Press

"The Europeans can call for certain policy shifts which, for the moment, the Americans can't," said Clara O’Donnell of the Centre for European Reform in London. ..."The official EU position regarding engagement with the Palestinian unity government is much more compromising than the US position and there seems to be a tacit involvement from the Obama administration to encourage the Europeans to do it," said O’Donnell.

"If they had agreed on those measures nine months ago it would have prevented the crisis from spiraling to this extent," said Simon Tilford, the chief economist at the Centre for European Reform in London. "But this is too little too late."

"The single biggest mistake by Europe was the decision to impose budget targets on Ireland, Greece and Portugal that were impossible to meet," said Simon Tilford, chief economist with London-based think-tank the Centre for European Reform (CER). "The economics of those budget targets were nonsensical. To meet those targets, all three countries have had to cut public spending by unprecedented amounts -- but this hasn't put those countries back on a sustainable fiscal path.

Analysts including Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform think-tank have suggested Greece is economically too weak to sustain euro membership.

"To see those yields on highly developed countries like Italy jump so fast has really focused minds," said Simon Tilford, chief economist for the Centre for European Reform in London. "Merkel is now in a very difficult position The Germans are now alive to the risk in ways they weren't before. For all the derision about Silvio Berlusconi, Italy is core Europe and has very strong ties to Germany and France."

"The structural reforms were necessary but not sufficient — with no plans to boost growth, the debt situation worsened," said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. "Greece needs a Marshall Plan to encourage growth." Public opinion in debt-ridden European economies, according to Grant, is becoming a "new and dangerous" factor.

"Renewables are the best form of electricity, but it will probably take the EU a long time - several decades - to be 100 per cent reliant on renewables," said Stephen Tindale, an associate fellow at the Centre for European Reform in London. "Before then, we need a low carbon bridge to get [away] from dependence on oil and coal. My advice to the Czech government would be to continue to use nuclear, because it is a low carbon source for significant amounts of electricity Germany is supposed to reach 18 per cent of total energy from renewables by 2020 based on EU targets.

"The ECB has been flexing its muscles" after being "very much on the back foot last year," said Philip Whyte, an analyst at the London-based Centre for European Reform. Still, "the threat the ECB is wielding (to reject Greek bonds) is a threat you might say it can never actually carry through given the consequences it would unleash."