Veronique, you quote the Economist editorial in which that magazine’s writers compare the US with the EU. Interesting enough stuff, but what really caught my eye in that piece was this:

The inability of Europeans to rise above petty national concerns, whether over who pays for bail-outs or who controls bank supervision, has prevented them from making the big compromises necessary to secure the single currency’s future.

That’s a pretty awful sentence.

“National concerns”: petty.

A country’s taxpayers wanting to decide how their money is spent: petty

A nation wanting to regulate its own banks: petty.

Why the single currency’s future should be “secured”: unexplained.

Oh dear.