The new plan put forward today by Merkel and French President Sarkozy was more about austerity and less or nothing about helping, to the chagrin of the gloomsters.
Helping here should be recognized for what it is, a euphemism for bailing out. Critics say, as they nearly always do, setting and holding fast to strict rules won't help the peripheral countries pay off their bad debts. This in our opinion is more of the same linguistic currency debasers love to use to get their way. Many of them are just trying to protect and, in some cases, to save their carcases. Others are ones who helped create the mess and now pretend that they know the way out.
Meanwhile, the US Fed held rates steady as she goes causing as least one pundit to argue that the Fed needs to lend more help to resolve the Euro mess (Yea, we know; that word lend is troublesome, to say the least!) and the ECB needed to fire up its printing press. Don't be too surprised if the the current administration tries to figure out a surreptitious way to put American taxpayers on the rescue docket too, similar to the TARP deals. The US financiers who stand to lose big in any meltdown have friends in high places.
By the way, it appears that no one on the planet earth knows exactly where all that supposed-paid-back TARP money actually is. If you think we're kidding try to find out; call your representative in Congress and see if you can get not any answer but a straight answer.
The UK continues to ruffle egos and political feathers with it hard stand against joining any collusion designed to aide and abet more of the same financial recklessness. But the Germans, long the whipping objects for allegedly holding the line on fiscal and monetary austerity, recevied some support from an unlikely source, Muhtar Kent, the chief executive of Coke-Cola. In a story by Alan Rappeport in the Financial Times, "Coke chief lauds "sane" Germany," Rappeport quoted Kent: "The reason Germany is the only sane place in Europe today is because of what Gerhard Schroder did....back in 2004."
"He cleared the mist, changed labour laws, went against the unions...and created really good incentives for small and medium-sized enterprises." Kent went on, according to the story, to point out, Schroder lost his job doing it, but it "marked the most effective era in recent German history. Those small companies in Germany are making things that go into things and people want those things."
Sounds like really good advice. Now if some brave politicians here in America want to put the future of the nation above their jobs and be brave enough to possibly lose them, we're on to somehting big. But don't hold your breath.
And here's a little sidebar on Germany and those companies that make little things from another FT story published 12/13/11. "German employment hit another post-unification high in October...."
Are you listening, politicians?
No comments:
Post a Comment