European Conspiracy Theory
Psst . . . there is an Anglo-American cabal to destroy the euro . . . seriously.
Paranoia is often a symptom, if not a cause, of civilizational decline. Arab streets, for example, are awash in conspiracy theories about U.S.-Zionist plots against Muslims. Now crisis-hit Europe has fallen victim to this disease.
In Greece, where statistical fraud was used to cover up a 13% budget deficit and public debt has reached 113% of GDP, the media blame the "dark forces" of "foreign vampires" for the country's borrowing problems. The victims, investors who were duped into buying Greek bonds at inflated prices, are being recast as the villains.
In Spain the scapegoating is being taken a step further. According to a Sunday report in El País, Spain's National Intelligence Center has opened an investigation into whether "attacks by investors and the hostility shown by some sectors of the British and U.S. press" amount to "collusion." The economy is still mired in recession, unemployment is approaching 20% and the budget deficit has hit 11.4%. And yet the government wastes its increasingly harder-to-borrow euros on conspiracies.
El País cites only unnamed sources, but the story rings true. "Nothing that is happening, including the apocalyptic editorials in foreign media, is just chance," public works minister and deputy secretary general of the Socialist Party, José Blanco, said last week. Rather, he suggested, it is happening "because it's in the interest of certain individuals." The comments have an unpleasant whiff of Mahathir Mohamad, the former Malaysian prime minister who blamed "Jewish speculators" for undermining Malaysia's currency in 1998.
The impulse to conjure up foreign cabals has even afflicted the European Central Bank. When asked in a Der Spiegel interview last week whether the debt crisis could lead to the euro zone's break-up, ECB Chief Economist Jürgen Stark said: "Great Britain has a budget deficit of the same magnitude as Greece's. The U.S. budget deficit is also more than 10% of GDP . . . It's astonishing to see where most of the criticism of the euro is coming from." Asked whether he sees an Anglo-American media plot, Mr. Stark replied: "Much of what they are printing reads as if they were trying to deflect attention away from problems in their own backyards."
This tin-foil-hat argument will scare investors faster than any critical newspaper editorial ever could.
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