Colm has some choice words for our European partners including an alternative to the van Rompuy-Barroso plan.
Author: Karl Whelan
The newly-agreed programme for government is available here.
Via the FT’s Brussels blog, here‘s a supposedly authentic copy of proposals for a competitiveness pact being circulated for the next European Council meeting by Barroso and van Rompuy. Much of it is still quite vague but, as leaked documents go, it’s somewhat more impressive than this one.
Here‘s a column I wrote for Business and Finance on the challenges facing the new government.
Via Vox,eu, here is a link to a translation of an open letter objecting to the EFSF that has been signed by 189 German economists. Rather than making the current mechanism permanent, they prefer the idea of setting up an insolvency scheme for EU states combined with EU funding for states that enter this scheme.
The economists may be presuming that the proposed permanent European Stability Mechanism is intended as a direct follow-on from the EFSF. However, it has been my understanding for some time (i.e. at least since Mrs. Merkel’s comments on burden-sharing last Autumn and the Deauville declaration) that the ESM could well be a vehicle that facilitates sovereign defaults and then provides conditional funding. So the position of the economists may not be far off what the German government is looking for.