Jonathan Lockhart's Notebook: The Verheugen vision

Jonathan Lockhart's blog is reporting on one of the finer points of the new EU constitution, the EU now controls the member states space policies. So much for this limiting the powers of the EU, once again it extends its grasp into yet more areas that it is completely unable to undersand. Nor are they waiting for the constitution to get ratified before starting to do this, well why would they the democratic element of ratification is only a fig leaf anyway. Should anyone vote against they will just have to vote again and again until they give the right answer.

The times is running an article about the Euro's sudden strength being a bubble, which will force the ECB into dropping interest rates or cripple the european economy. Personally I don't think it's a bubble in that a bubble is caursed by people pouring into something, but nobody is actively going into Euro's, they are getting out of Dollars and the Euro is the only place for them to go since they can't go to the Asian currancies. The Euro has in this become the counterwieght to the Dollar that its creators hoped, its just that it is a counterweight in hte sence of a large inert mass that moves purely because of the forces somewhere else. Nor am I so upbeat about this forcing the ECB to drop interest rates before the european economy is choked, after all it has never acted before to preempt a problem rather than being so paralyised that it can only react rather feebly after the problem is obvious to everyone.