Tuesday 19th June

So, despite all the dire warnings and predictions of disaster from those siren voices of the far right Greece has survived to fight another day.  Admittedly Spain is close to the brink too, but somehow the sword of Damacles, though appearing to hang from an ever thinning thread, never quite falls.  Or hasn’t so far.  The Euro crisis simply rumbles on and on, each new disaster appears to be worse than the one before, and then a solution of sorts is found.  They may be sticking plasters, but each one buys a little more time, and I sense that slowly things are going to get better, there may well be further bail-outs; there will undoubtedly be moves towards closer integration; M. Hollande may succeed in steering the mighty ship away from the whirlpools of austerity and towards a bit of growth.  I simply cannot believe that the Germans would rather the chaos of disintegration and the collapse of the whole European project than the road of pragmatism.    And anyway it is actually still a financial problem, with the main worry being the collapse of the banking system, rather than a real collapse of the European economy itself.  Maybe the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way and Germany and Britain will start to be on the losing side of the argument.  America has avoided the worst of this crisis by going a lot slower and trying to create jobs, and now France is lining up to do the same.  And in historical terms, even though the numbers are higher these days, the actual proportions of debt are not that high.  I feel that if the markets really wanted to destroy the Euro they would have done it by now, a lot of traders are making a lot of money out of this crisis as it stands, they don’t really want to kill the golden goose.  At least not just yet.