EuroCrash! the Musical Brings the Crisis on Stage

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,810425,00.html


Luke Dixon
A musical adaptation of the euro crisis comes to Berlin next week.

A new musical coming to Berlin turns the euro crisis into an amusing fairy tale, with Hansel and Gretel-like characters and a gingerbread house. But the author says he wants to point out the euro's weaknesses, and he lays some of the blame for the crisis on Germany. The Germans, he hopes, will have a sense of humor about it all.

f it were only this simple. The Germans, the French, the Greeks and the Spanish sing a song, do a dance and hash out their financial disagreements in one act. The Bundesbank and the euroskeptic take a bow, skip past the gingerbread house and everyone goes home.

At least in the theater, one can dream.

David Shirreff, a Berlin-based business correspondent for the Economist, has distilled the tortuous financial drama of his daily work into EuroCrash!, the musical. After debuting in London last fall, the show is coming to Berlin's Prime Time Theater next week. The cast then heads to Frankfurt's House of Finance for three nights before returning to London.

Given that Shirreff first wrote the musical in late 2010, and has made only a minor update since, it's more a historical journey than a treatment of the current crisis. The story opens with the Hansel and Gretel-like Mark and Gilda, not-so-subtly named for the respective former currencies of Germany and Holland, who stumble upon a gingerbread house belonging to euro architects Papa Kohl and Madame Mitterand.

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1. The Eurozone: 3.2 trillion dollars in sovereign debt that must be rolled over in the next 3 months

Good luck with that. That is also not counting the private banking and consumer debts. The ECB is going to have to expand their balance sheet to a staggering degree. Of course, The US Fed will also further increase the 700 billion in dollar swaps they extended to the EU banks in December. We are in the midst of grinding, plodding multiple currency extinction events.