How Europe can restore financial stability

With last week’s tumult in Italian markets, the European financial crisis has entered a new and far more dangerous phase, threatening both European monetary integration and the global recovery. Last week’s drama surrounding bond auctions in Europe’s third-leading economy should convince even the most hardened bureaucrat that the world can no longer let policy responses be shaped by dogma, bureaucratic agenda and expediency. It is to be hoped that European officials can engineer a decisive change in direction, but if not the world can no longer afford the deference that the International Monetary Fund and non-European Group of 20 officials have shown European policymakers the past 15 months.