Ferris News-Wheel 4: An Update
Last Friday I wrote a fairly pessimistic news report. Now, as Monday morning arrives, I can say that I was far too optimistic. Let me try and say just how things seem much worse than they were on Friday.
On Friday I talked down the financial and social health of places in the EU like Greece and Portugal and I talked again of that nasty debt-crisis that people tried to deny for so many many years. I talked of Germany being unhappy. But when I talked like this there was still some faint chance of some action over the weekend. The G7 wizards met again. There was some time left to get a sense of action.
However by this morning most of the best respected comments were far from happy at the future. The so called problem of the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) with thier poor budgets, hidden debts and bleak forecasts for future reform would inevitably hit the Eurozone. After that hit it will be the public that inevitably gets hit from all directions and that ”double-dip” (yet another downturn in social and economc stability for the majority) threatens even more. Oh yes this includes Finland.
Ireland is certainly included in this PIGS so now it will be PIIGS. Then to make matters worse those countries that are inside the EU but yet outside of the Euro-Zone are little or no better. The UK, for example, is being labelled as one of the PIIGS. Then to make things worse the G7 has been seen, again, as too slow and almost useless. The IMF is staying diplomatic at this stage but unless things improve rapidly before April then we must expect IMF action. That means a very nasty global downturn in terms of the future of both the EU and the Euro-zone. More importantly this now means that the everyday working folk can expect worse things to come. It is only the everyday folk that can find the solid volume of ”input” to influence the ”market”. It is the famous numbers game. History repeats itself.
This numbers game is also a power game but, as we know, things like collective bargains and power-sharing have been destroyed in favour of the minority power-games. In other words the only solution that we have today, for the near future double-dip disaster is a quick and huge reform of the structures inherent in Casino finance games. The problem here is that there is so little real support for such a hard-hitting reform. Better, it is thought, to hit the vast majority of Europeans who tend to do real work and pay thier taxes.
What this means is this simple. The vast majority of working folk are going to be hit more than they have been warned about and much more than they deserve.
Until the systemic and structural causes of this mess are sorted out such will be the future. After the weekend of useless responses this Euro Crisis is going to quickly turn into an EU crisis.
Have a nice beginning to your week
Steve Bowles
