Via the Browser, this heavyweight piece by Yves Smith at naked capitalism which looks at the issues swirling around the parlous position of Greece within the Eurozone and the wider implications.

Including this bold thought by Dani Rodrik:

I have an “impossibility theorem” for the global economy that is like that. It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full…

To see why this makes sense, note that deep economic integration requires that we eliminate all transaction costs traders and financiers face in their cross-border dealings. Nation-states are a fundamental source of such transaction costs. They generate sovereign risk, create regulatory discontinuities at the border, prevent global regulation and supervision of financial intermediaries, and render a global lender of last resort a hopeless dream. The malfunctioning of the global financial system is intimately linked with these specific transaction costs.

Or is that a truism, wrapped up in clever language? That as long as there are many different market-places there is no one market-place?

Maybe the Climate/Copenhagen debacle reminds us that nation-states are not planning to abolish themselves for what is proclaimed the Greater Good?