While correct, this article is still missing the main point: Germany knew the Euro would fail.
It wasn’t formed out of stupidity, wishful thinking and day dreaming. It was formed with the desire to engineer a crisis and provide a solution that was already in the pipeline a long time ago. Even Alan Greenspan just recently said the only thing that will save the EU is a United States of Europe. Ironically, he unwittingly mentioned what will happen. It will indeed break up, but 10 will remain and one in particular will rise out of intrigue as described in Daniel 8:23 (See also HERE for further explanation).
The Fourth Reich is running Europe and its United States of Europe along with its European Army is coming. You don’t have to believe it, but a lack of belief itself won’t make what was Biblically written from happening.
This is also what happens after a superpower dies — another power has to fill in the vacuum.
In 1919, the European nations that had prevailed in WWI imposed onerous peace terms on Germany via the Treaty of Versailles. The harsh economic sanctions and reparations imposed on Germany led to economic catastrophe, massive unemployment, hyperinflation and eventual political turmoil, which led to the rise of fascism a little more than a decade later. After only five years of strict enforcement, France finally relented and canceled some of the more onerous terms of the treaty, but by then the economic and political forces in Germany that would see the rise of Adolph Hitler were already in motion. The Second World War was already inevitable.
The insistence of the WWI allies on political humiliation and economic punishment for Germany presents a remarkable parallel to the position taken by German chancellor Angela Merkel over the question of economic austerity and debt repayment for Greece and other heavily indebted nations in Europe. After the human and economic pain of losing two world wars, is it possible that Germany’s leadership has not learned the key lesson of economics, namely that benevolence is always a better course than retribution? Just ask Vladimir Putin of Russia, who has set back his nation’s economy by decades in order to resist the fearsome specter of a Ukrainian free trade agreement with the EU.
As my co-author Fred Feldkamp noted in our 2014 book, Financial Stability: Fraud, Confidence and the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith demonstrated more than two centuries ago that benevolence is the driving force by which the invisible hand of economics can produce optimal benefits. The work of Smith in “The Wealth of Nations” supports the approach of Washington with the post-WWII Marshall Plan, whereby the United States rebuilt much of the industrial world using debt forgiveness and copious amounts of new credit. All nations benefitted from America’s generosity. Smith also demonstrates the futility of nations that attempt to punish actual or potential trading partners via reparations and other sanctions, like those applied to Germany via the Versailles Treaty.
By insisting on austerity to enable repayment of debt by nations such as Greece and Spain, to use just two examples, Germany is repeating the very same mistakes that led to disaster for Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. We need to keep in mind that Germany, France and other larger EU nations extended loans to nations like Greece in order to drive exports of goods and services. A lot of short-sighted politicians, corporate executives and bankers enabled this process of lending to a nation that clearly lacked the ability to repay. And now no one in the major capitals of the EU wants to talk about debt restructuring for Greece and other southern European nations.
“There is an odious component in Greece’s sovereign debt,” notes Berlin-based analyst Achim Duebel. “There have also been already two rounds of Greek debt restructuring, but of course the creditors have in the meantime changed.”
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Germany needs to tone down its rhetoric and admit that the debt forgiveness and bailout loans provided to Athens so far have largely saved banks in Germany and other EU nations via the back door, rather than actually helped Greece itself. The Greeks have received all the blame for the crisis, whereas the bankers in Frankfurt deserve the lion’s share of the culpability for making these ill-advised loans in the first instance. But does Merkel have the courage to make this case to the German public? The fate of Europe hangs in the balance.
Full article: Blame Germany If Europe Implodes (The National Interest)
Global Geopolitics 