The euro may be heading for cataclysm, but that’s no reason to be rude about pigs

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

I was sorry to hear Gillian Tett, the FT’s fragrant financial commentator, calling the eurozone’s southern members ‘pigs’ last week. In sunnier times, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain were referred to collectively as ‘Club Med’, but lately the acronym of their initial letters has come into common usage, with connotations obviously intended to be negative. It’s true that Greece and Portugal in particular are deep in the porker-manure, with the bond markets repricing their debt (Greek government bonds currently yield more than double those of Germany) in a way that suggests they may soon be unable to finance their spiralling deficits at all. They will then have to be bailed out by stronger eurozone states plus the IMF — and the austerity measures demanded are already provoking unrest. As pressures mount, the euro could fracture — and, as I wrote here five years ago of the inevitability of just such a crisis, ‘you may be sure that if restructuring the euro without its most delinquent members becomes a political imperative, the French and the Germans will find a way to do it’. But we will have no opportunity to be smug, because our own ruined public finances will certainly be caught in the hurricane. So not much scope for jokes then. But let me at least speak up for pigs — which, if you think about the way they process fodder no one else wants into tasty products from their trotters to their chitterlings, are models of productive efficiency. How insulting to associate them with Europe’s most profligate and incompetent governments.

Made in Japan

One of the best cars I ever had was the Toyota Carib in which I buzzed around Tokyo in the mid-1980s.