Final Word from Tuesday, October 11, 2011
We joked last year that an Interplanetary Monetary Fund should be created, becauseit's not fair for the Earth to be bearing all this growing financial risk alone. Little didwe know that the EU would come up with the intermediary step of eurozone bonds.Just as some banks were deemed "too big to fail," entire countries are now too bigto fail too, so the idea is to merge their debt with that of a bigger country or entireunion. The problem is when the rescuer needs to be rescued. Czech politicians whoback the idea of eurozone bonds, such as Miloš Zeman, Jiří Paroubek, Jan Švejnar andJosef Zieleniec, tend not to look this far into the future. Petr Nečas, in contrast, haswarned that eurobonds will make debtors think they can borrow even more. And ofcourse Václav Klaus has spoken of the day of "absolute collision." To delay this day,somebody better start looking now for Martians to buy some Interplanetary bonds.
Glossary of difficult words
to deem - to regard or consider in a specific way;
too big to fail - an American term for a bank, insurer or industrial company that is so significant to the economy that its bankruptcy cannot be allowed.