Spain: Are international "murky manoeuvres" behind financial market pressure on Spain? Where are the EU regulations?

Spain's intelligence services are investigating the role of investors and media in debt market turbulence over the last few weeks, El Pais reported on Sunday. Citing unnamed sources, El Pais said the National Intelligence Centre (CNI) was looking into "speculative attacks" on Spain following the Greek debt crisis.

"The (CNI's) Economic Intelligence division...is investigating whether investors' attacks and the aggressiveness of some Anglo-Saxon media are driven by market forces and challenges facing the Spanish economy, or whether there is something more behind this campaign," El Pais said.

Some French commentators are drawn to this scenario. It's the Anglo-Saxon banks and hedge funds who are behind the euro crisis, is their conclusion. Indeed, one French commentator was quoted as saying "those who played against Greece will pay dearly. The European Union states now view this as direct aggression against them." Even the head of the 16-nation Eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker, is drawn to the idea of the euro as victim. "We shouldn't accept to be the target of financial markets," he says. "I am concerned," he goes on, "at the irrational way of behaving of financial markets". In the UK, Labour MP and former Europe Minister Denis MacShane writes that "the Anglo-Saxon club of anti-Europeans is on the rampage".

The facts show that some if not all of these allegations are true - speculators have raised their bets against the euro. It is reported that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which reflects hedge fund activity, has witnessed growing positions being taken on the euro falling further. Nicolas Veron of the Bruegel Institute says "the markets are testing the limits of the single currency policy framework".

What has also become evident among those who support the EU and the euro, is that the onslaught of the powerful international financial community on the EURO will get worse as long as EU fiscal policies are decided at the level of national governments and regulations are not in place. Only when these changes happen can one put an end to the scenarios like the one we saw in Greece, where the Government made a risky financial deal with US based Goldman Sachs whereby Goldman Sachs also assisted the Greek government to hide its actual budget deficit. According to the New York Times a variety of US banks have given similar "support" to other EU nations, including Italy.

All this is unacceptable and must become the number one priority on the EU commission "to do list". If action is further delayed, the EU electorate and the EU parliament should seriously start questioning the motives of their national governments and the EU commission for not calling a halt to the manipulations of the international financial community on the sovereignty of their nations and the EU.

EU-Digest "Spain: Are international "murky manoeuvres" behind financial market pressure on Spain? Where are the EU regulations?"