Charlemagne: Europe's dark secret ?

When history comes to write the tale of the euro-zone crisis, the chief villains, if Europe’s leaders have any say, will be not dissembling Greeks or dithering Germans, but the financial markets. Traders subjected Greece to “psychological terror”, declared George Papandreou, its prime minister. They were “making money on the back of the unhappiness of the people”, lamented Michel Barnier, the European commissioner for the single market. The crisis was blamed on wolf-pack markets (Anders Borg, Sweden’s finance minister), cynical hedge funds, cocky credit-ratings agencies, neoconservative capitalism (José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero,

Spain’s prime minister), a duplicitous Anglo-Saxon press (Mr Zapatero again), and other wicked forces still.
Not all Europeans demonise the market. Ex-communist Europe, which only recently threw off the command economy, is less hostile. So are the Germans, with their small-business Mittelstand and consensual labour relations. Elsewhere, though, market-aversion seems to go deeper than mere disapproval of extravagant stock options or bonuses (which is common to market-friendly Britain and America too). Fully 29% of Spaniards and Italians, and 43% of the French, told a global poll last October that free-market capitalism was “fatally flawed”. Only 13% of Americans shared that view.

At best, too much meddling in markets will condemn Europe to gentle decline. At worst, it will undermine the capitalist enterprises on which its prosperity and social model depend. A few years ago, an ambitious centre-right French politician seemed to agree. “For 25 years, France has never stopped discouraging initiative and punishing success,” he said. “Preventing the most dynamic from getting rich has by consequence impoverished all the others.” His name? Nicolas Sarkozy
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Note EU-Digest: a most bias report by the Economist, obviously inspired by its friends in the Anglo Saxon "conservative" financial community who are very much opposed to the legislation initiated by the EU and the Obama administration to curb the free wheeling ways of the global financial community. What happened in 2008 to the worlds economic structure as a result of deregulation and greed must never happen again.

Charlemagne: Europe's dark secret | The Economist