say, slavery in the US. Against slavery as such, of course. Against slavery in what was for five years the Confederacy, never.

Don't imagine slights; it's always a sign of inferiority. Get real, proved facts; criticize at will those you consider wrong, whether in America, Europe or Borduria; praise whatever you think is right in America, Europe or Borduria.

That's the only way to make others respect your opinions you so much crave.

Well, well.

The Croatians have voted 66% to 34% to enter the European Union in July 2013.

A good marriage. The EU will be good for Croatia and the Croatian vote of confidence in the EU comes at a welcome time.

If all of us Europeans do not make the necessary effort and stand behind the euro it is my view that we would head into a most devastating World war.

The current so called economic crisis apart from being a normal
cyclical event has profound political causes. The political class
around the world has detached itself from reality and become largely
incompetent. Global media have allowed journalism and information to
become the stuff of an amusement bazaar. Both rich and poor are
failing to recognize that current ways of life are unsustainable and
in some cases even suicidal. We have allowed the financial industry to grow to a size that is unrelated to the size of the world and its
economy. Instead of nurturing freedom and virtue we have been driven by greed and excess.

The Greek implosion is our moment of reckoning. Our ability to stand
behind and support their reform effort is a tipping point. It will
determine the evolution of humanity for years to come. If Greece
fails, the euro will fail. The end of the euro is the end of the
European Union.

Those of you who discard the EU as a withering club of harmless old people or as an irrelevant and powerless Venus symbol please reflect on a World without the EU..A World in which corrupt American power and corrupt Chinese power and corrupt Iranian power are all liberated from the constraints of the European Idea and the unique institutional construct of the last 50 years.

The European Union is a successor of Great Empires of the past, the
only true guardian of freedom and peace. The failure of Greece is the victory of the separatists and the achmadinedjads of the world, of Belgian, Catalan, Irish, British, French, Hungarian, Macedonian and other European nationalists and extremists. It would be the
antechamber of an inevitable and most horrible War.

"Euro is the biggest ponzi scheme of the century."

Unbaised,

Euro per-se isn't a ponzi scheme. But euro allowed international ponzi operators and bankers to gamble on weaker countries, creating bubbles and encoraging irrational exuberant spending. Free trade, especially money, euro, combined with corrupt & inept politicians created the piigy crisis.

marie, viva, sherry,...

I thought obama will be one term president. But I am afraid he will be two full term president. The problem is no challenger within democrats. Much worse is that there is no one who can replace Obama within republicans. They are all flawed cadidates. Investment bankler Romey, if elected, he will destroy all inefficient american jobs for the profits, without creating new jobs. Newt's "Invented" "'Open marriage contract with America'" will be rejected by conservative americans as his ex-wife rejected his open-marriage proposal. Newt is "invented" person. He's not real.

Viva
The US early on passed laws prohibiting foreign-built ships from carrying US-originated trade. That enabled... till the end.

Couldn't agree more. Completely.

In fact that's my whole argument.

As for contenders now, I believe who some are. But can't be wholly sure yet.

One thing I know: they may be more concentrated in city A or region B but that will not mean city A will be on one side and region B on the other.

During the cold war, the USA probably did not feel it as much as we did in Europe, but even in countries with a small communist party, like Spain, the UK, Holland, Western Germany did have a lot of people "fighting" for the Soviet side.

Sanmartinian

The US early on passed laws prohibiting foreign-built ships from carrying US-originated trade. That enabled the ship-building North to capture the trade of the South, which created two thirds of US foreign exchange in the form of cotton.

So cotton was transshipped to Europe via New York which, in the process, took forty cents of every dollar of the value of the cotton.

New York siphoning off the wealth of a continent: sound familiar?
Of course slavery and states rights factored in, but the basic dynamic of trade slanted to the advantage of the North fuelled the antagonism as well.

The single fact that the North depended on the slave production of the South for much of its wealth tells us a great deal about the moral underpinnings of the arguments of the antagonists in the US Civil War. Slavery was largely a public relations drum for the North to pound.

In the South the situation was ambivalent. Blacks owned thousands of slaves. Freedmen plied their trades and lived in peace. The vast majority of Southerns never owned a slave. The realization that slavery was economically unsustainable was slowly dawning. But not fast enough. Much of the subsequent history of racial division in the US might have been very different if economic forces had been allowed to play out, rather than men's passions given free rein.

Anyhow, today New York still rules the roost. Being an indirect beneficiary, I'm not complaining. They didn't give it up in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, in fact they fought to keep it. And they won. I wouldn't bet against them for all the usual reasons.

But the contenders have to try. That's what makes the world go round.

>Josh

Well, that's a bit of over the top, isn't it? Or else I must have missed Wall Street's death camps last time I was in NYC... .

Well, if you want to be an Estoril line real lad you have to learn the gentle art of analogical thought including caricature and its small exaggerations.

Yet, have you never seen Godfather? A dead horse head in bed is not really Auschwitz and thrown to water with your feet in a concrete bowl is not quite a gas chamber but not very pleasant, either, is it?

Please read what I hope is a serious reply to viva.

I'll comment about European rating agencies when I'll see them in operation.

As for the present ratings I agree some are too lenient. Mainly those on Britain, Lux and Japan.

See Daily Charts.

To viva

"I agree we have pulled back from hot wars for the moment. But in this financial war, who are the antagonists?

The only honest opinion I can give you is: I don't know.

Yet.

German military researchers at the transition between the 19th and 20th century (they were excellent in their profession) maintained that all future wars would be shaped by an event you know well: the American Civil War.

Let's stick to their advice.

At the beginning of the Civil War there was an overwhelming question: who's going to side with whom?

It had happened before but was little noticed, was repeated later but Allies didn't pay proper attention to their great disadvantage.

Shall we look into it? Is Maryland going to side with the Feds or the Confederacy? What about Mississippi? Missouri? It got so confusing, a new State, West Virginia, had to be created.

Exactly the same happened in WW1 (which side Turkey?) and WW2. 70 years later it looks nonsensical but if Balbo had had his way, Italy would have joined Britain and France not Germany.

Maybe I'm reading too fast into the future but my feeling is that we are at the beginning of the process. Sides are not yet defined, never mind who's with whom.

Lets go back to the essence of war: rarely, if ever, nations were at war with each other. Interests have (kings, governments, landlords, peasants, slave owners, slaves....) Interests have always had a knack to persuade states (as in nation-state) the fight was about the honour and rights of the nation but they did not always succeed.

In WW1, war promoters had a hell of a time persuading the French to go to war. Does the name Jean Jaurès in France mean anything to you?. It should .

Almost repeat: In WW1, war promoters had a hell of a time persuading the Germans to go to war. Does the opposition of the Social Democratic Party to war in 1914 within the German Parliament mean anything to you?

I could go on with Britain (remember Bertrand Russel in prison?) Australia, the USA and so on.

Ah! But WW2 was different. Nazis were an ideological movement that started a war between the baddies and the goodies.

Sure?

Nazis were initially a band of unemployed left wing toughies that soon acquired the idiotic support of a national hero and one of the most gifted orators in the history of evil. They cloaked themselves in a completely insane ideology but they were nothing more than a band of criminals eager to get power and riches. At the beginning, like any other criminal organization, they even fought more among themselves than against outsiders.

Like any criminals intent on violence they relied in their usual rhetoric: create an ideology easy to be absorbed by the useful idiots (be that ideology the uniqueness of our Fatherland, our culture, our religion, our race, the superior rights of workers, the suffering proletariat, the unfettered freedom of markets, you name it, you've got it).

Probably the most “ideological” war in living memory was the Spanish Civil War: well, all it always was was salaried or unemployed workers against landowners and mostly employers, All the others were poor dumb citizens drunk with propaganda.

Back to America's Civil War.

Supporters of slavery against anti slavery idealists? It took more than two years for Lincoln to make it so. State righters against Federal supporters? What a peculiar way to demonstrate it with Sherman's destruction across Georgia or Lee's refusal to take Washington when he could.

No need to go any further: you got the gist of my thought.

In 1991, when my journalist friend and I were trying to see what would be the next war we agreed it could only be financial. We may still be proved right. Or wrong, who knows?

We did also try to guess which would be the likelier conflicts.

Islam against the rest of the world? Looks like we weren't far wrong.

Organized crime against organized governments? Mexico, Colombia, Somalia, Guiné-Bissau and , why not? Vegas and some Wall Street seem to back our guess.

Very rich against destitute? Well, at least the Daily Telegraph (hardly a died in the core socialist news piece) is already using the terms overclass and underclass.

I don't know yet who the main opponents will be in the new “financial war with bloody hot spots”.

In my opinion not nations or what's left of nation-states unless criminals manage again to wood-wink us with silly propaganda about the Royal Republic of Anglo-Saxony (have you never been to their embassy famous parties?) attacking poor Med-Piggies and their Protector the Heathen Central European Empire.

Come on, a little more realism and common sense would us a world of good.

Wars are between interests, very often criminal interests cloaked in ideological mantras.

And definitely not very clear-cut interests. In WW1 Britain kept selling cannon to Germany...

Euro is the biggest ponzi scheme of the century. It was flawed from the begining. The weaker countries are drawn into it by cheap lending, european subsidies, ease of travel, jobs etc. These new countries borrow in euro but cannot sustain the payback because of obvious economic differences among the member states. So thses countries will be ultimately forced to exit euro with a very cheap currency which will take forever to repay debt or else they giveup their soverignity to brussels in exchange of debt restructuring. Thats Euro and EU in a nutshell :-)

Knees one = Chinese one

Throne seems = which seems

Artisan suprem= aryan supremacy

Sorry iPad again