Where now for the euro?
Another round of meetings concludes. The limousines carrying Europe's finance ministers head to Brussels airport. Only to return next week. No one believes the eurozone crisis has been fixed. Some band-aid is in place.That's all.
The search is on for the holy grail - the formula that fixes the single currency and returns it to stability.
The head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has attacked the current "piecemeal" approach. "The EU," he said, "needs a comprehensive solution to the debt crisis. It can't be done on a country-by-country basis."
Yet the differences between members of the eurozone are real and cannot easily be smoothed away.
Take the idea of a eurobond (E-bond). It is a suggestion that has been around before. Using the chairman of the 16-nation Eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker, and the Italian Finance Minister, Giulio Tremonti, tried to engineer it onto the agenda.
Not surprisingly the Portuguese came out as enthusiasts for the E-bond. "Europe's monetary union," said Portuguese Treasury Secretary Carlos Pina, "is missing solidarity mechanisms between countries and we consider that the mechanisms are insufficient ".
It remains true that the weak and vulnerable like to appeal to "solidarity" while the strong are less persuaded. The Germans were quick to reject the E-bond. They saw it as a way of enabling debt-prone countries to avoid the judgement of the markets. Juergen Stark, a German board member of the European Central Bank (ECB), pointed out that "each country needs to be held responsible for its own debt". The German paper Bild ran a headline that said "EU wants to make euro soft".
All of this has clearly irritated Mr Juncker. He said "Germany's thinking is a bit simple on this". He went on to say that the "proposal is being rejected before it has been studied".
There were similar divisions over whether to increase the bail-out fund, the European Financial Stability Facility. The IMF - among others - believed a bigger pot would dispel fears that there wouldn't be enough resources to help Spain if it cried out for help.
Interestingly, it was not just Germany who opposed adding to the fund. The Dutch, the Austrians and the Finns were all decidedly reluctant. Within those countries there is increasing opposition to supporting bail-outs. The mood is disturbing some in the Brussels hub. "I am worried," said Economy Commissioner Olli Rehn, "about the divergence in the public debates between the northern and southern countries".
So where does this leave the euro crisis?
The pressure will remain on Spain and Portugal to reduce their deficits. Eurozone ministers were quick to applaud Spain for increasing the retirement age, hiking the tobacco tax and selling a significant share in the state-owned lottery and in a couple of airports.
Ministers hope the ECB will continue buying bonds, particularly if either Italy or Spain come under pressure. But this is seen as more of a "holding tactic" rather than a solution.
There will be in February.
There is always the hope that growth will gather pace and ease the pain, but many believe that 2011 will actually see growth slacken.
None of these measures, of course, addresses how some of the weaker countries will bring down their debts. Austerity measures will surely dampen demand and will herald a tough decade of low growth and wage restraint. Greece almost certainly will be granted more time to pay back its loans. Even then it is hard to see where the growth will come from to significantly pare down its debts.
That is why many observers believe that some restructuring of sovereign debt is inevitable. That move is not even countenanced by Europe's finance ministers, but the markets believe it will happen.
The argument over the way forward will be had most keenly in Germany. Yesterday the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt lashed out at the Bundesbank, which he called "reactionary" and opposed to European integration. He said Chancellor Angela Merkel was "not acting very cleverly".
But Helmut Schmidt comes from a generation when it was much more accepted that the German and European interest were entwined.
A debate is under way in Germany over how to stabilise the single currency, but at heart this has become an examination of what an increasingly confident Germany wants from Europe.
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