Why Is It Easier?
Posted on November 9, 2011 in Political Cartoons
The Death Of The Euro
Posted on November 9, 2011 in Articles
The Article: Is this how the euro ends? by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post.
The Text: Here’s how it was supposed to go: Greece first. Then, perhaps, Portugal and Ireland. If things got really bad, Spain. If the world — or, more precisely, the euro — was coming to an end, Italy. It was not supposed to go Greece and then Italy. No one was prepared for that. The markets weren’t prepared for that.
(Kristen Boghosian and Anqoinette Crosby/The Washington Post) And so the markets are falling. The Dow is down 290 points. The Stoxx 50, a blue-chip index for the euro zone, is down 2.5 percent. Italy’s borrowing costs have skyrocketed. The Euro has plunged.
The problem, put simply, is that Italy is both too big to fail and too big to save. It’s the eighth-largest economy in the world. At $2 trillion, it’s about seven times as large as Greece’s $300 billion economy. France and Germany’s banks alone have $600 billion in exposure to Italian debt. But Barclay’s says Italy is “now mathematically beyond the point of no return.” Silvio Berlusconi might be out, but changing governments does not change arithmetic. And so the question is simple, and stark: If there wasn’t the will to really save Greece, where would the will — and the money — come from to save Italy?
