Anderson’s terrific new diatribe against the European project contains some welcome jabs against Draghi, Barroso, the opacity of the ECJ. It’s great fun. But it reflects an ignorance of the political economy literature of the euro and a penchant for distortions political motives.

He sympathises with claims that ECB bond-buying was illegal – as falsely claimed by the AfD and others. He expresses anger over high levels of unemployment in the union but is seemingly indifferent or oblivious to the fact that OMT and QE prevented mass unemployment.

He’s cares less about outcomes and practical solutions to economic problems, and more about inflating the relevance of putative micro-motives. But Draghi’s stalwart neoliberalism relative to that of Trichet’s has little bearing on their performance in office.

And while the ECB stacks up rather poorly against the Fed, he seems to imply that the ECJ is somehow the only court in the world that is deeply conservative, unaccountable and arrogated to itself powers not set out in Treaties of Constitutions.

[As if SCOTUS wasn’t a court of ultra-reactionaries that granted itself the power of judicial review which it has used impede progress on racial and social issues for well over a century. For British courts, see Assange.]

And, no, that’s not why the they hiked rates in 2011.

Also, no, Optimal Currency Areas aren’t a thing, it’s an academic relic and people were right to ignore it at the time:

There is also little recognition of how power has shifted away from the Commission to the Council, and how the intergovernmentalism of the Council is the more than any other the source of neoliberal policy-making in the EU.

Overall, there is a nostalgia for a time of national sovereignty before the euro – as if either the competing nation states or the post-Bretton exchange rate mechanisms were working.

The idea that European federalism could be a progressive project is dismissed with lordly nonchalance.