Europe on the Brink

huffingtonpost.com — Europe is now on the very edge of an economic abyss. And Germany is finding that it cannot survive as a smug island of fiscally conservative prosperity while the rest of Europe goes down the tubes. It is anybody's guess whether Europe's leaders will shift course in time. If they fail, it won't be pretty. The fact that Germany's fate is now more closely linked to that of its neighbors actually offers a ray of hope. But then on Thursday, as Americans were taking a day off for Thanksgiving, the unthinkable happened. Germany had trouble selling its bonds. The bond market, in its panic, was fleeing even the safest haven. Europe is now approaching a Lehman Brothers moment, where nobody trusts anybody else's promise to repay a debt.

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