WOW! Another British paper publishes the facts on ECB disaster!

Sean O'Grady in the London edition of The Independent, actually reveals some facts on the disastrous lending policies of the ECB, can the nation survive this incredible outbreak of candour? A quote:

Finally, the ECB must take its share of the blame. The rate rise yesterday was badly timed and probably triggered Portugal's capitulation. Behind all this is a determination by the ECB to end its secret bailouts of peripheral economies. For months the governments of Portugal, Ireland and Greece have only been able to offload their government bonds to their own banks. These banks then took these bonds along to the ECB, which accepted them as collateral and handed over the euros.

Thus the ECB has been bailing governments out with no great fuss or headlines. The ECB, with great reluctance, went along with this pantomime as part of its "emergency" measures to deal with the crisis, even relaxing its collateral rules to accommodate the near-junk bonds issued by Athens, Dublin and Lisbon.

Thus some €40bn (£35bn) has been already loaned to Portugal and another €140bn to Ireland, neither ever politically sanctioned nor even acknowledged.

It was perfectly right for the ECB to want to get out of this, but it ought to have waited until the eurozone had finally agreed an expansion in the existing rescue fund and the rules for the new one that is supposed to operate from 2013.

The link.