29 November 2010

SPAIN: Prisoner Of the Euro; 4 Endgame Scenarios; Roubini Calls It The "Big Elephant" In The Room.

NYTIMES/ OPINION/ ECONOMIST PAUL KRUGMAN:
    "The best thing about the Irish right now is that there are so few of them. By itself, Ireland can’t do all that much damage to Europe’s prospects. The same can be said of Greece and of Portugal, which is widely regarded as the next potential domino.
    But then there’s Spain. The others are tapas; Spain is the main course."
AND:   "Spain would be better off now if it had never adopted the euro — but trying to leave would create a huge banking crisis, as depositors raced to move their money elsewhere. Unless there’s a catastrophic bank crisis anyway — which seems plausible for Greece and increasingly possible in Ireland, but unlikely though not impossible for Spain — it’s hard to see any Spanish government taking the risk of “de-euroizing.”

ALSO ON TOPIC : Economists Speculate on a Euro endgame; 4 scenarios.
By Peter Boone and Simon Johnson.
 http://baselinescenario.com/2010/11/28/the-eurozone-endgame-four-scenarios/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BaselineScenario+%28The+Baseline+Scenario%29

AND:  Economist Nouriel Roubini is calling Spain the “big elephant” in the debt crisis because there may not be enough money to bail it out. “In Spain, in my view, the eventual fiscal costs of cleaning up the financial system are going to be much larger than have been so far estimated by the government,” Roubini said. “As we saw, the stress tests were not stressful enough, if not a total fudge.”
SEE:  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-29/roubini-says-portugal-quite-likely-to-need-funding-update1-.html