Europe condemned to a seemingly unending series of crises: George Soros

The euro crisis is a direct consequence of the crash of 2008.

When Lehman Brothers failed, the entire financial system started to collapse and had to be put on artificial life support.

This took the form of substituting the sovereign credit of governments for the bank and other credit that had collapsed.

At a memorable meeting of European finance ministers in November 2008, they guaranteed that no other financial institutions that are important to the workings of the financial system would be allowed to fail, and their example was followed by the United States.

Angela Merkel then declared that the guarantee should be exercised by each European state individually, not by the European Union or the eurozone acting as a whole.

This sowed the seeds of the euro crisis because it revealed and activated a hidden weakness in the construction of the euro: the lack of a common treasury.

Image: Burnt euro notes, burnt because they were unusable for various reasons, are displayed in the money museum of German Bundesbank in Frankfurt, Germany.

Text: George Soros, Reuters

AP Images