"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Friday, October 26, 2012

Berlin Demands Yet More Austerity

EXTRACTArguably, overall the biggest loser from the summit was Spain. Effectively, the EU leaders have reneged on the decision taken at the June ‘make or break’ Brussels summit, when Merkel appeared to back down at the very last minute and finally consent to the use of bailout money for bank recapitalisation. Previously, as our regular readers will recall, she had insisted that any rescue money doled out by the European Financial Stability Facility/ESM could only be channelled through the actual states themselves. Governments in receipt of such monies would be “fully liable” for any payment defaults or lapses.
At the time, Merkel’s concession was hailed as a glorious victory for the ‘Latin bloc’ and the new Hollande leadership - Spain, and the euro, was saved. Rejoice. However, even before the ink was dry on the agreement - so to speak - it was engulfed in deliberately engineered confusion, with Germany and ‘triple-A’ allies denying that they had signed up to an imminent EU-financed clean-up of Spanish banks and lenders. What an absurd idea. Do you really think we are going to throw our money down a Madrid black hole?

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