Euroland will pay for this monetary madness

The ECB is in effect being used as a mechanism for making fiscal transfers between countries, which can only legitimately be agreed by elected governments. To save the politicians’ blushes, the transfers are being executed via an unelected monetary authority. It’s another example of how legal and democratic niceties seem to have been abandoned in the scramble to save the euro. The fiscal compact, almost certainly illegal within the wider framework of the European Union, is not the paving stone to fiscal federalism it pretends to be, but a form of economic dictatorship which seems to condemn much of the periphery to permanent depression. [...] Europe has no strategy for growth, no strategy for jobs, and in truth, no strategy for saving the euro. The project is broken beyond repair.