It's so annoying I'm starting to get depressed...

I feel for European Integration, particularly the economic part of it. It never has any respite. It is constantly attacked from every corner. Today the Euro is attacked for being too weak as a result of the fiscal crisis. Yesterday it was accused of threatening European competitiveness because monetary policy was too strict thus causing exchange rates between the Dollar and the Euro to be too high. Before that the problem was that European currencies fluctuated too much among themselves, thus creating comercial tensions between the EU's member states. We are sklerotic, we are Byzantine and we are lazy. We don't innovate and we are too rigid. Now we are too flexible and soon we'll be extinct. It seems that the only time we were happy was during the "30 glorious" years after WWII. How ridiculous that support for Europe is dependent on economic growth. This crisis will pass as all others have and as the next ones will. The world will not fall apart, and the Eurozone won't desintegrate. The European Dream will survive, but nay sayers will always find an excuse to say that it is falling apart.

It's going to be painful,but European economies will pull through. Commentators are talking as if this was the first time we had to tighten our belts... Portugal had to be bailed out by the IMF in the 1980s. My country has a lot of problems, but we pulled through. There's no reason Greece, or any other country, won't. We'll fix our houses; Germany, France, the Benelux, Sweden and Finland will make sure of this. In some years we'll be fine. The Euro will be close to parity with the USA, and eventually inflation will calm down. We might even experience a little bit of an export led boom, and hopefully the weight of fiscal pressures will revive budget rationalisations about defence expenditure. Not withstanding my ideosincracies though, Gideon Rachman is depressed... and his is a pretty contagious sort of depression. On the other hand, there's always Liberation's Jean Quatremer, who at least is slightly more realistic about the cyclical nature of this pessimism. Charles Wyplosz also offers some comfort in this article from Bloomberg.