“Is it one minute to midnight in Europe?” they write. “The failure of German public opinion to grasp the dire state of affairs in Europe today is inviting a repeat of precisely the crisis of the mid-20th century that European integration was designed to avoid.” Germans, they write, “would do well to remember how a European banking crisis two years before 1933 contributed directly to the breakdown of democracy not just in their own country but right across the European continent.”
The authors argue that Germany’s prosperity is largely a result of the monetary union. “The euro has given German exporters a far more competitive exchange rate than the old deutsche mark would have. And the rest of the euro zone remains the destination for 42 percent of German exports,” they argue. “Plunging half of that market into a new Depression can hardly be good for Germany.”
Full article: IMF Head Warns Time Running Out for Euro Zone (Spiegel Online)
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