Any other business | 1 October 2011

Hang on to your popcorn – this could be the final reel of the euro disaster movie

The good news is we’re in a new phase of the euro crisis. The bad news is we don’t know how it’s going to end.

In every good disaster movie, there’s a moment when bickering bureaucrats who have failed to tackle the threat — epidemic, earthquake, invasion — are sidelined to make way for the maverick (and unkillable) hero or heroine. A classic example comes in Independence Day (1993) with the sacking of spineless secretary of defense Nimzicki and the triumph of the computer nerd played by Jeff Goldblum, who figures out how to zap giant alien spacecraft. Now it’s happening for real, as bickering Eurocrats are elbowed aside by monetary special forces, no doubt with a wacky professor in tow.

BBC reporters have started pronouncing ‘default’ as ‘dee-fault’, as though their dialogue coach is Tommy Lee Jones. And there’s a nice twist in the fact that the cool new commander is IMF chief Christine Lagarde. In her previous post as French finance minister, she looked very much the outsider: the Americanised lawyer-lady at the court of King Sarkozy. By taking Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s job at the IMF, she has upset the phallocratic French establishment. Now she’s telling the whole of Europe what to do. ‘Guys, what you need is a Really Big Number. It worked for Hank Paulson when he rescued Wall Street in ’08; his people plucked “$700 billion” out of the air because it sounded big enough to stop the panic. You’ve f***ed up so bad you’re going to need €2 trillion. But that way you can write off Greece and bail out your banks as well.’ ‘Mon Dieu, madame.