KEEPING IT LOCAL

France's Finance Minister Michel Sapin and his fellow bellyachers like Matteo Renzi are Band-aid lineage. That's all they know. Nothing ever gets fixed, just covered over. The same goes for the Martin Wolfs of the editorial page coterie.

Wolf, in his his recent economic editorial abortion, "An unconventional tool," a formal apologia for more QE, writes this pathetic sentence: " One has to hope that emerging economies are now properly prepared for the ending of QE."

They sure are, just like the developed ones with all their brain trusts were properly prepared for the economic explosion that ripped through the global world just over five years ago. The angst among European politicians, bureaucrats and columnists about meeting the EU budget deficit limits is palpable.

 In Wolfgang Munchau's FinancialTimes article today, "If Europe insists on sticking to rules recovery will be a distant dream," speaking about European Commission policy, writes: "And while they are at it, they should also suspend the fiscal compact. There is no way that Italy or France will meet its stringent fiscal targets in the foreseeable future."

Foreseeable future as used here is a euphemism for one word--never. The truth is France and Italy, good times or otherwise. never intended to meet those requirements. That's why the good people of  Europe rather than bureaucrats, politicians and verbose columnists would be better served trusting known liars and river boat gamblers.

Appropriately, also in today's Times, John Plender reviews a book by Geoffry Hosking called Trust.

Social trust, says Hosking, is mediated through symbolic systems such as religion and money, together with the institutions associated with them, forming what he calls the "deep grammar of society." He argues, convincingly, that there is a tendency to give too much attention to power and the law relative to trust.

The workings of trust are nonetheless complex. Religion, for example, can provide people with a sense of identity, emotional solace and community. Yet religions also create boundaries, across which distrust is projected against outsiders--witness the virulent history of Christians and Jews, Christians and Muslims, Catholics and Protestants.

In the complex modern world what increases trust in one group can intensify distrust in another.  Moreover, the transition from trust to distrust can be rapid. The EU was the most successful attempt after the second world war to extend the radius of trust from the nation state to the international level. Yet the eurozone sovereign debt crisis posed an awkward test for supranational trust, demonstrating how citizens tend to rediscover their primary trust in the nation state in crisis.

That's as local as it gets, folks, in case you don't recognize it. Buried in all the arguments for globalization is the most powerful for keeping it local.