Authored by Thomas Kolbe via American Thinker,
In the shadow of France's sovereign debt crisis, other smoldering fires threaten to become a raging blaze. In Belgium, things could come to a flashpoint that sets the entire eurozone alight.
Among the many catastrophic lessons of the great financial and sovereign debt crisis more than a decade ago, one came as a surprise: it is not the size of an economy that determines the outbreak of a sovereign debt crisis. It was tiny Greece, accounting for just 2.5 percent of the eurozone's total economic output, that came within a hair's breadth of blowing the union apart from within. At the time, Greece's sovereign debt reached 170 percent of GDP. Austerity was then the order of the day, and given the country's homogeneous population and undeniable state lethargy, it was ultimately accepted.
But things hung by a thread. For in the eurozone, states are chained together through the bond market. The EU, and above all the eurozone, is simply not a federation like the United States. Debt consolidation under the leadership of the European Commission may be Brussels' goal, but given the growing tensions on the continent, it is likely to remain an illusion.
Brussels has long been using an instrument that points in this direction: through NextGenerationEU, the Commission raises joint funds on the capital markets in order to make them available to member states in the form of grants and loans. Countries such as Spain and Italy in particular benefit from this. The political trick is to increasingly cushion national financing problems th
