Last week, the European Union Council agreed on a set of policies for tackling the euro crisis. It was hoped that the new agreement (hereafter referred to as the October Agreement) would be a decisive step toward resolving a slow burning crisis that threatened to derail the euro, plunge the EU itself into a process of explicit disintegration and, consequently, drag into a new recession the global economy.

Readers of these pages will know that I have taken the view that the October Agreement was made of the wrong stuff (click here, here and here). Others (including President Obama) have praised Europe for moving in the right direction, reserving their doubts and criticism for Europe’s pace along this, ‘righteous’, path. I beg to differ. The October Agreement was catastrophically bad in terms of the direction that it is taking Europe, not just due to its anaemic pace. (In my next posting I plan to sum up all the reasons for which the October Agreement is even worse for Europe than it is for Greece.) If I am right, it was the duty of our political leaders to say NO to it in Brussels last week. Each one of them, Mr Papandreou included, had the opportunity to withhold their signature then, thus causing the EU leadership to keep brainstorming until a decent, workable solution was found; one that would genuinely resolve the euro’s systemic crisis. Read the rest of this entry »