Stocks tumbled for a second day Friday after concerns grew that the deep spending cuts under Europe's bailout plan would slow a global recovery.
Europe's healthier economies (all two of them, France and Germany) are now playing chicken to see who will abandon the euro first. Sacre bleu, perhaps France will bolt:
Share prices have dropped across Europe and the euro has slid to an 18-month low against the dollar on fears that the eurozone bailout of Greece will fail and reports that French president Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to pull his country out of the single currency altogether to force Germany to agree to the rescue plan.
Mon Dieu! Okay, that's all the French I know. The EU and IMF can forget about shocking and aweing the markets with any further bailouts. Successive interventions, if we start measuring from the U.S.'s first efforts in 2008, are yielding progressively shorter half-lives. Mr. Market simply ceases to be shocked by announced interventions nor awed by their increasingly fleeting impact.
