Juan Manuel Barroso - arsehole extraordinaire and bar

Missed this great article last week by the great Ambrose E-P. The unspeakable Barroso now says: 

The problems of Ireland were created by irresponsible financial behaviour of financial institutions and a lack of supervision in the Irish market. It was not Europe that created this fiscally irresponsible situation and this financially irresponsible behaviour. Europe is now part of the solution.

In December 2007 in their Stability Update Report of December 2007, Barroso’s staff identified risks but agreed with the IMF report of September 2007 that Ireland was “operating responsible fiscal policy”. As Ambrose says:

It is true that Ireland’s regulators made an utter hash of things. But could the Irish have avoided a destructive bubble? The parallel story in Spain suggests otherwise. The Bank of Spain was one of the best run central banks in the world, the pioneer of “dynamic provisioning”, yet even it could not contain the effects of an interest rate and currency regime that was so far out of kilter. The serial disasters across the EMU periphery cannot simply be blamed on the victims.

But they will be for as long as Germany cracks the whip and the EU oligarchy jumps through hoops without regard for truth, logic or common decency.