Friday will be remembered as the day the euro needed rescuing. Sure it is Greece that has asked to be bailed out but it was still a day that the architects of the single currency had never envisaged. For when it came to it, there were no plans to save a euro member in trouble.
The last few months have been a long, agonising drama. It is the financial markets that have been in the driving seat. The politicians, the eurozone countries, the European Central Bank, the European Union have all played catch-up, scrambling to put together a rescue plan. Now Europe is faced with what is potentially the biggest ever bail-out of a country.
The rescue pot is around £40bn. Two-thirds of it will come from eurozone countries and one-third from the IMF. For a long period, European countries resisted any involvement from the IMF. Pride stood in the way. They feared that the reputation of the euro would be tarnished. It has been. If they had turned to the IMF earlier, however, the pain might have been less and the crisis shorter.
Note EU-Digest: Obviously this is a British viewpoint which by default is always skeptical about the capabilities of any other European country or the EU to be able to handle a crises, but it financial or political.
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