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Simon Tilford of the CER said that to have a significant impact on Italian and Spanish borrowing costs, the ECB plan must banish investor concerns that the two countries' membership of the eurozone would ever be threatened. "Unfortunately, the ECB is highly unlikely to do enough to convince investors that membership is unequivocally forever, not least because the Bundesbank opposes any open-ended commitment to cap borrowing costs."

"Ukraine is trying to avoid the conditionality that comes with EU, IMF or Russian money," said Tomas Valasek of the CER in London. "Europe wants reform and transparency in the energy sector and Russia wants control of key industries. That creates political difficulties before the elections."

"Assuming inflation falls to zero in Spain, Italy and the peripheral trio, and averages around 2% in France and the Benelux trio, it follows that inflation in Germany (plus Austria and Finland) will need to rise to around 4%," Simon Tilford, chief economist at the CER wrote in a recent blog post.

It's summed up in a quote from Philip Whyte of the CER: "Three views of the UK are now common across Europe: that it is unreliable and unconstructive; that it is an active distraction from solving the region's worst crisis since World War Two; and that it appears to be heading for the EU's exit door".

Government moves in Hungary and Romania "suggest to me that this is still a generation that doesn’t have democratic instincts in their blood," Tomas Valasek of the CER, said July 18 by phone. "It takes more for the generational change to cycle some of the old politicians out of the system."

The British government's focus on consolidating the public finances and push through supply-side reforms is at odds with the new French president's instincts, according to Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the CER. "France is almost at the opposite end of that debate," he told politics.co.uk.

Simon Tilford from the CER summed it up in a paper like this: "Unfortunately, the agreed measures (at the summit) were modest and have already prompted a backlash in various countries, not least in Germany and the Netherlands. Indeed, much of what was agreed at the summit is unlikely to come into effect. All this suggests that the limits of the politically possible may already have been reached."

En opinión de Charles Grant, director del Centre for European Reform, «la probabilidad de que el Reino Unido abandone de forma efectiva la UE antes de 2020 es del 50-50, la situación es muy seria», nos confesaba recientemente.