Author Archives: Douglas Muir

About Douglas Muir

American with an Irish passport. Does development work for a big international donor. Has been living in Eastern Europe for the last six years -- first Serbia, then Romania, and now Armenia. Calls himself a Burkean conservative, which would be a liberal in Germany but an unhappy ex-Republican turned Democrat in the US. Husband of Claudia. Parent of Alan, David, Jacob and Leah. Likes birds. Writes Halfway Down The Danube. Writes Halfway Down The Danube.

And quiet falls the dram

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It hasn’t attracted much attention, but little Armenia just gave up on supporting its currency, the dram, and allowed it to float free. The dram promptly fell by 20%, leading to price hikes and a brief wave of panic buying and hoarding.

This is sort of a non-story at an international level, because (1) Armenia is tiny, (2) so many Eastern European currencies have been dropping that another one comes as no surprise, and (3) unlike some other places, Armenia’s economy is not actually imploding. The currency adjustment was probably long overdue, and the subsequent panic is already slacking off. Armenia’s economic numbers show a recession, but a relatively mild one; to oversimplify, the relative backwardness and isolation of Armenia’s economy and financial system are serving to buffer it from the worst of the crisis.

From an Armenian perspective, of course, this is huge news. And more interesting than it looks; there’s a plausible case to be made that the Central Bank allowed the dram to stay overvalued for much too long in order for some well-connected local players to get very rich. The opposition is advancing this case as loudly as they can. Since the government dominates all the TV news and most of the radio, magazines and newspapers, that’s not very loudly. And this is the same government that gunned down a bunch of peaceful protesters just over a year ago. So, the odds of any political fallout from the devaluation are pretty long.

Still… offered as another data point.

A good/bad time to stop having babies

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Here follows a bit of demographic speculation. It’s guesswork right now, but we’ll know in a year or two if I’m right.

Interesting Fact #1: birthrates tend to drop during recessions, and the drop tends to correlate with both the severity of the recession and the speed of its onset. The current recession is looking to be a bad one, and it happened pretty quickly, so we can reasonably expect a sharp drop in birth rates. I say “expect” because it hasn’t happened yet — human biology being what it is, we won’t see the first effects until nine months after most people became aware of the recession. This summer, more or less.

— Makes sense, right? Babies are expensive; more to the point, babies limit your options. They make it harder to move to a different city, change careers, stop working for a while. When times are hard and uncertain, babies become a luxury. For individuals and families, a recession is a good time to put childbearing on hold.

However…

Interesting Fact #2: all across Communist Eastern Europe, birth rates declined slowly through the 1970s and ’80s… and then crashed after 1990, dropping to very low levels and staying there through most of the decade. In some countries they bounced back a bit, in others not, but in almost all cases there’s a big “birth gap” from about 1991 until at least 1997, and often later. This is in contrast to, say, Germany or Italy or Greece, where birthrates declined more smoothly.

Put these two facts together, and there’s a problem. Continue reading →

Iceland’s government collapses

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This is a couple of days old, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention.

It doesn’t come as much of a surprise, given Iceland’s devastating economic situation. It’s not clear, though, just what the precipitating incident was. As late as Wednesday, the Prime Minister was saying that he wouldn’t step down, no, sir, no way. Der Speigel mentions “violent protests”, but they don’t seem to have been all that violent; brief googling only shows stuff like “lighting a bonfire” and “clashing with police”.

Elections are set for May, and polls show that if they were held today the Prime Minister’s center-right Independence Party would take a beating, but would survive in opposition. The next government would be formed by Iceland’s Green Party — which has never been part of a government before.

More information from any of our Icelandic readers would be appreciated!

A soda with Karadzic

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Just wanted to link to this post about meeting Radovan Karadzic in prison. The writer comes across as a bit naive — gosh, the ICTY cell block is dingy! Karadzic, a former politician turned New Age guru, comes across as charming and at ease with himself! — but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Key point for me: his claim that Karadzic won’t try to turn his trial into a circus as Seselj and Milosevic did. Color me skeptical on that one. We’ll see soon enough.

Greece: what if nothing happens?

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We’ve seen a lot of hand-wringing over Greece in the last couple of weeks. Various commenters have compared it to 1968 and to 1973, have noted the deep-rooted miseries that this has exposed in Greek society, and have expressed concern that violence may spread to other Mediterranean economies (Italy, Spain) or even to France.

Maybe. Maybe. But let me advance a contrarian suggestion: maybe nothing much is going to happen. Continue reading →

“No need anymore to try to look Canadian”?

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Garrison Keillor is an old American radio personality. As is often the case, he used to be a lot funnier than he is now. But once in a while he can still bring it:

The French junior minister for human rights said, “On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes.” When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back…

I just can’t imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference – the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis – you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine…

Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.

Okay, some gushing here. And I’m not sure the American backpacker should pick off that maple leaf patch just yet.

On the other hand, “district manager for Avis” — ouch.

In other news, it’s cold and grey in central Germany this evening. How are things where you are?

Halloween (y/n)

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So it’s Halloween tonight. Celtic holiday, sort of, taken over by the Anglo-Saxons, sort of, and then transported to North America and refined into a truly weird combination of costumes, scary, and sugar.

I’m a transplanted American living in Germany, and I’ve found that Halloween is just catching on here. Apparently nobody knew about it a generation ago — it was a weird thing the Americans did on their bases — but now at least some people are putting up jack o’lanterns and handing out candy. (Fewer jack o’lanterns. American pumpkins have been bred for soft shells and easy carving. Germans, not yet. Carving a German pumpkin is more carpentry than art.) There’s nothing like the tsunami of commercial decorations, costumes, and high fructose corn syrup that seizes America in the last days of October, but people know about it and children want to do it.

Normally I’d roll my eyes at this: another American commercial tradition colonizing the poor old continent, like raccoons invading the Black Forest. But Halloween is a sort of cool holiday. It makes no sense, but it’s fun. Fun is good.

So, my question, European readers: where else in Europe is this holiday taking hold? Are there small children going door to door in Hungary? Costume parties in Portugal? Black-cat paper cutouts in the windows in Finland?

Who’s got Halloween tonight?

And Macedonia makes 50

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Montenegro and Macedonia recognized Kosovo yesterday. Coincidentally, this raises the number of countries recognizing to exactly 50.

Macedonia and Montenegro are small countries, but they have outsized importance because (1) they’re neighbors of both Serbia and Kosovo, (2) they’re EU-members-to-be, and (3) they’re former Yugoslav Republics. So while this is no surprise, it’s still interesting.

I had some thoughts on this, but Radio Free Europe has already beaten me to most of them. (Yes, yes, I know about RFE. It’s a good article anyway, check it out.) One particularly interesting point: by co-ordinating their recognition, the two countries have given each other a certain amount of cover, diplomatically speaking.

I’ve said before that I expect a slow trickle of countries recognizing Kosovo gradually tapering off, until a plateau of between 50 and 60 is reached sometime next year. We’ll see soon enough!

One for the economists among us

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Thought this article made for interesting reading:

When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany’s inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is really an issue now. Contemporary industries have very sensitive controls for trimming production as consumption declines; our current stock-market dip followed bank problems that emerged more than a year ago; and there are no serious international problems with gold reserves, simply because banks no longer peg their lending to them.

In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls “the real Great Depression.” She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.

Continue reading →