The Guardian: "Mad Hatter's tea party that is the eurozone crisis"

Link to The Guardian

"The answer to a lack of growth in struggling countries such as Greece is austerity of such ferocity that recessions deepen. The solution to a financial crisis caused originally by the over-leveraging of banks and individuals is to turn Europe's bailout fund into a leveraged €2tn hedge fund. Meanwhile, many of the politicians in Britain who battled long and hard to keep the pound – George Osborne and Ed Balls to name but two – are now born-again evangelists for full fiscal union.

"Up until now, policymakers have solved this [crisis] by refusing to admit that it exists. The assumption has been that the events of the recent past have all been a bad dream from which Europe will wake up. Only recently has it been recognised that the single currency really is plunging down a rabbit hole, and is going to hit the ground with an almighty bump.
 

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Daily Telegraph:  
Charles Moore reviews 'The Fear Index' by Robert Harris (Hutchinson)

Link to Daily Telegraph

The Fear Index: A day in the life of the death of capitalism

"A common fault in novels is aiming too high and failing to know their own limitations, but in this case, I would make the opposite point. I would have liked Harris to have written more seriously about his subject. The world of the hedge funds and the credit crunch is due for its equivalent of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Harris may have it in him to write it. For me, the best parts of this book are not the action scenes when a man gets murdered in a squalid hotel or the dramatic moment involving the chief risk officer and the lift-shaft, but the build-up.

"In the first paragraph of this novel, Dr Hoffmann is sitting, so absorbed in Darwin that he does not hear the Victorian grandfather clock in the hall striking midnight. In the last paragraph, he is past hearing the chime of midnight, 24 hours later, from the church clock outside the hospital window. Those old clocks frame the narrative of a day in the death of advanced capitalism. They stand, I suppose, as watchmen for a better way of life."