The End of the Beginning for the Euro
Marc De Vos
5/13/2010
Parallels between Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis and the global financial crisis are manifold. As with the housing market and the derivatives craze, the euro tale is one of easy money, excessive leverage, bad accounting, and failed supervision. De Vos states that the euro’s Stability and Growth Pact, meant to restrain budget deficits and national debt, was violated in its application and ignored in its supervision. In short, this was a bubble of public excess waiting to be pricked. For the sake of the euro’s and the continent’s future, political scapegoating needs to stop. The cardinal issue for the euro is whether its members will implement structural reforms that coincide with increased austerity before doing so only furthers their decline.
De Vos is a professor at Ghent University and the general director of the Itinera Institute, a Brussels-based non-partisan policy institute.
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