At Davos, No Progress on Europe's Debt Crisis

In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, young Hans Castorp checks into an alpine sanatorium for three weeks of rest and ends up staying seven years. The European debt crisis is a lot like that—dragging on interminably as the patient sinks into a permanent malaise. Hopes of a breakthrough on the European debt crisis were dashed on Day One of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos—as it happens, the location of Mann’s fictional sanatorium.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel took to the Congress Hall podium on Jan. 25 with a typically austere message: Germany isn’t putting up any more money. “We have said right from the start that we want to stand up for the euro, but what we don’t want is a situation where we are forced to promise something that we will not be able to fulfill,” Merkel told the gathered global elite. “I know we are labeled the big headache of the global economy.”