US staring at crumbling EU

“In Europe, economic meltdown tears at unity,” headlines USA Today, which devotes a wide-ranging report to the growing divide between “better-off EU states” and their poorer neighbours. What is to become of the unhappy Greeks, the unfortunate Irish who are emigrating in their droves, and the “thousands of jobless Spaniards” who might “soon be homeless?” wonders the daily. And how long can they continue to count on being bankrolled by “furious” Germans and True Finns, the populist Finnish party?

As Herman Van Rompuy has pointed out, Europe has now reached a point where it can’t finance its social model anymore. Worse still, its financial ills could lead to a domino effect, in which: “Greek banks collapse, then French banks collapse, then U.S. banks collapse” — a pessimistic vision shared by theWashington Post,which remarks that “kicking the can down the road” has been the only response to these problems thus far. However, the newspaper warns that “Europe’s day of reckoning on its financial crisis is at hand.” European governments will “need to find common ground, and fast, lest Ms. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy, and their colleagues, go down in history as the leaders who brought Europe, and the world, to the brink of economic disaster — and then over it.