Tuesday, November 29, 2011

European Optimism

... would seem to be misplaced.

The latest attempt to save the Euro calls for national budgets to be reviewed by bureaucrats in Brussels. How adding another and more ossified strata of regulations and oversight to an already crushingly burdensome process is going to save the EU is beyond me. And just how is detection and enforcement going to take place? Are they going to have an all-new set of bureaucrats to monitor tax collection levels in Milan? If it's low, do civil servants in Brussels cancel the public playground expansion efforts in Naples? And who pays for these new civil servants?

When the only tool you have is socialism, every problem looks like it needs another layer of central management.

Meanwhile, Italy continues to sink.
Italy again had to pay investors yields averaging above 7% at its government bond auctions Tuesday, as the euro zone's third-largest economy continues to borrow at costs that forced Greece, Portugal and Ireland to seek external bailouts.

The auction of up to €8 billion in bonds over a range of maturities saw Italy paying a yield of 7.89% on three-year bonds and 7.56% on 10-year paper. Both marked new euro-era highs. That Italy had to offer higher yields on shorter-dated bonds at Tuesday's sale underscores how investors want to be compensated for the risk attached to the country's near-term fiscal outlook.

2 comments:

tom said...

This Brussels that's going to rule europe... isn't that in a country that hasn't actually had a government for several years? "We can rule you, but not ourselves!"

(blepe)

B-Daddy said...

The southern EU members are going to have to leave the euro and inflate their legacy currencies to get their wages in line with their productivity. Right now employers in the south pay German level wages but get PIGish productivity. This can't last. Only after using inflation to adjust wages downward will they be able to get some economic growth going.