Or perhaps it was a good idea inadequately implemented, and the problem now is that the political environment has now changed so much in a bad way that demonstrable problems cannot be fixed any longer. A resurgent German nationalism seems to have paralysed the EU.  But if there were a coherent alternative majority on the Council, Germany could be outvoted.  So perhaps the spinelessness of the rest of Europe is as much to blame.

Index of Frank's Diaries

You cannot build a system that deliberately favours the most powerful player and then expect that it will be reformed to something better in the future. That is, well, "starry-eyed idealism" is a term that comes immediately to mind.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Maybe the Convergence Criteria and the Growth and Stability Pact were macroeconomic nonsense, and lately the Competitiveness Pact Pact for the Euro Euro-Plus Pact is just ideological shock doctrine.

Without a negative feedback mechanism for limiting the growth of internal trade imbalances, and with arbitrary constraints on fiscal policy and an ideological prohibition of "printing money" the thing was primed for a blow-up. We're actually unfortunate that the global financial crisis started with the subprime crisis and acted as a trigger for the Eurozone crisis, allowing people to pretend that all was well with the Eurozone had it not been for contagion from across the Atlantic.

Economics is politics by other means