Rumours were emerging from Brussels this morning (following the earlier Slogpost on half-built Cathedrals of Mammon) to the effect that work on the new ECB Frankfurt HQ was put on the back-burner last March in order to accelerate completion of the new ring road to circumnavigate the now outdated EU Constitution fiscal rules Treaty. (See also Lisbon, Rome etc etc)
The Slog’s Sprout Mole has forwarded to Slogger’s Roost here, somewhere in France, the exclusively-revealed new hub system, construction of which has unfortunately destroyed the legal basis it was originally designed to by-pass. The new automotorbahnroutepista has cut by 99% the length of time it takes ECB money to reach insolvent caja private banks, and opened up a valuable new route between the Madrid Central Bank and those very same cajas for the growing market in transporting debt to the indebted. The dotted-lines represent proposed emergency routes that have been open since 2009 but don’t exist as such while being chock-solid with junk bond logistics haulage on a daily basis.
“The new design has, I think, produced the world’s first fiat money merry-go-round,” opined Japanese limerick freak Herman the Ersatz German van Rompuy, “and as such has an ironic beauty that will stand for all time”. Mr van Rompuy (whose middle name is Achilles*) said he was delighted to have awarded the contract to Grecobank SA, to several of whose senior staff he is entirely unrelated. The Bank of Greece adopted the design for its own purposes last week, and has prounced it “a great improvement on the old seagoing route via Tokyo to Frankfurt”.
*Astonishingly, that bit is true.
Inspired by this snippet from seekingalpha today: ‘Spanish bank borrowing: Just to be clear, the banks are borrowing from the ECB to fund their purchases (and private investor sales) of Spanish sovereign debt. “This can only go on for so long,” says Peter Chatwell, a fixed-income strategist.
NB Although this post is strictly for laughs, I would have to refute the theory that the ECB’s ongoing not going anywhere new HQ Project is purely to do with construction workers going on holiday. Nothing much has happened on the Tower of Babel since March. Research shows that construction workers go on towel-throwing holidays in August.
The Slog 