If you want to read something really scary about Europe, read this http://www.zerohedge.com/news/sarkozy-europes-liquidity-run-has-begun-because-there-30-trillion-problem Zero Hedge blogpost and listen to the embedded CNN interview with Oliver Sarkozy and Roger Altman. Sarkozy is the brother of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and a high executive at The Carlyle Group; Altman is a Wall Streeter with Evercore Partners who served in the Clinton Treasury Department. Sarkozy seems to think the Eurozone countries are going to have to come up with a financial rescue package ten times the size of our TARP–and very soon.
What I take from this is that one thing we should be thankful for on this Thanksgiving is that we are not in the Eurozone. Our British cousins, though they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving over there, have reason to be thankful to former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer kept Britain out of the zero. Tony Blair seemed to want to go in, but he effectively ceded control of economic and financial policy to Brown, and Brown put out a list of conditions that had to be fulfilled before Britain would ditch the Pound and go into the Euro. Reading the conditions at the time, I came to the conclusion that they never could be fulfilled, and in any case they weren’t. Brown’s reputation is not very high now–Blair’s memoir paints him as almost pathological–but his nation owes him some thanks.
