EU BreakUp?
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Italy’s new prime minister: The full Monti | The Economist
IN ITALY things seldom happen abruptly. Italians prefer compromise, half-measures and gradual change.
Technocrats: Minds like machines | The Economist
EVEN before Plato conceived the philosopher-king, people yearned for clever, dispassionate and principled government.
The circle below shows the gross external, or foreign, debt of some of the main players in the eurozone as well as other big world economies. The arrows show how much money is owed by each country to banks in other nations. The arrows point from the debtor to the creditor and are proportional to the money owed as of the end of June 2011.
BBC News - Eurozone debt web: Who owes what to whom?
Outside Britain, experts have often played a positive role in politics. Is it time we stopped knocking the technocrats?
In defence of Europe's technocrats | Philip Oltermann | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
UBS starts with a fairly direct “under the current structure and with the current membership, the Euro does not work.
UBS on Euro: “no modern monetary unions have broken up without some form of authoritarian government, or civil war”
Charlemagne: In the Brussels bunker | The Economist
THERE is surreal calm in Brussels, amid the greatest crisis to befall the European project in its history. The euro is besieged, several members lie gravely wounded or exposed to heavy fire and the defenders are running out of ammunition. The weakest outpost, Greece, could fall any day.
MISDIAGNOSIS is not, in itself, malpractice.
The proper diagnosis: Profligacy is not the problem | The Economist
THE costs of efforts to save the euro are justified by the claim that the alternative would be too dreadful to contemplate. But economic history is littered with examples of fixed exchange rates that came unfixed; the disuniting of currency unions, though rarer, happens from time to time.
The costs of break-up: After the fall | The Economist
AMONG millions of Europeans, the euro-zone crisis inspires stomach-turning fear. Among some British Conservatives, it provokes glee.
Bagehot: English for Schadenfreude | The Economist