We've had political trouble in Sweden to. As an explanation for Americans ; right now we've basically have "our" democrats running on "our" republicans budget.

This is because we have a racist fascist party in Sweden who no-one wants to be connected to or co-operate with in the other parties. The left-wing parties are bigger than the right-wing parties, but with the neo-facist party the right-wingers are bigger. When they were voting for the budget the neo-facists voted for the right -wing budget which means that the ruling parties are enforcing a budget that isn't theirs.

The neo-facist did this to force a new election were they would have gained supporters and gotten bigger. And the ruling parties announced a new election And yesterday this new election was going to be called. But a week before that, the 27th all parties except the most left-wing and the neo-facist one had come to an agreement. They are calling this the December-agreement. This agreement means that the situation we've been in can not be repeated until after the next election. All the parties except the neo-facist one are really happy about this, and most regular people too.

Tl;dr: me talking about Swedish politics

I've read a shit-ton of geopolitical and macroeconomics texts. Not a one of them regards the Eurozone as anything other than an ephemeral flash-in-the-pan from a time when politics trumped economics.

There is every reason for governments to want to band together for common bargaining power and zero reason for citizens to want the same thing. the Greeks have no interest in German-forced austerity and the Germans have no desire to underwrite the spendthrift, lazy Greeks. When Greece goes it'll take Spain and Portugal and then Italy and France will follow. That will be it. More than that, there's no advantage whatsoever to being the last country holding the bag and every advantage to bailing and bailing quickly. The Euro is going to rip apart in a week, the only question is what week.

Mauldin figured the Euro would be dead by 2014. he figured this in 2012. He hasn't been right so far, but he also hasn't misjudged the way things would play out.