The World Turned Upside Down
By Mark Pritchard. As the eurozone sinks ever deeper into chaos and collapse, Brussels has sent a top eurocrat to China to beg Beijing for a handout. Klaus Regling, Chief Executive of the unfortunately-named European Financial Stability Fund (the Euro Bailout Fund) has been despatched to see if the Chinese can spare the odd $100,000 million to prop up the Euro.
M. Trichet has now executed a well-timed exit, handing his job in charge of the Euro’s bank over to some hapless Italian at the end of October. Like the Captain of the Titanic managing to jump ship at Cork.
Now the Greeks have actually decided to give their people a say in a referendum and democracy has infected the eurozone, the markets have panicked and the last act in what has become the Greek Tragedy of the EU’s common currency looks to have begun.
Unless Herr Regling can get the Chinese to throw a few coppers – well, actually several tons of coppers – into the cap he officially is not holding out in front of them.
Chinese President Hu Jintao is currently gracing the G20 world economic summit in Vienna with his august presence. Being flush with trillions of dollars and euros in US and sundry EU bonds and head of the World’s biggest creditor nation, he could easily afford to toss some dosh the Euro’s way.
But his Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao is playing hard to get, suggesting that bailing out the Euro is not a Chinese priority. Bailing out the US dollar, a trillion of which Uncle Sam owes Beijing, may be a more tempting exercise of largesse.
Although other leading Chinese officials have hinted that nonetheless they would not be averse to buying up a few European ports, railways and factories if the price was right.
A hundred years ago, Europe and the USA owned the whole World. China was a bankrupt, politically shambolic chaos, chunks of its territory occupied by racial aliens and possessing scarcely a scrap of sovereignty. Now the tables are turned and it’s the other way round.
Because we Europeans and Americans spent the intervening century fighting amongst ourselves and surrendering without a fight vast tracts of land won with generations of blood and sweat to Third World savages and despots, whilst opening our homelands to colonisation by tens of millions of their people. Whilst the Chinese…didn’t.
The results speak for themselves.
