The Bill That Could Break Up Europe

摘要

Tumbling exchange rates, gaping current-account deficits, fearsome foreign-currency borrowings and nasty recessions: these sound like the ingredients of a distant third-world-debt crisis from the 1980s and 1990s. Yet in Europe the messrnhas been cooked up closer to home, in east European countries, many of them now members of the European Union. One consequence is that older eu countries will find themselves footing the bill for clearing it up.rnMany west Europeans, faced with severe recession at home, will see this as outrageously unfair. The east Europeans have been on a binge fuelled by foreign investment, the desire for western living standards and the hope that most would soon be able to adopt Europe's single currency, the euro. Critics argue, with some justice, that some east European countries were ill-prepared for eu membership; that they have botched or sidestepped reforms; and that they have wasted their borrowed billions on construction and consumption booms. Surely they should pay the price for their own folly?