BUNDESBANK DECLARES WAR ON EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK, OR JUST MORE ...

According to British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, there's been a battle shaping up between the German Bundesbank and the European Central Bank over the future of European fiscal policy, and according to him, it's shaping up to be a real battle:

Bundesbank declares 'war' on Mario Draghi bond bail-out at Germany's top court

But not so fast, says the Daily Bell:

Farce of the Bundesbank

Now, insofar as The Daily Bell is talking about the general effect of the EU on Germany, I tend to agree: the whole thing was intended to be from the start to couple the German locomotive to the rest of the European train, and pull the whole thing along. One need only go back to the earliest years of the Common Market and the byzantine rhetoric coming out of then West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the French cabinet minister Jean Mendez-France, both Eurocrats par excellence.

And I agree with the Daily Bell's analysis here:

"The Bundesbank and the German elite are always portrayed by the mainstream media as at odds with Europe's more accommodative policy. But that's really not the case.

"The German elites are just as globalist in their own way as the rest of Europe. It is the German CITIZENS who are increasingly against the euro and even the EU because Brussels is seen to have broken its solemn promises and Germans don't want to be sacrificed on the altar of European solvency.

"It is Germans themselves, stubborn Germans, who are employing their democracy to try to derail the authoritarian juggernaut aimed directly at them.

"Again, we doubt this particular gambit and decision will derail the onrushing fiscal doom, but let us not over-play our cynicism.

"For it also seems to us that the tide is turning against this "great experiment" and that, while incidents like these do not of themselves stop the functioning of the euro and even the EU, over time enough such attacks will have an impact."

Where I tend to disagree is with the German elite, which is here portrayed as unrelentingly globalist. Internationalist it is, but I question whether or not it is entirely in the pocket of the oligarchs in London and New York. Germany seems to have embarked, rather, on a diplomatic course that hearkens back to the days of Bismarck, playing a careful balance between East and West, though I strongly suspect that, in time, financial and market realities will incline Germany to the BRICs side of the equation, and it goes without saying, that the German elites, both corporate and political, have already seen this.

What remains to be seen is if they can correctly tap into the growing tide of popular German opposition to all the looming consequences of the Eurozone and to the stinking cesspool of corruption Brussels has become.

As always, it isn't just what the German elite signal to the rest of the west via the instrumentalities of its government or the Bundesbank,  but rather what it also signals to Moscow, Beijing, New Delhi, and Brasilia. What I suspect the real theatrics to be is therefore a desperate attempt to keep the Eurozone together by keeping the German locomotive coupled to it.  But if you suddenly start hearing more and more about Russian and Chinese conductors on the train, then you'll realize that Brussels, sock puppet to the City of London and New York that it is, is in some trouble. And if Ms. Merkel wins re-election, and suddenly takes her cabinet on another junket to China with a convenient stop-over as guests of Mr. Putin, then you can almost bet on it.

See you on the flip side.