Scrap the stability pact

摘要

Those who invent monstrous chopping machines, from Procrustes to Dr Guillotin, have a nice way of subsequently falling victim to them. It was thus divinely fitting that Hans Eichel, Germany's finance minister, should be one of the first to grumble publicly about Europe's "stability and growth pact", whose fiscal limits Germany may soon run up against. For the monstrous stability pact was designed and imposed, against the reservations of other putative single-currency members, by the previous German government, back in 1996.