Over at the Guardian in the Business section the penny drops:

The idea that the European leaders who have been like rabbits in the headlight for the past two years can mastermind a clean break for Greece is utterly fanciful. The crisis will be messy, painful, prolonged and probably terminal.

Even now, there is a failure or an unwillingness to grasp a basic truth about the single currency: it doesn’t work.

Larry Elliott warms to his theme:

It was not fashionable to voice these fears a decade or so ago, when the euro was seen as exciting and cutting-edge. The irony is that monetary union was really the last gasp of the mid-20th-century vision of economics: top down, bureaucratic and based on the notion of western economic hegemony.

Despite this monetary chaos, there are still some in Brussels or Frankfurt who argue that the euro has been a success and will go from strength to strength. They sound suspiciously like the members of the politburo who in the 1980s said the Soviet Union was working and would last for ever.

Keep going Larry, you’re on a roll!

The euro, in short, is ripe for what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. Capitalism, according to Schumpeter, was the story of constant, normally gut-wrenching change, in which innovation put established firms out of business and made whole sectors obsolete. Anybody working in the music industry, publishing or newspapers in the past decade understands what Schumpeter was talking about.

Does Schumpeterian theory apply to the eurozone? In a way, it does. The centre of gravity in the global economy has moved from Europe, which looks old-fashioned and lumbering in a world of rapid innovation and loose networks. Tweaking the flawed model in the way François Hollande is suggesting will not do the trick. The only real solution is to rip up the blueprint and start again with the small group of countries that could hack it together. Making the eurozone work is like finding a long-term business model for HMV or Thomas Cook. Like them, monetary union is the past, not the future, an analogue construct in a digital world.

Ah, this is where the analysis falls down.

How precisely to get from where we are now to somewhere safer? Maybe in fact only a wholesale collapse and some extended period of pain and misery (and maybe some extremism) will create the conditions for the right tough better decisions to be taken. Nothing else will do, in the nature of the way things work.

I mean, which Brussels or national bureaucrat would dare even to start to write a paper entitled: Creative Destruction: Time to End the Eurozone?

Answer: none. Some issues are on such a scale that officials and leaders alike simply don’t know what to do.

Elsewhere in the Guardian what else but a French Marxist bewailing the ‘moral failure’ which ejecting Greece from the Eurozone would represent: Germans unwilling to give vast ‘solidarity’ transfers to Greeks are exhibiting ‘intra-European racism … the historical function of nations must change’!

Ha ha ha. Try telling that to the Chinese and Russians, who themselves know a few things about communism.