@Setanta,
Setanta wrote:
You're an idiot. There is no good reason to take your idiot word over that of seasoned financial analysts.
Seasoned finacial analysts have speculated that the Germans will kill the EU project by abandoning the Euro..
Quote:The warning signs are mounting, and fresh news is adding to the gloom every day. Britain's financial watchdog has instructed banks to brace for a possible break-up of the euro zone. British currency trader CLS Bank is reportedly conducting stress tests to prepare for this worst-case scenario.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski made a dramatic appeal to Germany on Monday to prevent a collapse of the currency union, saying: "We are standing on the edge of a precipice."
German investors are jettisoning derivatives on a large scale because they have lost confidence in the instruments. For the first time, it appears, people across Europe regard the downfall of the euro as a real possibility.
Is it really for the first time, though? In fact, scenarios for the euro's breakup are older than the currency itself. At the end of 1998, Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott published a paper called "When the Euro Falls Apart." He put the chances of the euro failing at around 10 percent.
Today, that's a real prospect. According to Mark Cliffe, the chief economist of ING Bank, "even the most ardent euro admirer must concede that the probability of countries leaving or the breakup of the euro zone is no longer zero."
The economist Nouriel Roubini, known as "Dr. Doom" because he predicted the 2008 financial crisis, recently put the likelihood of the euro zone collapsing at 45 percent. But such expert forecasts sound abstract to most people.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,800700,00.html
You sir are a brain dead idiot....your mind closed for new business decades ago...
@hawkeye10,
You're the brain dead idiot. Your response is a non-sequitur to comments on the German export sector. The point is exactly that the collapese of the Euro would hurt German exports. When your currency becomes stronger relative to your trading partners, it hurts your exports because they become relatively more expensive in the countries you trade with. At the same time, their exports to you become more attactive to your consumers because they become relative less expensive. This is economics 101, and you just make a blatant fool of yourself when you show that you don't understand such a basic equation.
@CalamityJane,
CalamityJane wrote:
All rhetoric, Andy. Merkel told them already that she's not willing to re-negotiate bills that were voted on already and she's not willing to change her course.
You think that was
not rhetoric? Announcing your unwillingness to negotiate is a routine negotiation tactic.
and now a polite post from me, about politicians (well polite language anyway)
one wonders how posterity will judge these posteriors on their attitudes and reactions to austerity
So, who really thought that Europeans could really devote themselves to a common identity of "European," and be willing to sacrifice for citizens of other countries that have separate identities?
In my own opinion, while the U.S. on election night is depicted as blue and red states, I believe Europe is better depicted by the color purple to connote a feeling of royal entitlement. Did anyone ever hear the fable about the leopard not changing its spots?
One has to feel sorry for Europe today, since there are too few Jews in Europe to blame now for the economy. Just my Jewish perspective.
@Walter Hinteler,
Only Foofie could turn a thread about French and Greek elections and the resultant Euro-crisis, into how the Jews get blamed for everything. Do you think he has a persecution complex?
For anyone interested in the voice of reason there was a brilliant editorial in today's guardian.
Quote:It was not as if there were wild celebrations in France on Sunday night – certainly nothing to match the euphoria that accompanied François Mitterrand's election in 1981. But a miserable morning after the night before arrived on cue nonetheless – Greek shares crashed as its parties scrambled to form a new government; Spanish and Italian bond yields were once again on the rise; there was talk of an impending shakeup in the Spanish banks. It does not take much for the crisis started by over-leveraged banks and financial speculation to come leaping back to centre stage. The fact that the policy for dealing with it has been such a disaster – sending unemployment figures through the roof and magically increasing budget deficits – only hastens the final act of this drama: the possibility that Greece will default, leave the euro and increase the contagion in Spain and Italy.
Faced with turmoil on this scale, arranging the place settings for François Hollande's first tête à tête with Angela Merkel will shortly pale into insignificance. The two leaders will soon have bigger things to talk about. As things stand, the two will have little difficulty forming a common agenda. Ms Merkel does not do U-turns. She does handbrake ones – as she has already performed on military intervention in Afghanistan, state subventions and nuclear power. Even if it's already sown into the fabric of EU legislation, Ms Merkel's fiscal pact will not have much meaning unless it has France's backing too. So whether it is renegotiated, modified or supplemented with a growth pact is a matter of words. The European Central Bank's response will have to change, and change radically. For his part, Mr Hollande is a pragmatist, who has given himself room on the specifics of the deal that has to be cut. Almost a year after she stopped her nuclear programme, Ms Merkel has done nothing about ensuring how the power gap will be filled. Mr Hollande will close one nuclear power station in Alsace, but open another in Normandy. A deal is there to be done on investment in alternative energy supply and making French and German buildings energy efficient. The two leaders would not be so much be pushing at an open door, as falling through one.
This is not to deny the existence of deep ideological differences on debt. It will take an earthquake to overcome German fear of inflation and its resistance to increasing consumer spending. Yet these are both ways of averting a European-wide depression. Germany's export boom is dependent on its European market. There is only so long that Germany can be the only economy in Europe cracking open the champagne, while its customers drink from a standpipe. In any case, the inflationary pressures are mounting. The German car unions, which fear two more plants may close in Europe, are already champing at the bit for increased wage rises. All these factors, and not least the shifting sands on which Ms Merkel's own coalition rests, will push the German and French leaders into each other's arms.
The larger question is whether all this is too late. Mr Hollande could jump through all the hoops he has to go through in the next few months, including securing a working majority in parliament in June, and still face a crisis to save the euro, from which the weakened French economy would be unable to insulate itself. Once again it comes back to Greece, Ms Merkel's achilles heel and the nemesis of all fiscal consolidation measures. There is still a large Greek majority for staying within the euro, even if the parties who put their name to the bailout will now be hard pushed to form a government. What that contradiction means is that the EU-IMF programme will have to be renegotiated.
Mr Hollande may have arrived at the right moment. If he fails to turn the policy around, austerity will lead not just to economic collapse but, in parts of Europe, a social one too. The arrival of a pragmatic pro-European socialist could be the last chance to save the euro and the European project from neoliberal dogma that would have buried both.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/07/european-elections-centre-right
@Thomas,
No! I think she meant it and we'll see in a few days after they've met. Optimists do predict a "Merollande" union that will be much stronger than the "Merkozy" one was. It can happen since Merkel's roots are socialistic, and I am certain she appreciates Hollande being a pragmatic.
@izzythepush,
You're right about Foofie - he's the perpetual victim, played to the nines. You get that way when tunnel vision has set in.
---
The article of the Guardian is interesting, but in my opinion puts too much pressure on Hollande and too much power in his position. I doubt that he'll be able to turn things around, pragmatism won't help with Greece either. Frankly, I am not so sure that any policy - no matter what it entails - will help Greece. A corrupt government is a corrupt government, new elections won't halt the fiscal demise.
@CalamityJane,
CalamityJane wrote: It can happen since Merkel's roots are socialistic, and I am certain she appreciates Hollande being a pragmatic.
Both are centrists - just on two different sides of that centre.
@CalamityJane,
CalamityJane wrote:Frankly, I am not so sure that any policy - no matter what it entails - will help Greece. A corrupt government is a corrupt government, new elections won't halt the fiscal demise.
There'll be another (new) election,
wetten?
@Walter Hinteler,
Of course there will be Walter - once they filled up the non-committed candidates with enough Ouzo so they agree to be elected.
@Walter Hinteler,
Die hard socialist Mitterrand later on swayed towards the right too...
For whatever reason a socialist has won paramount power in France.
On of the few things to be admired as respects France is that it is a place where a socialist will lay unqualified claim to the title and no one will pathetically argue that it doesn't stick.
In time we will see if the socialist model of tax and spend can revive the moribund French economy for more that an few months.
When it doesn't though we can certainly expect socialists and their skef-denied kin in America to bleat about how their policies weren't given enough time or public money.
Better that socialism is proven to be bankrupt in France than America.
@CalamityJane,
Even though it's probably not been noted over there, there has been a dramatic swing to the left in the UK as well. We've just had council elections, and Labour has made huge gains at the expence of both the Conservative and Liberals. We're still three years away from a general election, but the government is clearly rattled.
@Finn dAbuzz,
It wasn't Socialism that caused the global meltdown, it was the ridiculous policies of George W Bush and the fat cats on Wall Street that did that.
People will say that Mitterand was not a socialist or that Hollande is not a socialist because of a wildly unrealistic and fuzzy definition of socialism which equates it with Soviet-style communism. Europe already has social democracy, and has had increasingly socialist institutions since the end of the second world war. As has been pointed out, a good deal of their problems have arisen from the irresponsible, unfettered greed of American financial speculators. It's hard on their economies when the largest consumer economy in the world is no longer buying so many of their goods, or coming to visit their antique playgrounds. Greece is an extreme example, and certainly not a type for European social democracy. The Greeks cheat on their taxes as their favorite national outdoor sport, and then riot in the streets because their government doesn't have the revenues to support their unrealistically generous social welfare system.
You can only say that Mitterand was not a socialist, and Hollande is not a socialist by comparing them to the old Soviet Union. Socialism is alive in Europe, and if it is not entirely well, that's as much the fault of American capitalist greed as it is any fault one can reasonably ascribe to socialism.
@Setanta,
The real concern is the rise of the far right. Marie Le Pen's National Front and the neo -Nazi Greek Golden Dawn party both did very well.
The austerity package hasn't worked, there needs to be a new focus on growth if we want to avoid the politics of the 1930s.
