It wasn’t very nice to liken the Greek debt crisis to the Ebola virus but, as a former Mexican finance minister, Angel Gurria knows a thing or two about contagion and financial sickness. “When you realise you have it,” he said, “you have to cut your leg off to survive.” As the head of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development was standing next to Angela Merkel, Germany’s tough-minded chancellor, at the time, his message will surely have got through. The message is that yet more promises of emergency loans to Greece, from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, are beside the point. Loans, whether the €45 billion already agreed or the rumored €100 billion-plus soon to come, are just palliatives. They do not stop the virus from spreading. The only way to do that is to cut the euro’s Greek leg off: in other words, to expel it from the single currency. This whole Greek tragedy must be galling to those Europeans who thought the post-Lehman recession was basically an American affair, one that showed the superiority of the continental way of doing things compared with those beastly Anglo-Saxons. Now America’s economy is rebounding strongly and it is Europe that looks like the world’s sickest continent. The European economy is weak, and a sovereign debt crisis that promises to spread from Greece to Spain, Portugal and, perhaps, Italy risks sending it back into another nasty recession. (Source: timesonline.co.uk)