The Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans Pritchard is still focused on Finland as a potential weak link in the suicide pact better known as the euro:
Finnish exit – or FIXIT, as they say in Helsinki – is certainly a plausible hypothesis. The Finns have no ensnaring duty to a mystical “Europe“. They did not join the EU until 1995, and only then with widespread dissent.
“Sweden and Denmark both held referendums on the euro, and both said no. We were never allowed to vote,” said Timo Soini, leader of the True Finns party. That was a mistake. The nation is not locked into ritual assent.
Finns obeyed the rules of EU membership with scrupulous care, while others gamed the system. “Our Lutheran morality, if you will,” said foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja.
They alone faced the fiscal implications of EMU for small economies out of cyclical alignment. Finland’s budget surplus was 5.3pc of GDP at the top of the boom in 2007. Greece’s was 6.5pc in deficit. There lies the full horror of what has happened.
“In Finland, a handshake is final. We thought we had a deal that every country would look after its own finances, only to find the deal was broken,” said Alexander Stubb, Finland’s Europe minister.
The Finns survived their own gruelling depression without foreign help in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed and exposed the fragility of the Finnish banking system. The economy shrank by 13pc.
“We had the IMF knocking at our back-door. Unemployment was at 18pc. We said ‘never again’ and yet here we are in a fresh crisis because of somebody else’s fault,” said Mr Stubb.
For the True Finns – with 19pc of the vote in the last election – it is an outrage. “We bailed out our own banks, and now after all the lying, dishonesty and malfeasance in Europe, we are being asked to bail out their banks. This is the last straw,” said Mr Soini.
There is no doubt that Finland could go it alone. It is the last unsullied AAA state in the Euroland, with a public debt of just 51pc of GDP. The reason why Moody’s did not place the country on negative watch last month along with Germany and Holland is a lack of banking exposure to Club Med debt and “relative insulation from the euro area” in trade.
More than two-thirds of Finnish exports go outside the euro bloc, chiefly to Russia, Sweden and the US. In other words, Finland lives in a different economic universe from core-EMU, and is deemed better for it by rating agencies. You could not find a more likely candidate for euro exit.
That said, Evans Pritchard is right to go on to identify anxiety over Finland’s perpetually threatening neighbor to the east as a major reason for the Finns’ unwillingness to abandon the single currency’s ship of fools.
But the reality remains that, despite a recent bout of saber-rattling from Moscow, the euro is, for now, more of a threat to Finland than the Kremlin.
Whether the Finnish elite — still keen to be seen as the best in Brussels’s miserable class — is prepared to recognize this is another question altogether.
Sadly, I doubt it.