If Rome burns it will take the whole euro project with it

The poor old euro has been left bedraggled and in the gutter, haunted by flashbacks of Silvio Berlusconi’s notorious Bunga-Bunga parties attended by the likes of Karima el-Mahroug, left, nicknamed ‘Ruby the heartstealer’, where hedonism was very much the order of the day.

The euro could just about cope with Greek lies, the bills run up by Irish cowboys and the Portuguese property bubble but now Italy threatens to drag it under completely

THE euro had another bad day — it got up late, felt a bit queasy after all that cheap Greek ouzo it’s been rather too fond of recently and decided to go back to bed for a while with a headache. But it just lay there feeling sorry for itself as no one seems to like it anymore.

What should have been the beautiful love-child of the French franc and deutschmark got warped by throw-back genes from the drachma, lira and punt that now threaten to propel it into an early grave.

The euro had been thinking of cheering itself up by popping along to what used to be its favourite old haunt, the swinging, downtown casino known as The Currency Market, but things aren’t what they used to be, and it could not face the humiliation.

Not so long ago the euro loved nothing better than swaggering around the gambling tables at the casino as braying Essex-boy chancers from the City of London and frisky Frankfurters wolf-whistled at it, telling it how much more fanciable it was than the dried-up old dollar or puffed-out pound.

And while the dollar is still in the doldrums as budgetary brinksmanship by aggressively right-wing Republicans on Capitol Hill threatens to provoke American debt default and sink the US economy (and therefore everyone else), sterling went on a crash diet and shed 25% of its former self, meaning the British economy merely experienced a recession, rather than the depression visited upon the Irish end of a single currency zone unable to devalue in order to remain competitive.

The euro could just about cope with the lies told to it by Greece, the bills ran-up by the financial cowboys of the Irish wild west and the collapsing house of cards that was the Portuguese property bubble, but now Italy has turned on it as well and the poor old euro is left bedraggled and in the gutter, haunted by flashbacks of Silvio Berlusconi’s notorious Bunga-Bunga parties as Rome teeters on the brink of dragging it completely under.

Even a currency so used to being single has never felt this alone — what is to become of it?

Its birth parents in Berlin and Paris are now so concerned about their out-of-control offspring they are openly talking about amputation to try and stop the contagion rife in the peripheral economies infecting their own.

Such plastic surgery would see the euro split into two currencies, with the second-rank one in which Ireland would be included severely devalued. While this may help exporters in the long run it, it will hit savers hard as the euro in their pocket would stay the same, but the ones nestling in bank accounts would suffer the nasty snip.

The New York Times was reporting a “silent run on the banks” in Ireland in March with almost 10% of deposits disappearing, and we can only assume that trend has continued since then. The fact gardaí report an upsurge in house burglaries where expensive items are left untouched as thieves ransack the place for cash and jewellery also suggests people are deciding to keep their money at home as the wider economic situation leaves them warier than ever of trusting banks.

All of which just adds to the woes of the euro as it shivers in the shadows, dazzled by the rise of the emerging new world power of the Chinese currency the yuan, which has almost $1 trillion (€700 billion) of US treasury reserve bonds and therefore a finger on the jugular of the American economy — and government — if it ever decided to squeeze.

When historians look back, 9/11 may even dwarf in importance as the key date in this past decade behind September 2008, when Lehman Brothers was allowed to collapse by a Bush administration as unable to read the warning signs about the financial calamity as it was to piece together the intelligence reports from Florida in August 2001 warning that a group of Middle Eastern men were learning how to get planes to take off and fly, but had no interest in how to land them again.

The Lehman Brothers collapse marked the moment when the financial axis of the global economy began to shift in earnest away from New York and towards Shanghai.

It was the event that set in train the inexorable transformation of what we still rather patronisingly refer to as the Far East into the hot centre of global finance — a process that will also mark the time when we are condemned to decline into the still relatively prosperous, but highly marginal, Far West of the future economy.

But then that is only really a return to the status quo-ante of world affairs, as before Britain began the great Western industrialisation of the late 18th century, China and India accounted for 40% of the global economy.

As the West wanes, Ireland has had a chilling foretaste of what life will be like when the economic sun also rises in the East as the country has already ceded all fiscal control to our overlords in the EU/IMF troika.

Dublin cannot move a comma on a spread sheet without the explicit approval of the Troika, so the Government is left a hollow shell, tinkering at the margins of economic control.

So the one big idea of the new administration in this area was the jobs initiative which is strangely short of actual jobs.

Thus we had the “JobsBridge” to create 5,000 internships, with participants getting an extra 50 quid a week on top of their dole.

But the trouble with being a bridge is that people walk all over you, and as some of these “internships” include working at petrol pumps and being a kitchen porter, it seems unlikely careers will ensue once employers have had their six months of slave labour under the scheme.

Though he gets a much more generous €3,846 a week, Enda Kenny has been on a sort of work experience since being elevated to Taoiseach, and despite a severe wobble over hospital cutbacks, he has generally been learning fast on his feet — he was nice to the Queen, and more importantly, refreshingly firm with the Vatican in the wake of the appalling Cloyne report, so there seems no need to cut his internship short just yet.

Indeed, as EU leaders can’t even agree to meet and discuss the default crisis, let alone try to solve it, Mr Kenny may be around long after the euro has died of shame — unless the collapse of the unloved and deeply unstable currency is so spectacular it takes us down with it.

Then we will all be nothing but eurotrash.