German bond fiasco good for EU

Germany has long been considered a safe haven for investors. However the country was unable to sell about 35 percent of the ten-year bonds it offered to the market on Wednesday. This cloud has a silver lining, writes the business paper Les Echos: "The crisis has reached Germany. Certainly, it is not pleasant to see that hypotheses of a pan-European recession are being validated or that the last Eurozone haven is disappearing. Nevertheless this new factor will oblige Berlin to change its stance. Caught up in the crisis, Germany can no longer present itself as a paragon of virtue vis-á-vis poorer states. Soon it will have to give up its elitist isolation and lend a more attentive ear to its partners' proposals for finding a way out of the debt crisis. Starting with assigning the ECB the role of lender of last resort, that is to say authorising it to buy sovereign bonds as soon as they are issued. Which by the way was precisely what the Bundesbank rushed to do yesterday to compensate for the lacking appetite of investors."

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