Euro-Debt Crisis and the European Union Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Euro-Debt Crisis and the European Union - Essay Example Rather than specifically call out any of the EU member states, Christine Lagarde calls on the ECB to fully commit reserve funding to deploy bailouts. The problem with this particular viewpoint is that the European Union is becoming more and more entwined with the internal political and economic desperation that is exhibited among the weakest links within the Union’s membership. Although attempting to save the European Union has been a central theme of the combined efforts of the world’s most influential financial body (the IMF), these efforts have dragged on and on and look increasingly unlikely to avert a crisis and/or disaster that is already unfolding before the eyes of the viewer (Wall Street Journal 1). The situation with Greece is but one example. Although the article in question deals mostly with the IMF’s implied directions regarding Spanish liquidity, this is just another example of the debt contagion that threatens to envelop the economies Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Ireland (PIIGS). In the article, Lagarde goes on to implore the domestic/state actors of the respective economies to fully cooperate with all haste and cooperation with the efforts of the European Central Bank. One interesting component of this advice is the fact that many of these state actors are playing a very tenuous balancing game. This balancing game is accented by attempting to employ the rigid austerity measures that the ECB requires in order for the disbursal of any further monetary aid/loans/bailout package, the fear that the European Union will eventually collapse and the consequential reaction to withhold resources in order to prepare for a worst-case scenario forcible exit from the Eurozone. It is for precisely this reason that Christine Lagarde is so adamant that each of these nations commits themselves fully to the proposition of saving the Euro.