How To Look After Food During The British Summer

Japanese household goods manufacturer Panasonic has come up with a timely solution to the perennial - and currently high-profile - problem of how to cope with the British "summer". To keep fruit and veg fresh in the home, it offers a fridge fitted with green and blue LEDs which fool the produce into thinking it is still outside. Photosynthesis continues under this synthetic sunlight, preserving

At £700 a pop the fridge is not exactly a cheap way of preserving something you would like to see survive. But it is considerably cheaper to extend the useful life of a cauliflower than that of a Spanish bank. Euro zone finance ministers have agreed to release the first instalment - €30bn - of the €100bn promised two weeks earlier by EU leaders to recapitalise Spain's ailing financial institutions. It was not an easy decision to make, especially for Germany's Chancellor Merkel, but it was hailed as a breakthrough at the time by EU Commission President Herman Van Rompuy.

Investors are sceptical. Most of the EU crisis summit meetings over the last couple of years have delivered euro-preserving breakthroughs, even if that is not precisely how they were billed at the time. Yet still the single currency stumbles from one fudge to the next. It must be observed, in fairness, that Mrs Merkel's endorsement of the use of bailout money to help banks directly opens the door more widely to a wholesale resolution of the sovereign debt crisis. Even so, there is still a long road ahead and the tolls could be expensive.

Arguably of course, throwing money at a problem is not necessarily the only way of solving it. Those lacking the £700 for a high-tech photosynthetic refrigerator could instead draw some hot water from the tap. In his book "Modernist Cuisine", Nathan Myhrvold advocates covering strawberries with water at 60°C for a few seconds before drying them and putting them in the fridge. They will last several days longer than untreated fruit.

By the same token, the €500bn in the European Stability Mechanism's kitty might not need to be spent if investors warm to the euro. If EU leaders can persuade the world that they are serious about preserving their currency, and that they will not allow sovereign At the moment though, they prefer the safety of German, Japanese, American and, yes, British government bonds. It is for that reason that the euro is close to its lowest level against the yen in 12 years and sterling/euro is at its highest point since 2008.

The euro looks less bad against the US dollar. Although it is towards the bottom of its five-year range, and within half a dozen cents of its early 2006 low, the euro shows no sign - at the moment - of returning to the very low levels it experienced in its early days. One factor in that resilience is a degree of concern among investors that the United States might also be heading for a showdown.

If November's election perpetuates the split between Congress and the White House, such that it remains impossible to agree a proper budget, automatic spending cuts and tax rises will come into effect. The original idea of this automated process was to scare the Democrats and the Republicans into a compromise with one another. That still hasn't happened and if there is no compromise by the end of the year some analysts predict the US economy will "fall off a fiscal cliff".

For the moment, however, it is still the euro that commands the attention of investors. They don't like it much but they are waiting to see if anything serious comes of the Brussels Breakthrough. The impasse could go on for months.

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