Counsel to the council

Mirek Topolánek named an impressive group of economists, bankers and businessmen to his National Economic Council. They'll no doubt do an exemplary job of advising him on how to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's becoming clearer and clearer that almost no one in government or big business, whether in the CR, EU or U.S., is truly interested in taking the fundamental steps needed to resolve the economic crisis. The Czech(oslovak) government had a wonderful opportunity to lay a solid foundation in the 1990s and instead jumped head first into the same kind of policies that have landed the West where it is today. The Czechs are now merely a few years or months behind the curve. The Council will devise fancy schemes for combatting the crisis, but if they aren't based on the premise of reducing borrowing, waste and theft, they'll merely mask the symptoms instead of attacking the cause. [Czech Republic European Union Czechoslovakia United States of America financial]