The folk at EU Referendum are churning out searching piece after piece on the deep and complicated EU rules which (they say) look to be making the financial crisis graver than it might be.

This post argues that the ranks of UK journalistic experts are failing to see the issues as a whole:

… the media suffers from the fatal flaw of specialisation – and excessive compartmentalisation. In this story, there are four, distinct main elements: the domestic political issues; the technical banking and economic issues; the EU dimension and the US/international element.

The problem for the media is that the political hacks write about national politics and the financial journalists deal with financial issues. The EU dimension is regarded as entirely separate (unless there is a direct domestic input) and the US/international element is handled by the foreign desk. There is very little cross-over so no one sees the whole picture.

… for a variety of reasons – some good, some bad – the hacks are not up to the job. The political hacks, in particular, are attuned to reporting on the tittle-tattle of the Westminster village. When they come up against a hard-edged issue like this, with a strong technical element, they are simply out of their depth.

And, commendably, they are among very few analysts drilling down into the intricate accounting rules which drive decisions on what banking and other assets are "really worth":

We know it was on the agenda at yesterday’s meeting in Paris but, bizarrely, the only reference we can find to any subsequent decision is in The New York Times. From that source, we learn that: "Leaders said they would try to rewrite European accounting rules by the end of the month to limit the losses banks have to write off, an effort to match changes in ‘mark-to-market’ accounting rules in the United States while keeping Europe’s financial sector competitive."

Thank goodness for Blogs.

On the Big Picture side here, all that ‘EU harmonisation’ is fine as long as the mountaineers roped together are all climbing steadily and securely together.

But what if one reckless mountaineer slips and falls, and one by one the other climbers are dragged over the edge of the abyss, the rope acting as the force not for safety but for mutually assured catastrophe?

One size rope fits all?