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Politics : Libertarian Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (5297)	12/5/2002 4:24:28 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13056

Re: ...with Germany's top companies shedding labour at home and shifting investment elsewhere - and 45,000 firms bankrupted this year - more misery is on the way. People are not spending; but they are not saving much any more either. Even West Germans feel poor; and they will feel poorer still when the new "wealth" tax cuts in on assets,... No, they'll feel poorer when the euro itself will be hit: as I said elsewhere, the 1:1(+/-10%) peg between the euro and the dollar won't last forever --it'll last as long as corporate America needs it. There's a good report on China in the current (European) edition of BusinessWeek... Greater China (ie mainland+Hong Kong+Taiwan) is expected to outstrip the EU by 2007 in terms of GDP and global trade and rank second behind the US. Besides, bankruptcies will hit a record high across Europe (in 2002) --not only in Germany. For the US the burst of the so-called New Economy bubble was just another, if painful, bump on the road whereas for Europe it looks like something more ominous... a sort of coup de grace. Think about it: the Nasdaq collapsed in 2001-2002, all right, but it's still there! And US high-tech powerhouses are slowly recovering. Now, what's the situation in Europe? The Neue Markt was just scrapped altogether and, wherever you look, there's just no European high-tech industry --except the usual state-sponsored white elephants (Ariane Espace and the satellite biz, Airbus aircraft, CERN and the quark-chasers). Another grim feature of the European slowdown is that it doesn't stop at the dotcom bust: European crown jewels that best epitomized corporate Europe are also suffering. The Swiss-Swedish engineering powerhouse ABB is fighting for its survival! We're not talking of yet another cyber-outfit launched by ponytailed geeks with no business plan here: ABB, the European Bechtel, was supposed to be run by no-nonsense, rational engineers --tough shit. The prospect is even worse in Italy where Gruppo Fiat is poised to end up as a wholly-owned GM subsidiary. Hence it's small wonder that the anti-globalization circus is mainly a European scheme: in the global musical chairs, the slouches can't sit fast enough... Yet, Europe doesn't want to be the sucker. Of course, Europeans don't want to admit it, so they wrap their resentment in a broader, nobler agenda on "fair trade", social justice, help to the Third World, etc. and scramble to rally other losers to their cause (mainly South America's banana republics). That's why you'll never watch anti-globaloney fuss in Asia --Asian countries are on the "+" side of the globalization's zero-sum game.... Gus Footnote: Message 17054208