A parliament for the eurozone•
European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and other top EU officials want to create a “eurozone parliament” with powers over members’ fiscal and economic policy. They also want the European Commission to be able to veto national spending plans.
Barroso said, “A deep and genuine economic and monetary union•can only be completed with a new treaty.” He explained that a federation of nation states is “our” political horizon which will guide the EU future. The European Commission will bring forward ideas for Treaty change before the June 2014 European Parliament elections
...but the German people aren’t happy
People living in the EU don’t agree. Merkel couldn’t win a referendum on turning the EU into a single state. An online survey by YouGov found that 53 per cent of Germans oppose the transfer of more powers to the EU, against 27 per cent in favour. Other polls in Germany confirm their doubts about the euro, as do those in Poland (76 percent oppose joining) and France (60 percent wish they had not).
Another euro-wheeze
The European Central Bank has come up with yet another scheme to save the euro, called Outright Monetary Transactions. The Bank will buy “unlimited” amounts of Spanish and Italian government bonds, if those governments apply for aid and give sovereign control of their budgets to the EU. This ECB scheme directly funds governments, which EU treaties forbid.
Spanish and Italian banks hold a lot of their governments’ debts; these bonds have lost value. The ECB scheme would bail out these banks yet again, with billions of euros on top of its current exposure, standing at over 900 billion euros in April 2012.
These interventions carry an additional danger that the ECB may ultimately redistribute those considerable risks among various countries’ taxpayers.
Creditors want central banks, in effect the taxpayer, to bail them out. There is no guarantee this can “save” the euro any more than earlier bailouts. Meanwhile the economy continues to fail in EU member states. ■