The euro crisis: stand by for years of slow, wretched decline – Telegraph Blogs
DANIEL HANNAN September 10th, 2012
... Imagine that you lost your main source of income tomorrow. At first, not much would change. You’d still be driving the same car, sleeping in the same bed. Only as things broke, and went unreplaced, would your poverty become visible. Dilapidation would steal upon you progressively.
What is true for individuals is true for whole nations – and not just nations in the eurozone. Britain’s decision to keep the pound bought us time: the sterling devaluation is the only reason that we have not suffered as Spain and Ireland have. But, unless we make use of that time, we shall simply have deferred the reckoning.
Incremental poverty is not some fanciful prospect. It has already begun. Most of my constituents are less well off than they were last year, and were worse off then than that the year before. The same is true across much of Europe and the United States. Economic contractions have until now tended to be brief. This time, though, the debt burden, the main depressor of growth, is as heavy as ever. What if we face another five or ten years of falling living standards? What if, instead of alleviating the problem, European policymakers exacerbate it with their stimulus programmes, their tax rises, their attacks on financial services and, not least, their determination to keep the euro together?
Decline is precisely that: not a sudden calamity, but a gradual descent; not the end of Atlantis but the end of Atlas Shrugged, a shabby, demoralising slide into darkness. This is the way the West ends - not with a bang but whimper.
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