What do eurozone leaders want most at the meeting of the World Economic Forum? To cease being viewed as the source of global economic threats and return to being a source of economic solutions. It is far more fun – let alone more dignified – to lecture others on their faults than to be lectured on one’s own. It is even more humiliating when those lectures are thoroughly deserved.
Unfortunately for the eurozone, there is no chance that its policymakers will escape blame in Davos. They will argue that they are on the way to a resolution. Alas, the more percipient of them, as well as their peers from around the world, know they are not. Their visit to the Swiss mountains will be a discomforting experience.
The eurozone is almost universally regarded as the source of the pre-eminent threat of an economic meltdown. The risk is that both banks and sovereigns could default, probably triggering – or triggered by – a partial or complete break-up of the eurozone. Such a wreck may still be regarded as unlikely, but it is no longer inconceivable.
