Last Friday (December 16, 2011), Ireland’s Central Statistics Office published their – National Accounts – for the September quarter 2011 and guess what? Things just became worse. Ireland is now nearly two years in the enforced austerity and all the deficit terrorists have been watching it closely for signs of life. The slightest upturn in GDP growth has brought a salvo of attacks on any one daring to oppose the harsh austerity. Well, I also watch it closely and the pattern that is unfolding is consistent with predictions. Things are getting worse not better. The only growth “engine” has been exports and with austerity spreading that market will not be strong enough to sustain growth when domestic demand is being ravaged by austerity.

The message to be drawn from this blog is that the dithering Euro bosses have done it again. Amidst all the bluster about stability and moving forward together all they have done last week (at the EU Summit) was further undermine the prospects of their region. The new rules that have seemingly been agreed upon will not be achievable and will generate even more financial instability as growth deteriorates further. In early 1968, amidst all the lunacy of the Vietnam War, an American general told a New Zealand reporter that the US decision to bomb a town full of civilians into oblivion was based on the logic that “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”. Last week’s (December 9, 2011) – Statement by the Euro area Heads of State or Government – invokes that sort of logic except in this case the brutality is of a different degree and style. Neither action was justified in the circumstances that the decision-makers faced.

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.

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.