As you may know, the hull of the Titanic was divided into several water tight chambers that was supposed to make her "unsinkable." In theory, if water got into one chamber, the chamber design prevented the leak from spreading to the rest of the ship. But this proved to be a fatal design flaw. When the ship hit the iceberg, water got into not one but several chambers, and was prevented from being spread along the entire hull. Flooding of several watertight chambers produced enormous structural tensions, which eventually caused a breakup of the ship. In the absence of the water tight chambers, water would have been distributed along the entire hull so its breakup could have been avoided. This would have made possible to save the people, if not the ship.
The EU structural design resembles that of the Titanic. Each country is supposed to be a "water tight chamber" with rules prohibiting budget deficit greater than 3% of GDP and other rules prohibiting spreading of the deficit along the entire union. In the US, individual states cannot have deficit spending, but the fed can. The net result is that the fed can bail out individual bankrupt states, which 'spreads' this state's deficit along the entire system. In the EU by contrast, the members states cannot have deficit spending (above certain arbitrary level) but unlike the fed, the ECB does not have it either. The net effect is that if one of these "water tight chambers" takes in water after all (surprise surprise) the only way of relief is opening the flood gates to another supposedly "water tight country."
>From that pov, far from benefiting from individual members state
crises, the EU is far more likely to suffer catastrophic structural
damage by it than the US can possibly suffer from troubles in its
individual states. In the view of the latest news that Frau Merkel
and Monsieur Sarkozy indend to force march Europe into even more rigid
water tightness of individual member states than before, one cannot
help buy conclude that that may prevent the flooding of the first
class cabins on the EU Titanic for a while, but it will create even
greater structural tension that will eventually break up the hull into
pieces, in which case saving the futile attempt to save first class
passengers will sink thee entire ship.
Wojtek
On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 12:13 PM, James Heartfield
<Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> As predicted by me back in May:
>
> Why the EU will thrive on Greece’s troubles
> Merkel says the Union is in trouble, but this is pure fearmongering designed
> to make people toe the line
>
> http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8915/
>
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