Tuesday, 8 November 2011
Last week's G20 summit in Cannes did nothing but reinforce that assessment and the fact policymakers are now openly questioning their own abilities underlines just how dire the situation has become.
"Europe is running dry on credibility," Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg, one of the most straight-talking of his colleagues, said as he arrived for another crisis-fighting meeting of finance ministers in Brussels on Tuesday.
"There is a credibility problem ... the solutions that are going to be discussed here today, like the Financial Transactions Tax, are a non-starter."
For more than a year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the top EU officials, Herman Van Rompuy and Jose Manuel Barroso, have repeated the mantra that Europe "will do everything necessary" to defend the euro single currency and the region's stability.
But with the crisis approaching the end of its second year and Italy, the euro zone's third and the world's eighth largest economy, about to be sucked into the mire, the pledge sounds empty. What started as a financial and economic crunch has morphed into a political drama with little end in sight.
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