These caught my eye.

First, the Indy’s Ben Chu on the tasty fare on offer to EU leaders at their latest Summit:

What would that transformative menu look like? Well the first course would be an acknowledgement by the self-righteous leaders of northern Europe that, with the sole exception of Greece, the struggling eurozone states are in deep financial trouble now, not because their governments were financially undisciplined in the boom years, but because the private sectors of those countries were.

Nowhere in his piece is there anything to suggest that just perhaps even a teensy weensy bit EU governments might be part of the problem, here by borrowing for ‘social Europe’ purposes more than they can afford to pay back.

Moving on to more serious levels of analysis, here again is Hamish McRae who gets the underlying point, namely that long-term borrowing for Europe requires a hard look by foreigners at our long-term underlying demographics:

 … while eurobonds could in theory at least help solve the debt problems of the fringe countries that are unable to borrow at sustainable rates, they would do nothing to solve the competitiveness problem within Europe. Several countries need to reduce their costs by a third or more, a scale of adjustment that has never been achieved in a democracy without a devaluation – which in this case means leaving the eurozone.

The big thing to realise here is that these bond market conditions are not normal. Bond yields are lower than at any time in the 19th century, lower than in the 1930s, lower than the long squeeze after the Second World War. Therefore, they won’t last. And if long-term interest rates are bound to rise, bundling together good creditors with bad ones is a toxic policy. The harsh truth is that even Germany – prosperous, organised, secure Germany – is just not rich enough to save the eurozone.

Finally, here is a veritable masterpiece of Big Picture work from Clive Crook at Businessweek:

The single currency fostered deep financial integration across the EU—that’s one of the reasons why leaving the single currency is so difficult. But progress toward a consistent EU-wide system of financial regulation—such as uniform banking rules or a single deposit insurance scheme—has been slow.

Labor markets also remain more national than continental, leaving workers and businesses at the mercy of the EU’s imperfectly synchronized business cycles. Migration is permitted in theory but can be difficult in practice because pension arrangements and labor certifications aren’t easily portable. Anyway, how many Frenchmen want to live in Britain? Or vice versa?

Until the crisis intervened, labor market craziness as notorious as Spain’s—where a dual system of permanent and disposable workers has driven the unemployment rate to 25 percent—was left unattended. Powerful unions and broken wage-setting systems allowed labor costs to get out of hand and created a widening competitiveness gap between Germany and southern Europe. This is the main underlying cause of the peripheral countries’ current plight.

The EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, is much to blame for this neglect. For years it focused on enlarging and complicating its areas of competence, but it failed to prioritize the issues that would make or break the currency union. Its pathological zeal to standardize the regulation of products and services fueled resistance to more rule from Brussels—resistance the commission then deflected by spraying regional development funds hither and yon. Its intrusiveness contrived to be both threatening and absurd. The commission thrived on tasks that neither made the euro system safer nor prepared the EU for the economic stresses of the crash.

The result is the fateful choice that confronts Europe in the coming days and weeks. Already a breakup of the euro system has gone from being “unthinkable” to a contingency for which officials are planning. The immediate question is whether Greece will exit. Europe’s leaders would hope to stop the rot there. But if Grexit happens, attention will turn instantly to which country goes next. To stop the system from unraveling with who knows what consequences, the EU may have to take the strides toward deeper union that Germany has been resisting since this crisis exploded: joint guarantees of sovereign debt and unlimited intervention by the ECB.

That’s fiscal union. It commits the EU to potentially enormous transfers among its members and makes them explicit. Can there be fiscal union of that sort without political union? And do Europe’s divided nations—the bossy Germans, idle Italians, arrogant Brits, and vain French—actually want to be one country? In Maastricht in 1992, the Treaty on European Union arranged things so those questions would one day have to be answered. Sooner than anyone bargained for, and before Europe was anything like ready, that day has come.

Somewhere else today I read that part of the crisis shows itself in young people flocking from Greece to work in Germany. Horror!

Er, no, it’s part of the solution. Until it leaves the Euro and can devalue, Greece to try to stay afloat exports sun in the form of tourism and imports money in the form of remittances from such ‘economic migrants’.

You wanted labour mobility in the European Union. Now you have it. Happy?