Hopefully, in their blind obedience to Merkel and co, the amazingly stupid and corrupt EU Commission will have gone yet another step too far. If You are Italian or Spanish and you read the headline in your local paper that the EU wants to make you poorer and take more power to themselves from your Government.
I think ropes and lampposts are in order for the EU Commissioners if they go much further.
Spain and Italy have been warned that their budgets for 2014 are in breach of European Union rules as Brussels uses new powers to force governments to revise spending plans before national parliaments vote on them. France was also cautioned that plans for painful economic reforms represent only "limited progress" as the European Commission exercised new eurozone powers in a historic shift of sovereignty away from elected governments. "Because in an economic and monetary union, national budgetary decisions can have an impact well beyond national borders, member states have given the commission the responsibility," said Olli Rehn, the commission vice-president in charge of the euro.
"I trust that they will thus be taken on board by national decision makers." Germany, Europe's largest and most successful economy, was also criticized for making "no progress" in following EU recommendations to help its eurozone neighbors by spurring domestic demand and imports. Fabrizio Saccomanni, the Italian finance minister and a technocrat imposed on the Italian government at the behest of EU officials, could be fatally weakened by the Brussels intervention, especially after Mr Rehn ruled out an exempting €3bn in investment spending that the Italian government has included in its 2014 budget. Mr Saccomanni warned that Italy could not take the investment spending from the national budget to meet EU rules because the cut would threaten the country's already weak economic recovery and inflame opposition to austerity.
"We could have taken even more restrictive measures to reduce our public spending, but I imagine there would be even more cries of pain. I believe our approach is balanced," he said. "It is not necessary to change the budget." Spain was told that its "draft budgetary plan is at risk of non-compliance with the rules, as the headline deficit target may be missed and the recommended improvement in the structural balance is currently not expected to be delivered". France was given the green light on its budget but the commission warned that next year's budget leaves "no margin" for deviation and reforms "constitute limited progress" in addressing structural targets. "A significant set of measures on top of those already specified will be needed to ensure that the target for 2015 is reached," said the commission. The commission also cautioned Finland, Malta and Luxembourg, asking the three countries to review their 2014 budgets to ensure that they meet eurozone targets.
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For five years, the European Central Bank has resisted calls for it to engage in quantitative easing. Is it time to break this final taboo? Last week's euro-zone third-quarter gross-domestic-product data offered something for both sides of this increasingly polarized debate.
For the ECB's critics, the data merely underlined the feebleness of the recovery: GDP grew by just 0.1% in the quarter, down from 0.3% in the second quarter and well below levels in the U.S., Japan and U.K. Particularly worrying was a surprise 0.1%...
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