According to one
director of a public-debt consulting firm in the E.U., “In the realm of
investor perceptions, Spain has crossed the Rubicon from solvency to
insolvency.” A day after Europeans in the state of Greece had given a narrow
victory to parties in favor of maintaining the austerity program there,
investors’ concern regarding the viability of the euro pushed the yield on
Spanish 10-year bonds as high as 7.2 percent—a level that Spain’s economy
minister, Luis de Guindos, claimed is unsustainable in the long term.
The full essay is in Essays on the E.U. Political Economy, available at Amazon.