It's a theme echoed by Jim Gallagher in today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled "Horror show: the European debt crisis":Right now, the European financial system is giving off signs of the apocalypse.
There's an under-the-table run on European banks. American money-market mutual funds, long a main source of dollar funding for the Europeans, are fleeing the Continent. Other sources of bank funding are getting clunky or drying up.
There's a run on the bonds of Spain and Italy, too, even though those two countries are quite solvent.Worldwide, money is running for safety, mainly to the U.S. dollar. All that money is driving yield on the 10-year Treasury bond to the lowest levels since the 1940s. The euro is down 8 percent against the dollar since August. The Chinese yuan is weakening.
The American stock market is bouncing up and down, lately in synch with news from Europe. The memory Lehman Brothers haunts Wall Street...
Two economists quoted in the article thinks things will work out: after all, Europe simply has to come to its senses and resolve the crisis.
Problem is, no one has explained how the crisis can be resolved. Greece owes creditors hundreds of billions of Euros and can never, ever pay those debts off. The idiotic lenders who underwrote and levered up these loans include some of the most august banking institutions in all of Europe.
So short of Germany and the United States flooding the international banks with cash -- which would be a handy form of political suicide back at home -- there don't appear to be many credible options for salvaging the Euro.
Prepare accordingly.
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