Financial heavyweights from both West and East urged the beleagured Eurozone to create a trans-national treasury as a necessary step toward calming its escalating sovereign debt crisis. Legendary U.S. investor George Soros and China Investment Corporation President Gao Xiqing agreed during a seminar at the IMF-World Bank annual meeting that closer fiscal union is needed to maintain the euro’s viability. “The alternative is a break-down of the world financial system as we know it,” Soros warned. “You can’t unscramble the omelet now that all assets and liabilities are in the common currency.”

But Soros and Gao differed in their level of optimism that the 17 nations sharing the euro can make essential reforms in time. “I’m quite confident that under the pressure of the crisis the new treasury will develop,” Soros said. Gao was less sanguine. “The fact that something means the end of the world does not mean it isn’t going to happen,” he quipped. “We all know we need a fiscal union to solve the current problems. So why don’t we have it?”....

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