This too shall FAIL.

A "quantum leap" in finacial regulatory surveillance...interesting analogy...so what is the probability that the EU spontaneously combusts?

More of the Khyber pass approach to governmental regulation. The solution is always known in advance (more "official" oversight and control), but the problems have not even materialized. In any other field of human endeavor, this approach would be laughable. In the EU is it "good policy".

EUOBSERVER / FEATURE - After months of often bitter back-room negotiations, European finance ministers have finally given the green light to a radical new centralised EU oversight of national budgeting processes and, broader still, of all economic policies - both of countries that use the single currency and those that do not.

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The unprecedented shift in powers to the bloc from member-state parliaments, heavily limiting what is known in the jargon as "policy space", or the ability of countries to write their own laws, was saluted by EU economics chief Olli Rehn.

"Today the EU member states are endorsing the basic thrust of the six legislative proposals by the commission," he told reporters after ministers had given their approval to what European decision-makers have dubbed the 'Six Pack'.

The ministers were not endorsing a light work-out of economic sit-ups, but a different sort of regime entirely - a half a dozen new far-reaching laws that the commissioner said "will lead to a quantum leap of economic surveillance in Europe."

The ministers were not endorsing a light work-out of economic sit-ups, but a different sort of regime entirely - a half dozen new far-reaching laws that the commissioner said "will lead to a quantum leap of economic surveillance in Europe."

Although much of the often very technical discussion, aimed at convincing markets of Europe's commitment to tighter fiscal decision-making, has been buried in the back of the financial pages of newspapers, those at the heart of the EU are under no illusion about the profound transformation the bloc is about to undergo.

"What is going on is a silent revolution - a silent revolution in terms of stronger economic governance by small steps," commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said last June after the EU Council first gave the nod to the commission's initial concepts for that would later evolve into the Six Pack.

"The member states have accepted - and I hope they understood it exactly – but they have accepted very important powers of the European institutions regarding surveillance, and a much stricter control of the public finances," he said at the time.