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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (24764)	10/31/2002 2:19:41 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi Jay. I was away to Hamburg for two days - big (for me at least) and successful delivery - so what I can comment here, is a destillation of whatever you can read on the flights or waiting to get called. >>Europe on the brink of collapse<< I see the editors discussing the article and the headlines and eventually going for something, that will grab the eyes - given its a newspaper from UK. I will not comment line by line - there's nothing to refute, I just possibly see it different. I also will not go too much into exogenic factors (aka USA) even though at least in Germany banking has gotten plastered all over the place by bad dot.com loans and high-flying ideas (me-too corporate banking etc) Talking about EU: given everybody the right to be selfish, it down to common interests to define the common future. I see here the big 2.5 (Germany, France and UK) having a common interest of eating the cake and keeping it too. The compromise over agrarian subsidies was full victory of J. Chirac over Schröder (keep on footing the bill) and T. Blair (no more Maggie Thatcher specials). Regarding who will eventually foot the bill - as Serbs say "and the common folks will goldenplate it all". No wonder that deficit spending is way to go. Germany: the cuts are in - home builders' subsidies, company car taxing, bringing in cca additional 20B. Maybe germany after all will NOT buy 74 Air transporters (Trouble with France again). The main troubling symptom, for me anyhow, is lacking will to reform. Evident from the speeches in the Bundestag these days. To stop being "social" (what's so social or socialistic about " I give you 100M you give me 100M" pork barreling). To give up the tariff system. To adjust to realities, when it comes to old age pension systems etc. Where does ECB come in? All the hoopla about the rates ("will they cut the rates or not?") is short-term pragmatics. The warnings of ECB about the importance of fiscal responsibility (of the union and of the member states) are not being heard. Maybe my ears have some special spectral response, when it comes to this kind of information. Re Germany, France - I guess the thinking is "Germans will profit most from the coming extension, so let's take a prepayment on it". Brink of collapse? Today's the anniversary of the first Hydrogen bomb. Fits more the description - if it's a brink of collapse, it's together with and at least partly due to the rest of the world. Just from inside, no exogenic factors? Call it "work in progress" - we'll definitely muddle through, as Metternich used to say - and he was, according to historians at least, a successful diplomat. I'm adding to my Au miners and probably sweetening it with some far-out leap puts on SnP.