More about Europe

Doug Saunders, writing for The Globe and Mail of Canada, makes the following trenchant comment about what must happen in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Ireland:

A number of EU members will have to become developing countries again – after having lived as first-world countries for more than a decade. They’ll have no choice. This is true even if they quit the euro and readopt the drachma or the lira. In fact, possibly even more so.

Even among rational people, expectations rise easily but go down with great difficulty. The riots we've seen in Greece are nothing to what will occur when people understand they must go back to being poor, to doing without government jobs and services, financed with borrowed money, to which they've become accustomed.