Word: eastern
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McConnell and Bunning will come together this Saturday for another Lincoln Day dinner in Corbin, a hard-scrabble town in the eastern Kentucky mountains. They are likely to play nice, but McConnell may still see a man who can't win in 2010. If so, Bunning will make sure it's a problem that belongs to McConnell as much as it does to himself...
...past few months, though, Kapitalizm's jaws have snapped shut. The global credit crunch has hit the economies of Eastern Europe hard. In Hungary and Latvia the International Monetary Fund has stepped in with emergency aid. (Latvia's government collapsed anyway.) Currencies have crashed, leading the European Central Bank to help Hungarians and Poles keep paying their foreign currency-denominated mortgages by pumping in euros. The fear now is that the region's banks could collapse, especially if Western banks yank credit lines to eastern subsidiaries. Such a move would be counterproductive. Western banks, particularly in places such as Austria...
...avoid that, Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány wants $230 billion in aid for Eastern members hardest hit by the crisis, and fast-track membership to the eurozone, the club of nations that uses Europe's common currency. Without help, Gyurcsány says, there is likely to be social and political unrest and a new economic Iron Curtain across Europe...
...finance ministers, dismissed the idea of relaxing the entry criteria to the euro. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who just a few weeks ago raised the specter of a return to protectionism when he suggested that French carmakers should close their factories in the East and move home, accused Eastern Europe of putting the entire E.U. at risk...
...ability to borrow and spend so much comes, in part, because the countries had opened up their capital accounts and sold off their banks to Western Europe at the E.U.'s urging. Financial liberalization and free trade were mantras recited by the E.U. (and others) as the Eastern states readied to join. The policies work. But as Katinka Barysch of the Centre for European Reform in London wrote recently, they have also "left the region exceptionally vulnerable in the downturn." Populist Eastern politicians may now use the crisis, and the perceived lack of Western help, to roll back reforms...