Firefighting
The sovereign-debt crisis has echoes of the ERM debacle
AS ANYONE who has watched “The Towering Inferno” will know, what starts as a small electrical fire in a cupboard can eventually consume an entire skyscraper. When Greece's debt problems emerged last year, some dismissed them as trivial, given the country's 2.5% weight in the euro area's GDP. Similarly, problems in the subprime-mortgage market were once regarded as too obscure to affect the entire American economy.
This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline "Firefighting"
From the July 16th 2011 edition
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