EU Summit: A Glass Half Empty or Half Full?
The Alpha-Sources blog is somewhat more optimistic than I am after the Sunday summit, but mainly shares the views that I also hold on the Central European economy.
I am not so fond about the narrative on heterogeneity among Eastern European economies and the need to discriminate between CE economies. Lately, this has emerged as the main discourse surrounding the measures taken to shore up the economies of Eastern Europe. [...] I cannot help but feel that pointing towards heterogeneity amongst the CEE is rather like pointing towards heterogeneity in the context of critical patients on an intensive ward. Surely, one patient may be closer to the brink than another but common to all of them is that they are in pretty bad shape. [...] Ultimately, a much more systemic perspective is needed here and we need to realize that a case by case approach does not work. This does not mean that the CE economies are not different; it merely means that the EU and the Eurozone need to see this as an integral part of the fight to keep the economic edifice from crumbling entirely.
While Alpha Sources believes that the EU is going into the direction of realizing this, I am a little bit more pessimistic. But I would really like to see the same move, and maybe it is like glaciers: you don’t see the change if you look closer but it has a tremendous momentum
(Via Julien Frisch)
A Central European perspective 
