Business Spectator

The best one can say about the euro crisis at present is that it is on hold, contained by the ECB’s promises to defend the euro and some stop-gap measures to keep financial institutions and countries solvent until the German elections.

As I discovered playing Monopoly, there is no point dragging out a game artificially. Apart from that, my parents got sick and tired of having to play on just in order to keep my strange business model going for no real purpose. Perhaps the Greeks and the Spaniards should also tell the Germans that the game is up?

If politicians actually tried to find hard evidence for their green growth claims, they might look in vain. Instead, we may need to revert back to the old days of common sense when nobody expected environmental regulation to cause anything else but economic costs in return for environmental benefits.

It could be quite a rude awakening after the September 22 election. An unsuspecting German public will quickly find out the real state of the euro, how much saving it will cost and what share of banking losses Germany’s savers and taxpayers will have to take in the euro periphery.

General elections are meant to pick a government and election campaigns to discuss the most important issues facing a country. If that’s your definition of an election, you may wonder whether Germany is really heading to the polls on September 22.

For as long as Greece remains trapped in a cycle of troika consultations, it will not escape its predicament of economic decline. And the longer the Europeans continue to give Greece bailout after bailout, the more entrenched Greece’s dependency will become.

For the fate of Europe’s youth to change, Europe must change.

By throwing a little money at the problem of youth unemployment and giving some nebulous guarantees, the EU’s leaders have just made clear that such genuine change will not happen anytime soon.

After more than 200 years, the case for free trade remains as strong as in Adam Smith’s times. But the so-called free trade agreements such as the trans-Atlantic deal are not the best way to promote this ideal. The result of such initiatives may well be a step in the opposite direction.