Heh. Everytime the guys from the bank come and suggest we buy this or that corporate bond (I help manage some research stipend money) and say that it has this or that rating, I give them a look and mutter something about MBS's or CDO's or the S&P downrate of the US, and then they look rather sheepish. :)

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

I've always found it amusing that the Royals were generally fans of Maggie when her markets-ueber-alles approach was directly contrary to every interest and tradition of the monarchy.

I was not writing to defend Jerome's comment, he can do that himself, but to support the view that excluding global power struggles from the field truncates the discussion, which then appears to conclude that Europe's problems are solely self-inflicted and that sovereign nation-states will be either the inevitable result of those self-inflicted problems, or the correct response to them. Well-adapted macroeconomic policies for those states may be suggested (with great confidence, even), but it's legitimate to have doubts about, not their theoretical effectiveness, but their chances of being applied in real conditions - will global finance go away, will laissez-faire neoliberalism go away, will economists change their spots, will right-minded governments emerge from the polities we have, will global imbalances and their attendant pressure to race to the bottom disappear, because the euro is no more and we have independent nation-states? Luis's (self-admittedly) doomer scenario above has the merit of putting the subject on the table. It's not enough to reply (hyperbole for hyperbole) that what's happening within the euro is just as bad, or that all a government needs to do is this or that. A serious (probably multi-scenario) description of what might and what is likely to happen to our several nation-states in the event of leaving the euro or of a general euro collapse, is called for. Alongside which (though great doubts may be legitimate on this score too), the chances of a return to the '80s to re-debate and identify an acceptable construction sans Maastricht for what has become the EU (including what the outlines of an acceptable construction would be), need to be assessed. Vast programme.