Now Hungary turns to the IMF for help

They are dropping like flies.With the markets anxiously watching what the New Spanish government will do to address its defecit,this morning it is the turn of Hungary which has asked the IMF and the EU for help.

According to Reuters, Prime Minister Viktor Orban's governmentwhich has pursued unconventional policies since it swept to power in April 2010, may face hard talks with lenders if it wants a deal without strict conditions attached, analysts have said.

The call appears an about face after it seemed Orban's government was quite capable of dealing with its own problems.

However the euro zone debt crisis, and Hungary's weak economic outlook coupled with the threat of a downgrade to "junk" debt status prompted the government to take this sudden U-turn.

Hungary was the first European Union country to receive an IMF-led bailout in 2008. The country had the highest public debt level among post-communist EU members at 81 percent of gross domestic product last year.

Eurosceptics triumph says the Spectator-Yah boo to the FT and the Beeb

This week's Spectator magazine is out and the right leaning publication takes on the Euro in its major article.

For Eurosceptics the battle appears to have been won writes the magazine

They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse.

whilst for those who backed it they

find themselves in the same situation as appeasers in 1940, or communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are utterly busted.

However the magazine turns its ammunition on two institutions who have backed the Euro,the FT which flung itself headlong into the pro-euro camp, embracing the cause with an almost religious passion and the BBC which in 2001 made a case for the euro that was represented by twice as many figures, interviews and soundbites as the case against.

The wink that changed history

Michael Meyers writes a good piece in Slate today reflecting on events 20 years agp in Bucharest as the leaders of the Warsaw pact countries came together for what was to be a swansong meeting.

He writes that

This day, however, the hunted was one of their own: reformist Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth, whose determination to bring democracy and free markets to his country threatened them all. And so, in the interests of self-preservation, the satraps of the Warsaw Pact marshaled their forces. The goal: a classically Commie "fraternal intervention" of the sort the world had seen before—Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968. Only one man stood between them and their quarry. His name: Mikhail Gorbachev.

and it was a simple gesture

As Ceausescu and the others ranted on, calling for armed intervention in Hungary, Nemeth glanced across at the Soviet leader. Their eyes met, and Gorbachev … winked.

Within six months the Warsaw pact was effectively dead and Ceausescu was syanding in front of a firing squad

Beware the August holidays

Are we going to get another summer crisis?

As the Economist points out

WHEN the people who run the Western world go on holiday, bad things happen in eastern Europe. Last August Russia invaded Georgia. Over Christmas its gas spat with Ukraine left millions of European consumers shivering (from nerves, if not real cold). Easter (on the western Christian calendar) brought violent protests against ballot-rigging in Moldova.

So what is on the agenda for August 2009?

A new war in Georgia is always possible. Crimea remains a combustible mixture of incompatible military and ethnic interests. The Kremlin’s relations with the once-docile regime in Belarus are uncommonly icy.