Tolerancia Cero. Una estupidez. (Es mi opinión)

Juez de Casablanca criticó Ley de Tolerancia Cero: "Actitud histérica de políticos que querían salir en las noticias"

La categórica opinión de Mario Cortés es que "esta ley lo único que logrará es alterar la vida a la gente normal y no va a incidir en los accidentes de tránsito".



Juez Mario Cortés


El implacable juez de policía local de Casablanca, Mario Cortés Cevasco, sacó nuevamente la voz: "Acá se requiere mayor responsabilidad. Mi opinión es negativa, y creo que esto obedece a una actitud histérica adoptada por políticos que querían salir en las noticias".
Estas declaraciones las hizo al diario El Mercurio de Valparaíso, al ser consultado sobre la modificación a la nueva Ley de Tolerancia Cero al alcohol -ya promulgada-, que en la práctica prohíbe en forma absoluta la ingesta de alcohol a los conductores.

El denominado "juez de hierro" (conocido por su rigor al aplicar la Ley de Tránsito) calificó la norma como una "legislación histérica dictada sobre la base de dos o tres accidentes. Estos accidentes los cometieron borrachos que con o sin esta ley van a seguir bebiendo".

La autoridad agregó que la modificación de la ley fue basada en el estudio de "las conductas habituales de un ciudadano normal. No podemos imponer una conducta a la comunidad sobre lo que hacen cinco personas irresponsables. Esto es un craso error".

"El ciudadano común, el que va a cenar con su familia, no es causante de accidentes de tránsito, sino que son los irresponsables que conducen con 1.5 gramos de alcohol en la sangre", dijo. Y añadió: "Si alguien iba a un matrimonio, y tomaba una copa de champán, una poca de vino blanco, otra de tinto y un bajativo durante las cuatro o cinco horas que permanecía en el lugar, se producía el proceso de eliminación del alcohol y al salir estaba en condición tolerable".

La categórica opinión del juez es que "esta ley lo único que logrará es alterar la vida a la gente normal y no va a incidir en los accidentes de tránsito".

El juez Cortés remató: "Uno puede manejar y controlar los accidentes, pero pretender mediante leyes talibanescas alterar la vida de los individuos, es una irresponsabilidad legislativa".

Tablets vs PCs

As New iPad Debut Nears, Some See Decline of PCs

The chief executive of Apple, Timothy D. Cook, has a prediction: the day will come when tablet devices like the Apple iPad outsell traditional personal computers.

His forecast has backing from a growing number of analysts and veteran technology industry executives, who contend that the torrid growth rates of the iPad, combined with tablet competition from the likes of Amazon.com and Microsoft, make a changing of the guard a question of when, not if.

Tablet sales are likely to get another jolt this week when Apple introduces its newest version of the iPad, which is expected to have a higher-resolution screen. With past iterations of the iPad and iPhone, Apple has made an art of refining the devices with better screens, faster processors and speedier network connections, as well as other bells and whistles — steadily broadening their audiences.

An Apple spokeswoman, Trudy Muller, declined to comment on an event the company is holding Wednesday in San Francisco that is expected to feature the new product.

Any surpassing of personal computers by tablets will be a case of the computer industry’s tail wagging the dog. The iPad, which seemed like a nice side business for Apple when it was introduced in 2010, has become a franchise for the company, accounting for $9.15 billion in revenue in the holiday quarter, or about 20 percent of Apple’s total revenue. The roughly 15 million iPads Apple sold in that period was more than twice the number it sold a year earlier.

In the fall, Amazon introduced the iPad’s first credible competitor in the $199 Kindle Fire. Although Amazon does not release sales figures for the device, some analysts estimate it sold about four million in the holiday quarter. Later this year, tablets from a variety of hardware manufacturers based on Windows 8, a new, touch-screen-friendly operating system from Microsoft, could further propel the market.

“Tablets are on fire, there’s no question about that,” said Brad Silverberg, a venture capitalist in Seattle at Ignition Partners and a former Microsoft executive, who hastened to add that he was speaking mainly of the iPad, which dominates current sales.

Tablets are not there yet. In 2011, PCs outsold tablets almost six to one, estimates Canalys, a technology research company. But that is still a significant change from 2010, the iPad’s first year on the market, when PCs outsold tablets 20 to one, according to Canalys. For the last two years, PC sales were flat, while iPad sales were booming. The Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook gave the market an additional lift over the holidays. Apple is banking on the tablet market. Its iPad brought in nearly 40 percent more revenue during the holidays than Apple’s own computer business, the Macintosh, did.

“From the first day it shipped, we thought — not just me, many of us thought at Apple — that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market, and it was just a matter of the time that it took for that to occur,” Mr. Cook of Apple said recently at a Goldman Sachs investor conference.

Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, estimated that Mr. Cook’s prediction would come true in 2017, but others contend tablets will be on top sooner than that.

For example, in a blog post on Friday, Horace Dediu, an analyst with Asymco in Finland, made a detailed argument that tablet sales would pass traditional PC sales in the fall of 2013. His projections rest heavily on an assumption that Apple will face more serious competition in the tablet market from Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Windows 8 and a wave of other devices based on Google’s Android, an operating system that has been mostly successful in the smartphone market.

Tim Bucher, an entrepreneur who has held senior positions at Apple, Microsoft and Dell, said tablet sales would “absolutely” pass those of PCs, a trend he argued would become even more pronounced as a younger, tablet-savvy generation ages.

“I think the older generation does not pick up on the way of interacting with the new devices,” Mr. Bucher said, contrasting older people with the next generation. “I don’t know how many YouTube videos there are out there showing everyone from babies to animals interacting with iPads.”

Where does that change leave the PC, the lowly machine that defined computing for decades?

At a technology conference in 2010, Steven P. Jobs, then Apple’s chief executive, heralded what he called the post-PC era and compared personal computers to the trucks that prevailed in the automobile industry until society began moving away from its agrarian roots. PCs are “still going to be around and have a lot of value,” said Mr. Jobs, who died in October. “But they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”

Even Mr. Cook in his recent speech said he was not predicting the demise of the PC industry, although he did say the iPad was cannibalizing some computer sales, more Windows PCs than the much smaller market for Macs. One category of PCs where that is especially true is netbooks, the inexpensive notebook computers that have had a steep decline in shipments in the last couple of years. “What the iPad is doing is taking growth away from the PC market that would have gone to a secondary or tertiary device,” said Mr. Dediu. “It’s not so much people are going to drop PCs. They’re going to add this additional device.”

Traditional PCs are not standing still. Boxy desktop computers are an ever-diminishing part of the PC business, while Apple’s MacBook Air and a category of Windows laptops with Intel processors called ultrabooks have reinvented traditional clamshell notebooks as superthin devices that turn on instantly like tablets.

Microsoft’s introduction of Windows 8 promises to shake up computer designs further. Microsoft and its hardware partners have shown laptops with keyboards that can be swiveled around or removed altogether, turning them into tablets.

“The tablet and PC markets are all going to blur,” said Tim Coulling, an analyst at Canalys. “We’re going to see a lot of form-factor innovation. We’ll be asking, What is a tablet and what is a traditional PC?”

Jeffrey Sachs se candidatea a la presidencia del Banco Mundial

My quest to help end poverty has taken me to more than 125 countries, from mega-city capitals to mountaintop villages, from rain forest settlements to nomadic desert camps. Now I hope it will take me to 18th and Pennsylvania, to the presidency of the World Bank. I am eager for this challenge.

Unlike previous World Bank presidents, I don’t come from Wall Street or U.S. politics. I am a practitioner of economic development, a scholar and a writer. My track record is to side with the poor and hungry, not with a corporate balance sheet or a government. Yet the solutions work for all — the poor, companies, governments and the rest of us — by creating a more prosperous, healthy and secure world.

I don’t seek the bank presidency because of its financial muscle. The bank’s net disbursements (disbursements minus repayments of funds from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development as well as the International Development Association) were about $16 billion in fiscal 2011. That’s a meaningful sum — but global markets easily eclipse the bank as providers of finance.

The World Bank is potentially far more decisive than a bank. At its best, the bank serves as a powerhouse of ideas and a meeting ground for key actors who together can solve daunting problems of poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation. The World Bank should create a truly international meeting of the minds (a point underscored by the fact that its highly esteemed lead economist is from China).

I know the power of that approach. In Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, I’ve been a trusted problem-solver for heads of state and impoverished villagers. My good fortune to see the world through the eyes of others, during 30 years working on some of the world’s most vexing problems, has helped me understand various regions’ challenges and the need for tailored solutions. There are reasons why what works well in the United States might not work in Nigeria, Ethiopia or India.

Yet the World Bank is adrift. It is spread too thin. It has taken on too many fads. It is too disconnected from critical areas of science and knowledge. Without incisive leadership, the bank has often seemed like just a bank. And unfortunately, Washington has backed at the helm bankers and politicians who lack the expertise to fulfill the institution’s unique mandate.

The World Bank presidency should not be a training ground in development. Its leader should come to office understanding the realities of flooded villages, drought-ridden farms, desperate mothers hovering over comatose, malaria-infected children, and teenage girls unable to pay high school tuition. More than knowing these realities, and caring to end them, the bank president should understand their causes and interconnected solutions.

Solutions to critical problems such as hunger, AIDS, malaria and extreme deprivation remain unaddressed because of vast gaps in knowledge, experience and power among those who ultimately need to work together. I work with scientists who have powerful answers but no public voice; bankers with ample finance but no clear idea of how to deploy it; business leaders with powerful technologies but no ways to reach the poor; civil society with deep community roots but no access to capital; and politicians who lack the time or experience to forge solutions.

Finding the graceful way forward, forging the networks that can create global change, should be the bank’s greatest role. I’ll stand on my record of helping to create those networks: to launch the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; to bring new support for the world’s poorest farmers so they can boost yields, production and income; to scale up the role of community health workers; to translate debt relief into poverty reduction; to link the poorest countries to global markets in support of exports for growth; to make mobile technologies the new edge of development practice; and to link climate science with solutions.

My role has been to help bring together vastly diverse communities of knowledge, power, and influence to see what can work in practice and then to help make it happen.

I am ready to lead the bank into a new era of problem-solving. I will work with industry, governments and civil society to bring broadband to clinics, schools and health workers, creating a revolution of knowledge, disease control, quality education and small businesses. I will work with agronomists, veterinary scientists, engineers and communities to build prosperity in impoverished and violence-ridden dry lands.

I will work with engineers and financiers to harness the solar power of the deserts in the service of hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who lack electricity. I will work with urban planners, architects and community organizations to help ensure that the developing world’s mega-cities are places to live and thrive.

This and much more is within our grasp. Properly led, the World Bank can build bridges among science, business, civil society and finance that will put sustainable solutions within reach. Let’s get started.

Los tomates y la educación. (Un artículo malito no +)

Hay dos maneras de ser idiota. El ser humano ha demostrado plena competencia en ambos. Ha explorado sus extremos, pero en su movimiento pendular no ha sabido encontrar el centro. Nos referimos – como no – al tema del mercado.   ¿Cuáles son las dos expresiones de la estupidez?  La primera es negarlo. Se ha intentado muchas veces en diferentes épocas y lugares. Se captura al público, por voluntad o por la fuerza, con argumentos como el de la bondad y la justicia, de que debieran estar todos los bienes a disposición de quien los necesite y en una cantidad y calidad adecuada. Todos sabemos a dónde conduce aquello: la escasez, el mercado negro, la corrupción. Al final, no existe ni justicia ni nada. Un desastre.   Obviamente, la segunda estupidez, acaso más voluminosa aun, es dejar al mercado como árbitro regulador de todas las necesidades humanas. Cuando se pasa de la primera estupidez a la segunda, todos los problemas parecen solucionarse como por arte de magia. Donde no había pollos, ni azúcar, ni harina, ni carne, aparecen de pronto todos estos productos en abundancia. Más caros, desde luego, pero los hambrientos  se sienten en Jauja y no les importa pagar unos pesos, o rupias, o dinares, o dólares más.   Pero tal como el primer desvarío humano produce los males ya citados, el paso a la segunda sinrazón tendrá también sus consecuencias.  El motor del sistema de libre mercado es el dinero, el lucro. Preguntarán sus defensores (sí, todavía los hay y muchos): ¿Qué tiene de malo una justa recompensa por los servicios ofrecidos? No cabe sino responder: Nada.  Todos trabajamos para obtener una recompensa en dinero que nos permita vivir. Ya sea que conduzcamos el metro, enseñemos en la escuela, hagamos pan o diseñemos casas. Nada de malo hay en desempeñar una función rentada. Pero ocurre que cuando el mercado es el único emperador que rige nuestras vidas, aquella sana ambición se transforma en malsana codicia. Esta última es una enfermedad mental que provoca un ansia de adquirir dinero sin límite alguno. Más allá de toda racionalidad. El codicioso no tiene freno, ninguna cantidad es suficiente. Pasa sin darse cuenta el punto en que sus bienes son suficientes para dar una vida de reyes a varias generaciones sucesivas.  Pero el enfermo no piensa en aquello, inmerso en su actividad lúdica que consiste en tener más que su vecino, sus familiares, sus amigos, si le queda alguno. Nada lo satisface, nada lo hace feliz. Como todo enfermo mental, el sujeto dominado por la codicia es profundamente desgraciado. Pierde sus contactos humanos, su autoestima no se sustenta más que en el volumen de su cuenta bancaria. Paulatinamente se va alejando de las emociones, de la risa, del goce simple de una buena comida. Paradójicamente, se siente inseguro, incomprendido y mal querido.   Pues bien, en ese tipo de personas hemos confiado para que administren nuestra economía. Obviamente, sus parámetros no tienen ninguna relación con nuestra lógica. Destaca en su curioso léxico el verbo optimizar. RAE lo define como la mejor manera de realizar una actividad. El común de las personas entenderán por ello una manera que logre el mejor resultado con el menor costo. Los adictos del mercado y en fases avanzadas de contagio con el virus de la codicia entenderán otra  cosa. Optimizar es obtener una mayor ganancia de dinero a cualquier costo. Para ello, son capaces de envenenar a las personas con toxinas,  desarrollar remedios que causan más enfermedad que salud, crear vicios para vender sus productos, y toda otra suerte de tropelías para lograr su único y solitario fin, que es el de engrosar sus billeteras.   Pero volvamos  a un tema muy de moda en el mundo entero: la educación. Se trata de un bien inmaterial, difícil de medir y cuyos frutos sólo se verán con los años, cuando sea demasiado tarde para hacer efectiva una hipotética garantía. Nadie puede ir a la edad de cincuenta años a su escuela y exigir una indemnización  por la mala calidad de lo que le entregaron como educación. No funciona como el hecho de vender tomates en la feria y competir con otros tomates en precio, calidad, sabor y tamaño. Crear un sistema educativo que cubra las necesidades del país es un trabajo conjunto de toda la sociedad, ejecutado por sus mentes más brillantes, personas de probidad e intenciones demostradas a lo largo de una vida. Mujeres y hombres sabios que estén más allá de toda sospecha. Aunque escasos, en toda sociedad se encuentran individuos de esa especie. También se debe recurrir desde luego, a referentes de otros países y de otras épocas.   Un trabajo arduo y extenso que debe contar con aportes generosos, paciencia infinita y un cierto rigor en la hora de tomar decisiones. Algo que hemos postergado demasiado tiempo y que nuestros estudiantes han sacado a la luz. Hemos encontrado nuestros problemas y nuestras contradicciones envueltas en telarañas y olor de moho y humedad.  Recuperarla es una tarea impostergable y de primera prioridad.   Lamentablemente, quienes nos gobiernan parecen haber tomado otra senda. Adoradores del mercado, han desechado toda insinuación que se refiera a sus evidentes carencias. Con insistencia majadera, quieren confiar al mercado la solución de los graves problemas que acusa nuestra educación. Han hecho mofa de nuestros temores, han ignorado nuestras razones.   De manera que tendremos una educación optimizada en el lucro, que  es su principal fin. Su prohibición se circunnavegará para burlar las mínimas trabas legales. La mugre se barrerá bajo la alfombra. Nuestra educación seguirá cuesta abajo. Muchos de nuestros jóvenes no sabrán leer, y si aprenden a deletrear, no serán capaces de comprender un texto básico. Su ignorancia los hundirá  cada día más en la miseria. La única prioridad es la de terminar con las protestas y sacar a la gente de la calle. Para lograrlo, se está dispuesto a asumir el costo de una baja de intereses bancarios, algunas becas suplementarias, dos o tres retoques estéticos al sistema que lo hagan menos odioso y la creación de un fondo fantasma que se desvanece en su fatuidad.   En el interior del alma de nuestro país habita una pena, una enorme frustración, una sensación de despojo. Cuando se está  muy al oeste de la vida, en la proximidad del ocaso, se puede refugiar uno en los recuerdos de días más tibios y brisas más amistosas. Cuando se es joven, este dolor se traduce en rabia, sensación de impotencia y rebeldía. El país enferma y se torna febril. Agoniza el diálogo, aflora el fanatismo. Las posiciones se hacen irreconciliables, se rompen los vidrios ante el estridente ruido de la ira.   Tenemos que aprender que el mercado es el mejor sistema para producir, transportar y vender tomates. Insuperable. No cabe discusión alguna. Pero es absolutamente incapaz de producir y repartir educación o salud. Ciego en su afán de ganancias, nos hundirá en un negro océano de ignorancia y enfermedad.     Os deseo sabiduría, fervor y paciencia.  Y fuerza suficiente para verterla en generosidad.  

Over-regulated America

United States' economy Over-regulated America The home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation Feb 18th 2012 | from the print edition The Economist AMERICANS love to laugh at ridiculous regulations. A Florida law requires vending-machine labels to urge the public to file a report if the label is not there. The Federal Railroad Administration insists that all trains must be painted with an “F” at the front, so you can tell which end is which. Bureaucratic busybodies in Bethesda, Maryland, have shut down children’s lemonade stands because the enterprising young moppets did not have trading licences. The list goes hilariously on. But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal. Consider the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. Its aim was noble: to prevent another financial crisis. Its strategy was sensible, too: improve transparency, stop banks from taking excessive risks, prevent abusive financial practices and end “too big to fail” by authorising regulators to seize any big, tottering financial firm and wind it down. This newspaper supported these goals at the time, and we still do. But Dodd-Frank is far too complex, and becoming more so. At 848 pages, it is 23 times longer than Glass-Steagall, the reform that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. Worse, every other page demands that regulators fill in further detail. Some of these clarifications are hundreds of pages long. Just one bit, the “Volcker rule”, which aims to curb risky proprietary trading by banks, includes 383 questions that break down into 1,420 subquestions. Hardly anyone has actually read Dodd-Frank, besides the Chinese government and our correspondent in New York (see article). Those who have struggle to make sense of it, not least because so much detail has yet to be filled in: of the 400 rules it mandates, only 93 have been finalised. So financial firms in America must prepare to comply with a law that is partly unintelligible and partly unknowable. Flaming water-skis Dodd-Frank is part of a wider trend. Governments of both parties keep adding stacks of rules, few of which are ever rescinded. Republicans write rules to thwart terrorists, which make flying in America an ordeal and prompt legions of brainy migrants to move to Canada instead. Democrats write rules to expand the welfare state. Barack Obama’s health-care reform of 2010 had many virtues, especially its attempt to make health insurance universal. But it does little to reduce the system’s staggering and increasing complexity. Every hour spent treating a patient in America creates at least 30 minutes of paperwork, and often a whole hour. Next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals may claim reimbursement will rise from 18,000 to 140,000. There are nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots, and three relating to burns from flaming water-skis. Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying (eg, a proposed code for nurseries in Colorado that specifies how many crayons each box must contain) to the delusional (eg, the conceit of Dodd-Frank that you can anticipate and ban every nasty trick financiers will dream up in the future). Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the shrewd can abuse with impunity. The other force that makes American laws complex is lobbying. The government’s drive to micromanage so many activities creates a huge incentive for interest groups to push for special favours. When a bill is hundreds of pages long, it is not hard for congressmen to slip in clauses that benefit their chums and campaign donors. The health-care bill included tons of favours for the pushy. Congress’s last, failed attempt to regulate greenhouse gases was even worse. Complexity costs money. Sarbanes-Oxley, a law aimed at preventing Enron-style frauds, has made it so difficult to list shares on an American stockmarket that firms increasingly look elsewhere or stay private. America’s share of initial public offerings fell from 67% in 2002 (when Sarbox passed) to 16% last year, despite some benign tweaks to the law. A study for the Small Business Administration, a government body, found that regulations in general add $10,585 in costs per employee. It’s a wonder the jobless rate isn’t even higher than it is. A plea for simplicity Democrats pay lip service to the need to slim the rulebook—Mr Obama’s regulations tsar is supposed to ensure that new rules are cost-effective. But the administration has a bias towards overstating benefits and underestimating costs (see article). Republicans bluster that they will repeal Obamacare and Dodd-Frank and abolish whole government agencies, but give only a sketchy idea of what should replace them. America needs a smarter approach to regulation. First, all important rules should be subjected to cost-benefit analysis by an independent watchdog. The results should be made public before the rule is enacted. All big regulations should also come with sunset clauses, so that they expire after, say, ten years unless Congress explicitly re-authorises them. More important, rules need to be much simpler. When regulators try to write an all-purpose instruction manual, the truly important dos and don’ts are lost in an ocean of verbiage. Far better to lay down broad goals and prescribe only what is strictly necessary to achieve them. Legislators should pass simple rules, and leave regulators to enforce them. Would this hand too much power to unelected bureaucrats? Not if they are made more accountable. Unreasonable judgments should be subject to swift appeal. Regulators who make bad decisions should be easily sackable. None of this will resolve the inevitable difficulties of regulating a complex modern society. But it would mitigate a real danger: that regulation may crush the life out of America’s economy.

Opinión en The Guardian

Garzón’s extraordinary contribution to law As human rights lawyers, we express our grave concern at the decision of the Spanish supreme court to ban Judge Baltasar Garzón from judicial office for 11 years for having authorised the wiretapping of communications between detainees and lawyers in the course of an investigation into high-profile crime and political corruption involving members of Spain’s ruling party (Report, 14 February). Irrespective of human rights implications of wiretapping in such circumstances, we believe there are serious grounds for believing that Judge Garzón has been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Since he was appointed magistrate of the Spanish Audiencia Nacional in 1988, Judge Garzón has fearlessly and successfully investigated significant cases relating to drug-trafficking, terrorism (including state-sponsored death-squads used by the Spanish government), organised crime, money-laundering and political corruption, putting his and his family’s lives at risk. His contribution to international human rights law has been extraordinary. A pioneer of the concept of universal justice, he ordered the arrest of General Pinochet in 1998, and investigated the Chilean and Argentinean dictatorships for crimes against humanity. In 2006, he declared himself competent to investigate alleged crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime. The Spanish supreme court prosecuted him for this in 2009. This fact, coupled with the limited changes undergone by the Spanish judiciary since Franco, make it difficult not to believe that Judge Garzón is the victim of a witch-hunt. His case raises concerns for the rule of law. Judge Garzón has consistently acted without fear or favour to advance international human rights law. His is a great loss not only to Spain, but to the whole system of international justice. We fervently hope he will succeed in vindicating his name. Albert Llussà Solicitor and advocat, Professor Ray Murphy Irish Centre for Human Rights, Vinodh Jaichand Professor of human rights, University of the Witwatersrand and 26 others

Europe’s rescue plan (Economist)

YOU can understand the self-congratulation. In the early hours of October 27th, after marathon talks, the leaders of the euro zone agreed on a “comprehensive package” to dispel the crisis that has been plaguing the euro zone for almost two years. They boosted a fund designed to shore up the euro zone’s troubled sovereign borrowers, drafted a plan to restore Europe’s banks, radically cut Greece’s burden of debt, and set out some ways to put the governance of the euro on a proper footing. After a summer overshadowed by the threat of financial collapse, they had shown the markets who was boss.

Yet in the light of day, the holes in the rescue plan are plain to see. The scheme is confused and unconvincing. Confused, because its financial engineering is too clever by half and vulnerable to unintended consequences. Unconvincing, because too many details are missing and the scheme at its core is not up to the job of safeguarding the euro.

This is the euro zone’s third comprehensive package this year. It is unlikely to be its last.

Words are cheap…

The summit’s most notable achievement was to forge an agreement to write down the Greek debt held by the private sector by 50%. This newspaper has long argued for such a move. Yet an essential counterpart to the Greek writedown is a credible firewall around heavily indebted yet solvent borrowers such as Italy. That is the only way of restoring confidence and protecting European banks’ balance-sheets, thus ensuring that they can get on with the business of lending.

Unfortunately the euro zone’s firewall is the weakest part of the deal (see article). Europe’s main rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), does not have enough money to withstand a run on Italy and Spain. Germany and the European Central Bank (ECB) have ruled out the only source of unlimited support: the central bank itself. The euro zone’s northern creditor governments have refused to put more of their own money into the pot.

Instead they have come up with two schemes to stretch the EFSF. One is to use it to insure the first losses if any new bonds are written down. In theory, this means that the rescue fund’s power could be magnified several times. But in practice, such “credit enhancement” may not yield much. Bond markets may be suspicious of guarantees made by countries that would themselves be vulnerable if their over-indebted neighbours suffered turmoil.

Under the second scheme, the EFSF would create a set of special-purpose vehicles financed by other investors, including sovereign-wealth funds. Again, there are reasons to doubt whether this will work. Each vehicle seems to be dedicated to a single country, so risk is not spread. And why should China or Brazil invest a lot in them when Germany is holding back from putting in more money?

Together, these schemes are supposed to extend the value of the EFSF to €1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) or more. Sadly, that looks more like an aspiration than a prediction. And because the EFSF bears the first losses, its capital is at greater risk of being wiped out than under a loan programme. This could taint France, which finances the rescue fund and has recently seen its AAA credit rating come under threat. Since the EFSF depends partly on France for its own credit rating, a French downgrade could undermine the rescue fund just when it is most needed.

If the foundations of the firewall are too shallow, then the bank plan plunges too deep. By the end of June 2012, banks are expected to establish a core-capital ratio of 9%. In principle, that is laudable. But if banks have months to reach their target, they can avoid raising new equity, which would dilute their shareholders' stakes, and instead move to the required ratio by shrinking their balance-sheets. That would be a terrible outcome: by depriving Europe’s economy of credit, it would worsen the downturn.

Then there is Greece. Although the size of the writedown is welcome, euro-zone leaders are desperate for it to be “voluntary”. That is because a default would trigger the bond-insurance contracts called credit-default swaps (CDSs). The fear is that a default could lead to chaos, because the CDS market is untested. That is true, but this implausibly large “voluntary” writedown will lead investors in other European sovereign bonds to doubt whether CDSs offer much protection. So while the EFSF scheme is designed to offer insurance to bondholders, the European leaders’ insistence that the Greek writedown be voluntary will make euro-zone debt harder to insure.

…but trust is nowhere to be found

Europe has got to this point because German politicians are convinced that without market pressure the euro zone’s troubled economies will slacken their efforts at reform (see article). Despite a list of promises presented to the summit by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister (see article), Germany has good reason to worry. But it needs to concentrate on institutional ways of disciplining profligate governments, rather than starving the rescue package of funds. As it is, this deal at best fails to solve the euro crisis; at worst it may even make it worse. As the shortcomings of each component become clear, investors’ fears will surely return, bond yields will rise and banks’ funding problems will worsen.

Yet again, disaster will loom. And yet again, the ECB will end up staving it off. Fortunately, Mario Draghi, the ECB’s incoming president, made it clear this week that he realises that is his job. But therein lies the tragedy of this summit. An ECB pledge of unlimited backing for solvent governments would have had a far better chance of solving the crisis months ago, and remains the best option today.

At this summit Europe’s leaders had hoped to prove that their resolve to back the euro was greater than the markets’ capacity to bet against it. For all the backslapping and brave words, they have once again failed. There will be more crises, and further summits. By the time they settle on a solution that works, the costs will have risen still further.