Eurozone Meltdown: "This Could Be the Last Weekend of the Common Currency"

June 1, 2010 (LPAC)—The death rattle of the Eurozone financial system continued to play itself out in full public view over the weekend.

The head of the London-based economic consultancy firm Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), which is advising the Greek government on how to handle the crisis, told the press in Athens yesterday that "the only option for Greece is both to exit the euro and to default" on its public debt, and then devalue its currency by about 15%. Doug McWilliams, chief of CEBR, said such measures are now "virtually inevitable," and that "Spain would probably be forced to follow suit, and probably Portugal and Italy. Could this be the last weekend of the single currency? Quite possibly, yes," he stated.

French Development Minister Francois Baroin shocked financial commentators on Sunday by raising the specter, in an interview with Canal+ TV, of France losing its AAA bond rating, as Spain did last week. "The objective of keeping the AAA rating is an objective that is a stretch," Baroin admitted, "that in fact partly informs the economic policies we want to have. We must maintain our AAA rating."

And in Spain, the Zapatero government is teetering at the edge of collapse, as it tries to impose London-dictated policies which will create mass unemployment even beyond the 20% that now exists in the country. The British, IMF and EU have all demanded "labor reforms" above all else, including "wage flexibility" (i.e. drastic pay cuts) and "altering the collective bargaining system" (i.e. destroying the trade unions). The Zapatero government had set today as the deadline for the unions to "voluntarily" agree to these policies in discussions with the business sector, but no such accord could be reached, and so they pushed off the deadline for another week. The Spanish trade unions are threatening a general strike if these policies are imposed.

The Zapatero government is rapidly plunging in the polls, and will be forced to call elections well before the scheduled ones in 2012.