August 24: Greece foreshadows another car crash for world economy

A POLITICAL commentator recently described the euro as “unworkable and unreformable” and capable only of producing “recurrent and worsening crises”.

Greece is currently on her third bailout and Mrs Merkel and Co are frantically trying to find a plaster big enough to cover the gaping hole in that country’s finances.

Whatever is produced, it will not work because Greece is bankrupt and needs debt write-off.

The only reform that will make the euro work is greater political and financial integration, but the political will to make that happen is not there and, in any case, it will take at least five years to achieve the treaty changes required.

In the meantime, the world economy is beginning to look very worrying. It is now seven years since the last global crisis so, on previous form, the next cannot be far away and no one is now deluded enough to think 
we have “abolished boom and bust”.

With the economies of China and Japan slowing down to a worrying extent, and growth here and in the US being less than firmly based, it is inevitable that the next crisis will test the euro, possibly to destruction, before the EU’s leaders have chance to implement any credible reforms.

Barack Obama is sitting out his last couple of years just trying to protect his legacy; David Cameron is still basking in his unexpected electoral success and the EU leaders are blinkered by their own euro-dogma. With all the western leaders seemingly asleep at the wheel, what chance is there that we can avert the slow motion car-crash looming?

From: Nick Yates, Ukip Brighouse, Laverock Lane, Brighouse.

GREECE has missed the opportunity to take the first steps to departing the European Union; for it is inevitable they will leave.

A nation cannot function without controlling its currency by devaluing, revaluing or responding to market forces.

With their economy in tatters, unemployment at 50 per cent and ever more stringent financial restrictions imposed upon them which will shrink the economy they have no chance of repaying the further 61 billion euro loan recently approved by the German government.

And why does this loan have to be approved by the German government and no other in Europe? Aren’t we all supposed to be equal?