The EU Goes Nuclear

I'm in Virginia Beach on travel so I won't be posting much this morning, but I had to note this.

May 10 (Bloomberg) -- European policy makers unveiled an unprecedented loan package worth almost $1 trillion and a program of bond purchases to stop a sovereign-debt crisis that threatened to shatter confidence in the euro. Stocks surged around the world, the euro strengthened and commodities rallied.

Translation: They will be paying government debts with money printed out of thin air. There wasn't much else they could do, given the size of the problem. Having done this, a couple of questions come to mind.

• What was the point of the Germans blowing $40B on the Greeks or whatever the total was? It just got washed away in a cataract of printed money.


• Unlike the EU / IMF bailout of Greece, there don't seem to be any strings attached to this one. It's just print and spend, baby.


• Never bet against a government's desire to survive. They will do anything to keep spending money and retain power.


• See also: Zimbabwe, rampant inflation currency of

Maybe the entitlement society isn't so dead after all. We just found a motherload of painless budget-goosing cash!

This will work, right?