Soros says Europe unlikely to survive

[Ishtar]

I'm finding this interview quite interesting after Drake's remark yesterday that Soros has just been thrown out of Russia for trying to buy up the whole country.









“Far from abating, the euro crisis has recently taken a turn for the worse,” he wrote in the article published on The Financial Times yesterday.

“The European Central Bank relieved an incipient credit crunch through its longer-term refinancing operations. The resulting rally in financial markets hid an underlying deterioration; but that is unlikely to last much longer,” Soros added.

“The fundamental problems have not been resolved; indeed, the gap between creditor and debtor countries continues to widen. The crisis has entered what may be a less volatile but more lethal phase,” he warned.

Soros also cautioned that Germany’s Bundesbank has seen the danger.

The bank “is now campaigning against the indefinite expansion of the money supply, and it has started taking measures to limit the losses it would sustain in a break-up,” he said.

“The Bundesbank is also tightening credit at home. This would be the right policy if Germany was a freestanding country, but the eurozone’s heavily indebted members badly need stronger demand from Germany to avoid recession,” Soros added.

“The heavily indebted countries will either fail to implement the necessary measures or, if they do, they will fail to meet their targets because of collapsing demand. Either way, debt ratios will rise, and the competitiveness gap with Germany will widen,” according to Soros.

He also said Europe is facing a long period of economic stagnation or worse whether or not the euro endures.

“Other countries have gone through similar experiences. Latin American countries suffered a lost decade after 1982, and Japan has been stagnating for a quarter of a century; both have survived. But the European Union is not a country and it is unlikely to survive. The deflationary debt trap threatens to destroy a still-incomplete political union,” Soros concluded.

From Press tv