Official - EU Loopiness off the charts...

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To translate - Angela "Austerity Now, Austerity Forever" Merkel says that banks will not have to, ever, take losses on the bonds of any Eurozone country

To translate the translation - Remember Ireland? Remember how the Irish gummint bailed out their insolvent banks at par (100%), and effectively screwed the Irish to the tune of Billions? We're going to do that to theentire Eurozone!

I could rant, but Felix Salmon sez. it best
To understand just how stupid this is, all you need to do is go back and read Michael Lewis’s Ireland article. The fateful decision in Ireland was to take the insolvent banks and give them a blanket bailout, with the banks’ creditors all getting 100 cents on the euro. That only served to put a positively evil debt burden onto the Irish people, forcing a massive austerity program and causing untold billions of euros in foregone growth, while bailing out lenders who deserved no such thing.
Are we really going to repeat — on a much larger scale — the very same mistake that Ireland made? Does no one in Europe realize that this is the single worst thing they can do?
The eurozone’s ‘terrible mistake’
UPDATE:  Angela Merkel, German chancellor, in Paris. has just announced a u-turn: under the new ESM, private sector investors will not be required to bear some losses. The ECB will be pleased. See ft....

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