Let’s stand up to the markets — we can’t bear this debt burden alone

TWO phrases that I heard recently have been going around and around in my head.

The first was a casual remark, made to me by a businessman in a meeting. “We’re living through the moment,” he said, “when the capitalist system decided to eat itself alive.”

The other remark was one made by David McWilliams on the Marian Finucane show on Sunday. He was being challenged to try to describe why every solution to the euro crisis seemed to be failing, and he said that the fundamental problem was that they were trying to shoehorn the laws and rules of politics into a situation that demanded to be addressed by the laws of economics.