You are here
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: German court curbs future bailouts, bans EU fiscal union
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The Telegraph, London
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Germany's constitutional court has at last delivered its Solomonic judgment on Europe's rescue machinery.
It chose to avert Gotterdammerung. The nexus of bailouts already agreed for Greece, Portugal, and Ireland are allowable under Germany's Basic Law -- or Grundgesetz -- because there is no "automatic" transfer of money beyond the Bundestag's control. Germany may participate in Europe's E440 billion (L388 billion) bailout fund (EFSF).
To prohibit the existing rescues would have brought down the temple of monetary union within days, and with it Europe's financial system. The judges did not want a global depression on their conscience.
Fears that the court might queer the pitch in some complicated way have been eating at markets for weeks, so Wednesday's relief rally was predictably fast and furious. Germany's DAX index surged 3.7 percent and Milan's MIB was up 4.2 percent as Italian banks came back from death.
... Dispatch continues below ...
Sona Drills 85.4g Gold/Ton Over 4 Metres at Elizabeth Gold Deposit,
Extending the Mineralization of the Southwest Vein on the Property
Company Press Release, October 27, 2010
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Sona Resources Corp. reports on five drillling holes in the third round of assay results from the recently completed drill program at its 100 percent-owned Elizabeth Gold Deposit Property in the Lillooet Mining District of southern British Columbia. Highlights from the diamond drilling include:
-- Hole E10-66 intersected 17.4g gold/ton over 1.54 metres.
-- Hole E10-67 intersected 96.4g gold/ton over 2.5 metres, including one assay interval of 383g of gold/ton over 0.5 metres.
-- Hole E10-69 intersected 85.4g gold/ton over 4.03 metres, including one assay interval of 230g gold/ton over 1 metre.
Four drill holes, E10-66 to E10-69, targeted the southwestern end of the Southwest Vein, and three of the holes have expanded the mineralized zone in that direction. The Southwest Vein gold mineralization has now been intersected over a strike length of 325 metres, with the deepest hole drilled less than 200 metres from surface.
"The assay results from the Southwest Zone quartz vein continue to be extremely positive," says John P. Thompson, Sona's president and CEO. "We are expanding the Southwest Vein, and this high-grade gold mineralization remains wide open down dip and along strike to the southwest."
For the company's full press release, please visit:
http://sonaresources.com/_resources/news/SONA_NR19_2010.pdf
Yet euphoria is surely misplaced. The court's president, Andreas Vosskuhle, cautioned Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brussels to watch their step. "This was a very tight decision. But it should not be mistakenly interpreted as a constitutional blank cheque authorising further rescue measures," he said.
The opinion is a partial victory for the professors who brought the case and fear that Euroland's crisis is dragging Germany across the Rubicon into an EMU debt union without treaty authority or democratic control.
Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider, their lead jurist, called the verdict "a bad day for Germany and Europe and a slap in the face of the country". Yet in reality the professors extracted language that kills off any prospect of a debt union, or an EU treasury and fiscal federalism, for the foreseeable future.
"The Bundestag's budget responsibilities may not be transferred through open-ended appropriations to other actors. In particular, no financial mechanisms can lead to meaningful fiscal burdens without prior approval," said the opinion.
"No permanent treaty mechanisms shall be established that leads to liability for the decisions of other states, especially if they entail incalculable consequences," it said.
The ruling is "a clear rejection of eurobonds", said Otto Fricke, finance spokesman for the Free Democrats (FDP) in the governing coalition.
Above all, the court ruled that the Bundestag's fiscal sovereignty is the foundation of German democracy and that Article 38 of the Basic Law prohibits transfer of these prerogatives to "supra-national bodies."
By stating that there can be no further bail-outs for the eurozone without the prior approval of the Bundestag's budget committee, the court has thrown a spanner in the works and rendered the EFSF almost unworkable.
It restricts the ability of Chancellor Angela Merkel to strike rescue deals at EU summits, leaving it unclear how she or any future Chancellor could respond to the sort of crisis that blew up in late July of this year when Italian and Spanish bond yields reached danger levels above 6 percent. Moreover, Finland, the Netherlands and Slovakia are all eyeing variants of this legislative veto.
Mrs Merkel is already facing a simmering mutiny in the Bundestag. Up to 25 deputies from her coalition -- mostly from the FDP and Bavaria's Social Christians (CSU), but also top Christian Democrats -- intend to vote against the revamped EFSF later this month or abstain.
What this reflects is the deeper revolt by German society over escalating rescue costs and the threat to German nationhood. The budget committee is already fractious and is likely to prove tougher with each fresh demand. The question is how will it respond to the disintegration of Greece's rescue programme or if and when Brussels again pushes for a massive boost in the firepower of the EFSF to cope with Spain and Italy.
The path remains strewn with hurdles. Slovakia said it will not debate the EFSF bill until December, delaying activation until February, leaving a very reluctant ECB to hold the fort by purchasing Club Med bonds. Richard Sulik, the president of the Slovak parliament, has vowed to do everything he can to block the EFSF.
Harvinder Sian from RBS said both Athens and the EU-IMF team are likely to keep Greece's programme alive for another quarter, with the risk of a "hard default" in December. He said the sorts of "19th-century colonial demands" now being made on Greece have provoked armed revolutions in the past and might tempt Athens to act first, especially since 90 percent of Greek debt is subject to Greek contract law.
The contagion risk remains acute. Portugal is "fundamentally uncompetitive" and carries a debt stock (360 percent of GDP) too large for plausible deflation. "Spain is only at the start of a multi-year post bubble adjustment, while Italy has proven ungovernable in the gold-standard world of EMU," said Mr Sian, warning that private investors will not touch the region as long as there is any fear of EMU dissolution.
UBS has even put precise figures on the costs of break-up, deeming the current structure unworkable. "We note that almost no modern fiat currency monetary unions have broken up without some form of authoritarian or military government or civil war," it said. As long as major banks are uttering such thoughts, this crisis can only rumble on.
* * *
Join GATA here:
Toronto Resource Investment Conference
Thursday-Friday, September 15-16, 2011
Sheraton Toronto Centre
http://cambridgehouse.com/conference-details/toronto-resource-investment...
The Silver Summit
Thursday-Friday, October 20-21, 2011
Davenport Hotel, Spokane, Washington
http://cambridgehouse.com/conference-details/the-silver-summit-2011/48
New Orleans Investment Conference
Wednesday-Saturday, October 26-29, 2011
Hilton New Orelans Riverside Hotel
http://www.neworleansconference.com/
Support GATA by purchasing gold and silver commemorative coins:
https://www.amsterdamgold.eu/gata/index.asp?BiD=12
Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt:
Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009:
http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal
Or a video disc of GATA's 2005 Gold Rush 21 conference in the Yukon:
Help keep GATA going
GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at:
To contribute to GATA, please visit:
Lewis E. Lehrman on How to Solve the U.S. Debt Problem
Lewis E. Lehrman, chairman of the Lehrman Institute, sponsor of The Gold Standard Now project, advises that to reduce the $1 1/2 trillion U.S. deficit, the Republican Party must initiate an investment program.
Working Americans are not saving, which enables the banks to lead the country into a cycle of debt, leverage, boom, panic, and bust.
Lehrman says: "Eliminating the budget deficit of a trillion and a half dollars cannot be done overnight. The proposal by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan was very dramatic -- one Republican called it radical -- but it was not happily received. The solution, of course, is to design an American program for prosperity, because you can solve these entitlement problems with a growing economy. We need a tremendous program of investment, and investment comes from savings. When you pay savers, middle-income professionals, and working people 0 percent at the bank, you are not going to encourage them to save. Then we are left with a bank cycle of debt, leverage, boom, panic, and bust."
To read more and to sign up for The Gold Standard Now's free, noncommercial, weekly report, "Prosperity through Gold," please visit:
http://www.thegoldstandardnow.org/gata
