The Great Debate UK
from The Great Debate:
Is France closing for business?
Arnaud Montebourg, a member of the French parliament, has a problem with the iPhone. He thinks consumers in France should pay more for it than they already do. Why? Because, he says, the iPhone is made by “exploited” laborers in China who are taking away the jobs of French workers and the best way to redress that is by putting in place trade barriers and taxes that will stop “excessive imports.”
Then there’s Renault in Morocco. When the French automaker opened a new factory in Tangiers in February, Montebourg decried the move as “a humiliation for French industry,” because Renault hadn’t built the plant in France even though the French state is an important shareholder.
Montebourg’s protectionist stance – he calls it “deglobalization" – is well known in his native France, but now he’s unleashing it on the world. In the new Socialist government, Montebourg is the “minister for productive recovery,” a job whose precise perimeter remains hazy but that appears to cover large swaths of industry and commerce. His first official statement was an announcement that he intends to lean on companies including Shell, ArcelorMittal, Unilever and Peugeot, that are planning to close facilities or lay off workers in France.
It’s still too early to tell how adept President François Hollande will be in steering the French economy through these difficult times, but already there are some early indications – including the appointment of Montebourg – that the business climate in France may be about to change for international companies.
Hollande’s programme marks return of the Ancien Régime
By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.
Seeing the dewy-eyed kids at the post-election celebrations in Paris, I couldn’t help thinking how crazy it all was. The youngsters were plainly convinced they had a president to take their country forward into the new dawn - after all, he campaigned under the slogan “Le changement, c’est maintenant”. In reality, Francois Hollande’s programme is unambiguously regressive, with its stop-the-world-we-want-to-get-off determination to go in the opposite direction to every other country, its refusal to countenance any erosion of the country’s ruinously expensive welfare state and its complacent confidence that there is nothing to stop France carrying on as before. What better place to greet the return of the Ancien Régime than the Place de la Bastille?
Of course, the new President promises that he is going to balance the budget in 2017 with the familiar prayer of tax-and-spend governments the world over: “Oh Lord, make me solvent! – but not yet…” Now, even allowing for the fact that France’s deficit is only 5 percent of GDP, it still means he is going to keep on borrowing until the national debt is more or less as large as GDP. (Remember: a balanced budget means no need for more loans, so the national debt is constant. To start paying off its debts, a country needs a surplus, something France has not managed for more than forty years).
What would markets and Merkel make of Hollande?
It’s time I came out of the closet and ‘fessed up. My friends, colleagues and family all know anyway, so ……OK, here goes.
All my adult life I have been and remain a Francophile. It is a perversion I can neither defend nor explain.
Put the euro zone out of its misery
By Laurence Copeland. The author is a professor of finance at Cardiff University Business School. The opinions expressed are his own.
Let me make a wild guess – just a hunch, a vague feeling, the kind you get when you hear a football club chairman say “the manager has my full support”. My forecast is that the IMF monitors currently poring over the Italian government’s books will uncover a black hole somewhere, probably one big enough to swallow the euro zone, and the discovery will leave them as shocked as Captain Renault when he found there was gambling going on at Rick’s Bar in Casablanca.
Capitalism and democracy under threat from euro zone crisis
By Laurence Copeland. The author is a professor of finance at Cardiff University Business School. The opinions expressed are his own.
It takes quite a lot to make me feel sorry for politicians, especially the European variety, but I must say that Nicholas Sarkozy and particularly Angela Merkel have a right to be livid at the news that the Greek government now proposes to hold a referendum on whether they will agree to be given another gigantic dollop of aid. Having only reached agreement (of a very vague kind) at last week’s summit in the early hours of the morning, you can imagine how the French and German leaders must have felt when they discovered that their marathon negotiating sessions may all have been in vain. It seems the Greeks are now too wary of foreigners bearing gifts to accept their largesse without weeks or months of prior deliberation and debate.
The euro zone marriage is over
By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.
Under the Arc de Triomphe, tourists can gaze up at the engraved list of Napoleon’s great victories: Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram… Perhaps a similar triumphal arch should be built in Brussels to commemorate the string of victories won by a tiny band of heroic Eurocrats over the mass of their combined electorates: Rome, Maastricht, Lisbon, Wroclaw, and now Berlin, where, to nobody’s surprise, the integrationists in the Bundestag have easily seen off the opposition to their plan to bolster the EFSF. Cue the now-familiar backslapping in Europe after each of their knife-edge victories over the forces of democracy.
The starting point for these Eurocrats/integrationists is that the popular will is simply an obstacle on the road to the ultimate destination of a United States of Europe. Whenever they encounter one of these inconvenient roadblocks, they fume, argue among themselves about the merits of alternative routes until they finally swerve triumphantly round the obstacle, congratulating each other for their ingenuity and skill.
from Global News Journal:
UNsensational? Five more years of Ban Ki-moon
U.S. Senators Joe Lieberman and John Kerry look on as U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon addresses reporters in Washington. REUTERS/Molley Riley
It's hard to find a delegate to the United Nations who despises U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. But it's even harder to find someone who thinks he has the gravitas and charisma of his Nobel Peace Prize-winning predecessor Kofi Annan, who invoked the wrath of the previous U.S. administration when he called the 2003 invasion of Iraq "illegal." As one senior Western official, who declined to be identified, said about Ban: "It's not as if he's lightning in a bottle, but we can live with him."
from James Saft:
Pension savers get the boot
From Dublin to Paris to Budapest to inside those brown UPS trucks delivering holiday packages, it has been a tough few weeks for savers and retirees.
Moves by the Irish, French and Hungarian governments, and by the famous delivery company, showed that in the post-crisis world retirees, present and future, will be paying much of the price and taking on more of the risk.
from MacroScope:
Did France cause The Great Depression?
Economist Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College has stirred up a bit of a fuss by concluding in some academic research that it was France, not the United States, that was most to blame for The Great Depression.
Irwin's theory, in a paper posted here by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is that France created an artificial shortage of gold reserves when it increased its share from 7 percent to 27 percent between 1927 and 1932. Because major currencies at the time were backed by gold under the Gold Standard, this put other countries under enormous deflationary pressure.
from FaithWorld:
Strong support to outlaw face veils as France prepares to vote ban
France's plan to ban full face veils, which comes up for a vote in the National Assembly on Tuesday, enjoys 82% popular support in the country, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. Its neighbours also approve -- 71% of those polled in Germany, 62% in Britain and 59% in Spain agreed that there should be laws prohibiting the Muslim veils known as niqabs and burqas in public.
(Photo: French woman fined for wearing a niqab while driving outside court in Nantes June 28, 2010/Stephane Mahe)
The poll, conducted from April 7 to May 8, did not range further afield, but reports from other countries show support there as well. The lower house of the Belgian parliament has voted for a ban, which should be approved by the Senate after the summer. In the Netherlands, several bills to ban full veils in certain sectors such as schools and public service are in preparation. Switzerland's justice minister has suggested the cantons there should pass partial bans but make exceptions for visiting Muslim tourists (the wives of rich sheikhs visiting their bankers in Zurich or Geneva?)
