The Euro’s Corona Crisis

The Euro’s Corona Crisis On Thursday the 23rd of April there was a video conference meeting of the EU leaders to discuss once again what to do about the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing lockdown of production across the area. In particular, there is the vexed question of how to help out those EU members states like Italy and Spain that have been hit hardest by the pandemic. , over three days and two nights of teleconference, the finance ministers of the Eurozone fumbled their way towards an emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) aimed high with a demand that the Eurozone states share the burden of the crisis with a jointly issued debt instrument known as a coronabond. The FANGs (Finland, Austria, Netherlands, Germany) or ‘frugal four’ beat them back down, proposing that each member of the currency union bear its debts alone. The Dutch finance minister Wopka Hoekstra played bad cop. He rejected a ‘mutual bond’ guaranteed by all states, arguing that it was Italy’s fault that it had such high public debt that it could not afford to pay for the pandemic itself. He did not trust the ‘profligate’ spending ways of the likes of Italy. This echoed the Eurogroup’s callous stance against Greece during the so-called ‘euro debt crisis’ of 2012-15. The southern states, backed by France, protested that the Dutch minister’s position stood against the whole idea of the European project,












The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts , futurists , visionaries , free investigative journalists , researchers , Whistelblowers , truthers and many more