I often wonder what outer space thinks of Earth. In recent days a new planet – named Kepler 22b – has been discovered which has Earth-like features and would probably support life. With the CofFEE conference over it was back to the Euro crisis today. Kepler 22b will be following the EU Summit as much as all of us. Laughing with us as the buffoons who parade as leaders work on the next can to kick down the road. The ECB boss gave a press conference yesterday which clarified things a bit – they won’t bail out governments but each week are bailing out governments. That sounds easy to understand. Like the rest of it. I wonder what Kepler 22b is thinking.

This week, the European Union Summit should see the leadership take the monetary union further into the mire and further away from an effective solution to their woes. The German Chancellor has vowed to create a new fiscal union across the Eurozone. She announced this plan to the German Parliament and declared she would push for a change to the treaty that established the common currency. Let me state at the outset – the plan as the press are reporting it – will not work. It is just the latest in a long line of Euro “solutions” that has fallen on its face soon after being announced as the way forward for the EMU. It won’t work because it doesn’t address the problem and will make changes that will make the actual problem worse. Europe is suffering a lack of aggregate demand and needs to address that head on by increasing public spending. Further constraining the capacity of governments to spend will make the situation worse.

Its summer! After reading this blog – The ECB is a major reason the Euro crisis is deepening – many readers have written to me asking to provide more explanation of the “sterilisation” operations that the ECB is engaged in. It is clear that an increasing number of people are becoming interested in arcane things like central bank operations which can only augur well for creating capacity for better public debate. A lot of readers overnight have reacted one way or another to the announcement by several central banks that the swap lines are open again albeit at a lower “cost” than previously. There was also considerable interest in understanding what the “failed” sterilisation yesterday means. The answer is not much but we had better not tell the Germans that the ECB weekly deposit tender failed.

I woke up to the headlines this morning about the apparently failed German bond tender yesterday and all the experts predicting doom. In my E-mail box there was around 30 requests for an explanation from readers who had read the news and concluded that it was a major event in the current crisis but didn’t really understand what the implications were. The implications are fairly simple – the bond markets are working out that no EMU government is free of insolvency risk because they all use a foreign currency (the Euro). Germany is better placed to resist the crisis because of the relative strength of its economy but it is not immune from it. Its economy will also deteriorate as the effects of austerity spread out through trade. While the “experts” waxed lyrical about the crisis being confined to profligate EMU states (the PIIGS), it was always clear that the northern strong-hold states were going to be dragged in as the crisis deepened. That is because the problem is the Euro itself and the way the monetary system is designed. All the other emotional stuff about lazy Greeks is a sideshow. Germany is starting to find that out – yesterday, it received its first strong message. The crisis is going right to the top in Europe now.

Bloomberg News carried the headline today (November 23, 2011) – Germany Sees No ‘Bazooka’ in Resolving Debt Crisis as Spanish Yields Surge – which reiterated various statements in recent days from German political leaders eschewing any role for the ECB in defending the EMU from impending collapse. The Germans seem to have very selective memories. There was a time – much closer to today than their hyperinflation experience – when their citizens were cold and hungry and only a major fiscal intervention saved them from greater austerity. There was a time when they marched in the streets with placard declaring “Wir wollen Brot!”.

As they say in the classics – “some of my best friends are” … and in my case I might have added German. The Euro crisis – that is, the crisis that has arisen because the creation of the Euro stripped member nations of their capacity to defend their economies against negative private spending episodes – is being worsened because of the incredible resistance by Germany and the Troika (EU, ECB, IMF). The Brussels-Frankfurt consensus – which claimed the creation of the Eurozone would engender stability and growth is shattered – irretrievably humiliated one might venture to say – yet the cabal that hides behind that “consensus” maintains power and influence. The hypocrisy that the cabal engage in is staggering. Their narrative is almost totally dislocated from the reality. They regularly disregard their own rules to favour the vested interests that keep them in power. And meanwhile, they are overseeing a collapse of all the ideals they claimed their system was designed to achieve.