Europe’s vacationing leaders have come under fire for going all Hulot on the crisis. The Daily Telegraph has more details:

Lord Prescott, the [British] former Labour deputy prime minister, launched a Twitter campaign to urge senior government figures to return to Britain. But it failed to take off after it was pointed out he had been caught playing croquet at his country residence when he was supposed to be filling in for Tony Blair five years ago…
Across Europe, other prime ministers and presidents came under pressure to return to their desks as the crisis escalated. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, has been criticised for being on mountain walking holiday in Italy, where she dined on yak carpaccio with Reinhold Messner, the Tyrolean mountaineer. She interrupted her hiking yesterday to take a call from Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, who is holidaying at his wife Carla Bruni’s villa in Cap Nègre on the French Riviera. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, was in Rome to take calls, including talks with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Spanish leader, who cancelled his holiday on Monday. Mr Rehn also cancelled his holiday to return to Brussels but his boss Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission’s president, chose to remain on vacation in his native Portugal.

Yak carpaccio? Why not?

Finns are always handy folk to have on your side in a tough spot, and, as the EU Observer reports, the EU’s Olli Rehn (a Finn) is doing his best to defend the Eurozone’s AWOL Team:

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – EU economic affairs commissioner Olli Rehn has blamed the escalation of the euro crisis on superficial market forces and “lack of verbal discipline.”
The Finnish commissioner broke his holiday on Friday (5 August) to give a snap press briefing in the EU capital in order to soothe fears that Italy or Spain might go bust.
He said both countries have sound economies and financial reform programmes but the EU’s inability to communicate the merit of new bailout measures agreed in July is a major factor behind lack of market confidence in the eurozone.
“We all in Europe will have to ensure rigour in our communications and sufficient verbal discipline so that we ensure our joint message will be listened to and understood in the way we want it to be understood…If you look at so-called market forces, or market players and perceptions, what they are after – they are after making money and that is driven by fear and greed.”
He added in his portrait of market psychology that investors were “clearly unrealistic” in expecting the “technically complex” July bailout deal to be implemented overnight.
He also tried to dispel the idea that EU officials and member state governments were lax in heading off for their vacations before agreeing the details of the bailout package and seeing it ratified by the 17 eurozone countries. “My services are working night and day to put flesh on the bones of the 21 July agreement,” the commissioner said.
Rehn’s press briefing is the fourth attempt this week by senior EU personalities to calm bond markets. A letter by commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso published on Thursday saying “all elements” of the July bailout deal could still change contributed to a massive drop in world stock markets. An op-ed by EU council chief Herman Van Rompuy on Monday went down badly when he said he was “astonished” by the surge in Italian and Spanish bond rates – a statement taken by analysts to mean that he simply failed to see it coming. For their part, German and Greek leaders have in recent weeks publicly blamed each other’s countries for the euro mess, while Italy’s leader rubbished his own finance minister…

Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that “so-called” market forces are just a touch turbulent.