I’m not completely familiar with all details coming out of the Euro summit a couple of days ago so I thought I’d cheat a little and point out some conclusions from a couple of my preferred econobloggers, Paul Krugman and Felix Salmon.
Firstly Krugman…
European stocks are up today, and I have no idea why. …this looks like a disastrous meeting. More austerity, more posing of the crisis, wrongly, as being all about fiscal deficits; no mechanism for ECB funding. Somehow southern Europe is supposed to deflate its way to prosperity, while everyone runs a trade surplus, presumably against that potentially habitable planet we’ve discovered 600 light-years away.
and Salmon…
It all adds up to one of the most disastrous summits imaginable. A continent which has risen to multiple occasions over the past 66 years has, in 2011, decided to implode in a spectacle of pathetic ignominy. Its individual countries will survive, of course, albeit in unnecessarily straitened circumstances. But the dream of European unity is dissolving in real time, as the eyes of the world look on in disbelief.
Europe’s leaders have set a course which leads directly to a gruesome global recession, before we’ve even recovered from the last one. Europe can’t afford that; America can’t afford that; the world can’t afford that. But the hopes of arriving anywhere else have never been dimmer.
Obviously pretty negative stuff. I guess the fact that both Italian and Spanish 10 year bond yields didn’t move too much also suggests the bond markets aren’t quite as confident as the equity markets, which increased an average of 2% across most places on Friday, at this point in time. Should be another interesting, i.e volatile, week coming up.