Please wake up!

I’m impressed by the performance of the Greek government, by the willingness of the coalition parties in Greece to undertake whatever will have to be undertaken in order to respond to our wishes,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters in Luxembourg late yesterday after chairing a meeting of euro finance chiefs.

I just read that statement on Bloomberg. I wonder what he is impressed with. Oh yes, their willingness.

“It’s time to wake up Jean-Claude”

“But mummy I was having such a wonderful dream”

Eurozone Finance Ministers will need to check on reality pretty soon.

Mrs Merkel is visiting Athens today and it looks like she will get a far better taste of the Greek “man on the street’s” willingness.

The Greeks feel let down by the U-turn performed by their Prime Minister in first campaigning against budget cuts and then adopting them when he came to power.

The social unrest we are seeing in the depressed economies of Southern Europe shows the true state of affairs and what austerity means for the people.

Continued austerity will make it much more difficult for those economies to see any growth for quite a few years. Unemployment continues to rise and those without jobs will become ever more restless.

Politicians, their hands tied by Brussels or Frankfurt, are powerless to improve the lot of their people and the only choice an election can bring is to stay in or leave.

The currency markets continue to buy the Euro on the premise the economy is less bad than that of the United States. I don’t see that there is much to choose between the two right now, but it is the manner in which they are going about handling the crisis that marks them apart.

There is a lot of talk about the U.S. “massaging” (I have heard it called a lot worse) their economic data (7.8% unemployment? Really?) to give a boost to their President as he faces the upcoming election. That is short term and doesn’t affect the overall trend for the currency.

The major trend for the Euro is still down despite the correction we have seen recently. A correction that was caused primarily by buying at a major technical and the confluence of three pieces of news that were either positive for the single currency or negative for the dollar.

It still seems probable that the Euro will be bought up above the resistance at 1.3080 and could even test 1.3180 but unless whoever is in charge in the Eurozone (it is difficult to tell) takes the bull by the horns and forces through policies that can stick, the fall could be sharp and gather pace at an alarming rate and see at least one departure from the currency bloc.

Cometh the hour Cometh the man (or woman)?

Let’s see.