Ireland's government debt will reach 107% of GDP by 2011, according to the National Treasury Management Agency said in a statement.

Yes, it was around 25pc in 2007. This merely illustrates how fast it is deteriorating.

EP would do well to dwell on the UK and its eroding standard of living fostered by both govt and BOE policy. (Forget about quality of life issues, the UK cannot afford such luxuries anymore.)

Europe has always had relative poverty but the fairly generous social net has dampened the outward appearance. Absolute poverty, such as is experienced in the US, will make a return imo. The ECB's main remit is to protect the value of the Euro and it has been pursuing conservative policies to ensure the Euro's success. Secondly, there is a wave of conservative fiscalism coming from Germany which will ensure one of Europe's main economic engines influences policy across the board. Social payments will decrease in the future realtive to GDP in many EU countries. Many influential European policy makers want sound income statements and balanced balance sheets as mandatory requirement for all Eurozone countries.

Given the derth of new economic opportunities, the inability to crack open far Eastern markets in a truely meaningful manner and reduced consumption from lower social expediture, the European recovery from the financial turmoil should be slower. However, despite EP's prognostications, the Euro zone can handle its debt load and most EU countries citizen's are not personally debt burdened like those in the US and the UK.

Europe's recovery may be slower but it will be more fundamentally sound, and with less of a debt hangover.

For cyclical reasons, German unemployment started rising much later than in Spain, where it has already reached 4m.

So it is too early to see the visual effects on the streets of German cities. It will feel different in late 2010 if — as some of the institutes now fear — unemployment reaches 5m.

That said, Germany will ultimately recover. The problem is that those countries such as Italy, Greece, and Spain that have lost competitiveness viz Germany will recover much more slowly. That is when the intra-EMU strains will become serious.

How it all unfolds depends on politics in the end. My core view is that Europe remains very tribal. How far will Germany go to bail out Club Med, either via transfers or via inflation?

I was not in any way apologising for the dire state of affairs in Britain. The UK is not my brief but personally I think British public accounts have been grotesquely mismanaged. We ran a fiscal deficit of 3pc of GDP at the top of the cycle when Spain and Finland ran surpluses of 2pc or 3pc.

That is the reason why the UK deficit has spiralled to 13pc. However, the UK story is sui generis. Britain is not part of a fixed exchange system, so the currency can take the strain — up to a point — as it has in Sweden. This will ensure that social damage in 2010 and 2011 will be a little less awful than it would otherwise have been.

The debt levels of Italy and especially Belgium did indeed fall for several years after Maastrich set the path towards EMU. In the case of Italy, this was largely due to much lower interest costs as Rome came to enjoy Berlin's credit rating on bonds — ie, the convergence effect).

What is shocking is the speed with which fifteen years of gains are suddenly vanaishing. If they can stabilize euroland in 2010, there should be time to repair the ship. However, it is getting ever harder as the demographic crunch approaches.

My main point in this piece is that tight monetary/ loose fiscal policy is the worst conbination for a fast-aging region with high public debts. My article was not about the collapse of the euro as such. That would occur only if they the ECB fails to change course, (or at least that is my argument, others no doubt differ) so I presume that they will do exactly that under pressure from Paris, Madrid and ultimately Berlin, though serious damage is already occuring.

On my own EU views. They are complicated. My wife used to work for the European Commission and I still have many friends in the EU institutions. For a long time, I thought Brussels did serve as an engine of free-market reform in Europe. I have certainly praised the Competition Directorate, and Neelie Kroes in particular, but also Mario Monti.

However, I have long held the view that the EU has bitten off more than it can chew, ofter pursues a double agenda (ie power creep behind virtuous proposals),is inherently undemocratic. Euro-MPs do not hold the executive to account. The decision to press ahead with the EU Constitution/Lisbon after the rejections by France, Holland, and Ireland in referendums crosses a delicate political line in the sand — at least for me. I can no longer view the EU as a legitimate undertaking.

I am not a supporter or member of any party, UKIP or otherwise. I wrote that I would vote for UKIP in the European elections in June for the specific reason that the candidate in my region was Marta Andreasen, the Spanish former chief accountant of the European Commission who was sacked for blowing the whistle on the EU books. (I covered the story as Brussels correspondent at the time, and obtained a leaked Commission memo admitting she was actually right — but was fired anyway).

On a small point, where I wrote that the ECB had refused to join others in embracing QE, the line was heavily cut for space reasons without my knowledge. My original draft said it had done so late, and half-heartedly. It has of course now started with €60bn of covered bonds.

On the specific issue of the homeless, it was in my most recent trip to Europe that I finally figured out why they have far fewer than the U.S. It's subtle, but I noticed that while they have some homeless people, what they don't seem to have many of are mentally ill homeless people. I think you are right, in that it is "social services" at work, whether the otherwise homeless like it or not: in general, European countries have more freedom to commit mentally ill persons. In much of the U.S., the standard is that the person has to be an immediate threat to themselves or others, which in practice means that they can't be committed until they have committed a crime; for the most part, the laws in Europe are not nearly as strict. With doctors, rather than legal courts, making decisions for commitment to institutions, the end result is fewer homeless people on the streets.

Country – rescue – GDP
U. Kingdom – 781.2 – 1910 not in euro zone
Denmark – 593.9 – 245 not in euro zone
Germany – 554.2 – 2620
Ireland – 384.5 – 195
France – 350.1 – 2046
Belgium – 264.5 – 361
Netherlands – 246.1 – 621
Austria – 165 – 296
Sweden – 142 – 346 not in euro zone
Spain – 130 – 1150

All figures are in billions of euros and include capital injections, guarantees granted, effective asset relief and liquidity interventions.

I added the GDP numbers from wikipedia:
(Numbers in Euro, US$ divided by 1.4)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal

Did the easing in the UK and Sweden help?
The numbers for public debt in Belgium and Italy are that that high since who knows when and the countries still exist. I do not want to do A E-P’s job and look them up over time but as memory serves for both countries they were higher when the euro was introduced.
That is a grim outlook for the Euro zone and probably a worse outlook for – to quote Willem Buiter- Reykjavik on Thames.
Gunther

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (A E-P) predicted the catastrophic fail of the Euro from the onset. The Euro is still here.

A E-P has an axe to grind. A very big one. He is staunchly anti-EU and essencially everything that smells like the EU is labelled as a disaster.

He is an UK independence party (UKIP) supporter.

His employer, the Telegraph (sometimes known as the Torygraph – in reference to the Conservative Party) is very right of center and currently is said to be more near the UKIP than the conservatives.

While I have nothing against people having strong opinions (and I am still a avid A E-P reader), it is quite obvious that A E-P will always paint the EU as a disaster. In fact reading A E-P is becoming more boring and less informative every day: you know what he will say just by reading the titles of his articles. Staunch nationalist, anti-EU.

A E-P will not allow facts to get in the way of his opinions if it involves the EU.

I still read the guy though, and think that, if it does not involves the EU, he is a good read. But I more or less ignore him on EU issues where is is simply a propaganda writer.

Disclaimer: I am far from being an EU/ECB lover.