EU's Plight: Sadism or a Cold-Blooded Takedown?

Who will stop the Sado-Monetarists as jobless youth hits 58pc in Greece? Greek unemployment rose to 25.4pc in August. Youth unemployment rose to 58pc. Under the official forecast, the economy will contract by a further 4.5pc next year, so it fair to assume that lots more people are going to lose their jobs. It is certainly not going to improve in any meaningful way for years to come. This is what happens when you lock into the wrong currency and block the escape routes – or join a "burning building with no exits" in the words of William Hague. – UK Telegraph/Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Dominant Social Theme: The collapse of Europe is as unavoidable as it is unexpected.

Free Market-Analysis: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has recycled a name originally applied to Margaret Thatcher for Brusells's Eurocrats. He calls them "sado-monetarists" – and this is an apt term for those administering monetary poison to the Greeks.

But is Europe really collapsing in order to satisfy the emotional needs of a few corrupt Brussels Eurocrats?

For Evans-Pritchard, the answer seems to be "yes." It is more complicated than sadism, of course. In fact, Evans-Pritchard is apt to lay the blame on insecurity. Brussels cannot admit it was wrong about the monetary union.

We tend to believe that Evans-Pritchard, like other sensible, mainstream journos, understands the reality behind current Brussels actions. Interestingly, then, he cannot bring himself to state it.

It is a kind of subdominant social theme of sorts: That the elites are inflicting such pain on Europe to accommodate their own insecurities. Here's an explanation from Evans-Pritchard's own newspaper that we quoted way back in June as the basis for an analysis entitled, "The EU ... Not So Beneficial After All, but Certainly Hypocritical": 

The EU's 'beneficial crisis' has spun out of control ... 'Europe' expected to be united through emergencies, but this one will tear it apart ... As long ago as 1957, Jean Monnet – who was the real organising genius behind the gradual building of "Europe" into a single, unified state – suggested that it was only through monetary and economic union that the "political union which is the goal" could be achieved. "There are no premature ideas," he wrote, "only opportunities for which we must learn to wait."

By 1970, Monnet's ideas were being fleshed out by the Werner report, which saw monetary union as the key step towards political union. But in 1978, another report for the European Commission, by Sir Donald McDougall, warned that it would be reckless to create a single currency unless Europe was first given an all-powerful government, with the power to tax, and to make a massive transfer of resources from the richer states to the poorer.

In the 1980s, though, that other great integrator Jacques Delors (second only to Monnet in his influence on the drive to European political union) decided to ignore the advice of McDougall and others and to launch the single currency without the suggested preconditions. To move straight to fiscal union, he knew, was not on the cards. But if the single currency was put in place first, it would create exactly the kind of strains which had been foreseen – making fiscal union the only way out.

At the time, we called the EU exercise, especially the euro, "an exercise in cynicism." The idea was to implement a currency union, we explained, "which would then collapse and usher in a full-fledged political union. First an economic calamity and then a political salvation ... Hundreds of millions traded in their national currency for euros that were designed to fail. They were SUPPOSED to fail."

We pointed out Europe is in flames and that bread lines in countries like Greece were getting longer and longer. People were even setting themselves on fire. How is this a "beneficial crisis"? And we added, "The breadth of the cynicism of Europe's original founders is matched only by the depth of the current disaster. The smugness is breathtaking."

Evans-Pritchard's take (today anyway) is that EU policy is ideological. But obviously it is not. Why doesn't Evans-Pritchard, one of the best British newspapermen of his generation, admit it? Instead, he writes the following:

We all know the reason why this is not being done. The ideologues running monetary union cannot bring themselves to contemplate any step back in the Project, just as they would not admit yesterday in the Commission's economic report that they have gravely misjudged the effects of fiscal tightening (the fiscal multiplier) and have therefore miscrafted their entire austerity strategy.

We are not dealing with rational people. We are dealing with a religious order, and these monks are becoming an increasing danger to Europe's societies and democracies.

Margaret Thatcher's advisers were tagged Sado-Monetarists in the early 1980s but they never inflicted anything remotely close to this level of suffering. The strange silence of the Left on this is baffling.

Sooner or later my Fabian friends will have make up their minds whether they are for the workers, or for the "bankers ramp" — as old Socialists like Peter Shore used to describe monetary union.

The Draghi Put has lifted the immediate financial threat, but this makes matters worse. The drip-drip of ugly economic data continues each day. The deeper structural crisis is still getting worse. Loan demand has crashed 50pc in Italy and France. Spain's unemployment is 25.8pc and may reach 30pc next year.

Yet there is no longer any immediate catalyst or external umpire in the markets that can bring this mass civic abuse to an end. Unless the Bundestag comes to the rescue by refusing to pay for any more can-kicking, we may have to wait until internal devaluations in the Club Med bloc push jobless rates to such excruciating levels that the political system snaps.

What is going on is a kind of "directed history." Every part of this unrolling catastrophe seems to have been plotted out in advance. In "Evolution of the IMF Is Directed History," we wrote about it. You can see the article here: "Evolution of the IMF Is Directed History." 

We pointed out that those behind what is today the EU likely intended for it to fall apart. They knew it would. They had to know because they had built their financial institutions and knew what they were capable of.

Central banking always implodes – cyclically. There had to be a financial disaster in Europe sooner or later given the creation of a European central bank and Europe's tethering to the euro.

We also recall the enthusiasm with which various banks offered funds via government and how the funds were wasted or stolen. The idea has been that funds were offered out of greed. This is nonsense. The big banks surely knew what they were doing, as well as the ramifications.

No one ever thinks to explore WHY Western banks offered Greece and other countries so many billions, eventually forging the sovereign crisis.

Anyone looking at the situation logically could have predicted the outcome. The only logical conclusion is that the officers of these large commercial banks had some level of certainty that they would be paid back.

They would be paid back, we can surmise, because of the EU mechanism that would utilize commercial bank lending as a trigger to tighten a political union that would in turn allow a continued bailout.

It all fits together. Not only that but also this system is the one that entraps developing countries. Once they take their World Bank loans and dissipate the funds, the IMF comes in and insists on austerity measures, higher taxes and fewer government services.

The IMF, in other words, or the IMF system, is being imposed on Western countries. First, bankrupt the nation by lending to corrupt politicos and then come in with the IMF to insist on austerity.

This was a cold-blooded takedown. To insist otherwise, to make up terms like sado-monetarism, is to miss the point. Those in charge of the euro have manufactured the crisis. They said they would!

It is hard to fathom this sort of cruelty. People are dying in the PIGS due to Brussels's austerity. Did they really expect this to come to pass?

Yes, they did. We are confronted again with Money Power's implacable and merciless rigor. These people started two world wars in the 20th century to build globalism. They were apparently willing to sacrifice Europe to renew globalism's reach.

Conclusion: And now they are willing to sacrifice Europe's PIGS to refresh the progress of the EU toward a superstate. This neo-empire will be built on the suffering of millions.