EU makes Europe Bandit Country

As Ireland gets ready to receive the funds raised in the bond markets this week by the entire EU, Europe becomes a vast area where the rule of law no longer applies - bandit country in effect as recognised in this blog posting's headline!

When the finance ministers of the Euro Group met in emergency session of Ecofin, last May, they decided to break the terms of the EU Treaties and thus go beyond the law. The French Finance Minister, Mme Christine Lagarde, has already admitted that fact in an interview with the Wall Street Journal as previously well reported on this blog. Her German opposite number, Wolfgang Schäuble, as this blog reported at the time, cleverly avoided becoming implicated, having been taken ill en route to the meeting. As events are unfolding such a deviation to hospital appears increasingly fortuitous as it daily becomes clearer that it is his fellow countrymen who will be the main (and increasingly more costly) victims of these criminal acts.

What is not clear is how the UK is entwined in this whole very sordid business. Not only is the UK outside of the eurozone, the country actually lacked a government at the time the illegal activities were decided upon. Why they were thus involved in this week's quite improper fundraising must be one of the greater mysteries so far this century, one of so many still only partly answered by the now apparently silenced Wikileaks!