A chilling but plausible (to my untrained eye) account of how the stricken markets are forcing the erosion of national sovereignty in Europe. Paul Mason interprets the European Central Bank and its creation of the massive bailout package over the weekend:

Why it is radical becomes clear if you compare it to the Bank of England’s move to print £200bn. That £200bn shows up on the “balance sheet” of the Bank, not the British government. But the Bank of England is ultimately an arm of the British state – whatever its formal constitution says. Ditto the US Federal Reserve. However, the ECB is a central bank without a state to underpin it.
The move to printing money is a signal that the EU has to create something more like a state to back the ECB.
Not only is the EU now committed to much stronger fiscal – i.e. tax and spending – oversight. It is now implicitly committed to becoming an economic super-state.

More:

We are only beginning to get our heads around the detail of this deal but its geo-strategic and moral implications are clear. Big states have bailed out little states and will demand reforms that change the lifestyle of people in these states forever. Northern Europe has effectively seized control of southern Europe. The eurozone is on a path to becoming a supra-national state-like entity.
But because every step of the EU project has been taken by elites, with the populations left to work out what was happening months and years later, we can now trace very accurately where the risk has been transferred to. It has been transferred to politics: will the people of Europe accept the consolidation of the eurozone, with the loss of economic sovereignty that represents?
In short, in a matter of two years, we have transferred risk from the banking system to the state finances to the streets. And the risk is only partly dissipated by this transfer.

Do you ever get the feeling that very big things are happening, and happening faster than any of us can understand, much less attempt to control?