The author sees the current European banking/sovereign funds crisis as being a contest between European financial centers. The political leaders of the various countries are only representing their financial centers while the people's dire economic interests are being ignored. He uses a metaphor of a family of European nations whose parents are engaging in extramarital affairs with banking institutions while totally disregarding the welfare of their children, the people of Europe.
As always, the greatest pain is quietly borne by the kids: the citizens who haven’t even been consulted by their leaders. Childhood illusions about European solidarity have been brutally uprooted. But, as if to repress the most confronting part of the drama, no one appears to be talking about the disgraceful extramarital affairs that lie at the root of it all. The truth is that both the UK and Europe have been engaging in financial adultery for decades on end.Although quite amusing, I'm not really convinced that this is the most apt metaphor. First, it is hard to imagine any set of parents having so little, if any, regard for their children. But to extend the metaphor a little, the solution is for the kids to grow up, organize and support their own healthy households, and leave the squabbling parents behind. Second, the European political leaders are really only representatives of the financial institutions, even though they and all the societal institutions that the ruling class controls pretend otherwise.
On the other hand, a more appropriate metaphor would be this scenario: several giant corporations fighting for a dominant position in the market by engaging in a price war. The officers of these corporations couldn't care less about their employees--there are plenty more out there among the unemployed. So, they keep cutting the prices on their products to undersell their competitors. This results in their selling below the costs of production and causes harm to their enterprises which, in turn, results in layoffs of employees. (This happened in the early days of industrial enterprises until they became wise to the adverse effects of this game plan and decided to collude with each other against consumers by price fixing and market division tactics.) Nowadays financial empires are governed by powerful people who, while being drunk on their sense of power, feel a sense of impunity and have little inhibitions about wrecking havoc among their national populations in their pursuit of more power and profits.
