PIGS Trough

If the European Union ends up bailing out bankrupt Greece the PIGS will all eat at the same trough, remarks Wall Street Journal columnist and Hudson Institute adviser Irwin Stelzer. “If it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. If members of a club come to the rescue of a profligate member— call it a loan, call it a temporary liquidity infusion—it’s a bailout. Perhaps sensing that they are all Greeks now, or at least many of them, and that the club had better hang together lest several of its members hang separately, the powers-that-be in the euro zone seem to be moving towards bailing out Greece, or, as EU president Herman Van Rompuy put, have reached ‘agreement on the Greek situation.’ No surprise. The political class has a large political investment in the euro, and has no intention of allowing Greece to abandon the euro or to default on its enormous outstanding debt. So rather than see it leave euroland, the more affluent members decided to bail Greece out, some details of the bail-out to be announced sometime today. Those finance ministers who haven’t yet read Henry Paulson’s ‘On The Brink’ might give it a look. The former U.S. Treasury Secretary tells the tale of his efforts to prevent a collapse of the financial system.”