Armageddon talk in Brussels
Yesterday evening I went to a dinner in Brussels, featuring a group of senior politicians and diplomats. These dinners can be dull. But not this one. The sense of crisis in Europe made for an extraordinary conversation. The official speeches were not that exciting – featuring the usual, “we’re living in tough times, but I’m confident we’ll see this through type of rhetoric”. But it was the talk around the tables that was so striking. Three remarks in particular stuck with me.
1) A senior official from a AAA country in Europe, saying of the euro – “It seems we have created a machine from hell, that we cannot turn off.”
2) A senior official from a country that is in trouble with the markets saying that – “For us Europe was a dream, but now it is a nightmare” – and concluding that the only option was for his country was to leave the euro. I asked him whether this was official policy. He said – no, but he personally could not see any other way out.
3) A Brussels-based official who says that he is thinking of “Armageddon plays”. In other words, what to do with his money, if the euro breaks up. His conclusion – “Buy land in New Zealand. If war breaks out in Europe, you can always go and live there, grow your own food and sell vegetables to the Chinese.”
As you might infer, that was not an entirely serious remark. But the sense of near-panic underlying it, seemed to me entirely real.
