WORLD
Europe survives the year
Baku, December 26 (AZERTAC). The year 2012 seemed pretty dangerous for the eurozone and the whole of the EU. But the worst did not come to pass, especially since Angela Merkel made concessions, which allowed Mario Draghi, President of the ECB to intervene. However, in 2013, Europeans will still have to remain vigilant.
“Forget the Mayan calendar: it`s in Berlin where Cassandra will be vindicated or refuted.”
Nor did it reveal anything that we did not already know, because we had been aware for some time that all roads led to Berlin (although with a stopover on the way in Frankfurt, headquarters of the European Central Bank).
Throughout 2011, a lethal combination of hesitation, prejudices, myopia, lack of leadership, divisions between countries and a maddening slowness managed to turn a deep economic crisis into an existential crisis that put the survival of the euro in question. In extremis, the European Central Bank flooded the market with liquidity, which eased the problem temporarily but did not solve it.
True, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, aware of the gravity of the crisis, had publicly acknowledged in November (2011) that “if the euro falls, Europe falls”.
But, as is sometimes said, behind every great man there is always a woman (hidden, or a surprise?). In this case, Chancellor Merkel, who after having dragged her feet for months and even having fed the scepticism in her own country with unfortunate statements about southern Europe, she decided to confront the German Bundesbank, which voted against these measures and to ignore the hardliners in her own party who were reluctant to accept any kind of commitment to public or private debt (bank debt), and to accept, in the first place, the bailout of Spanish banks and ECB intervention to relieve the pressure on the risk premium on Spanish and Italian bonds and, in the second place, to start talking about a banking union. And so, between June and September 2012, the euro was saved. That`s the year`s good news.
The year 2013 will be a year of transition in which two contradictions will dominate: on the one hand, the feeling of having left the abyss behind us, which is visible in the lowering of the risk premium and the decision of the Spanish government not to ask for a bailout; but on the other, the impossibility of denying that the adjustment policies are still not working and there will be no external stimuli to let us grow and create jobs.