What Matt Yglesias said about this Chris Bertram post.
Author Archives: David Weman
Olivier Guichard has died
Olivier Guichard, one of ‘the Last Barons of Gaullism’ has died. New York Times has an obituary.
Another disaster
On thursday a split European Commission “decided to launch unprecedented legal action against member states over their effective suspension of the euro rules last November.”
“The Commission will now ask the European Court of Justice to rule on a procedure taken by finance ministers last November to avoid disciplinary action being taken against France and Germany for their persistent breaking of the rules underpinning the euro. Brussels believes the procedure was “not appropriate” and has received legal advice confirming this.
The spokesman also confirmed that the Court would be asked to “fast-track” the case, which would mean the issue is resolved in 3 to 6 months rather than one or two years. But it is up to the court to decide whether to grant this.”
I’ll writing some belated commentary of my own, but meanwhile you can talk about it here.
A good week
This week, A Fistful of Euros is very proud to present two new members of our team, Scott MacMillan, and Mrs Tilton. I trust they are already familiar to our regular readers, and their qualitifications speak for themselves.
A warm welcome to them both.
Also, this week we’re very happy to have the brilliant Chris Brooke as guest contributor. We’ll feature guests regurarly from now on.
Jurjen’s back!
Jurjen (“the quiet one” in AFOE) has started posting to his weblog again after a three month hiatus. Hooray!
Only, now I’m worried one of my favorite underrated bloggers will unexpectedlyy retire. A few days after Mrs Tilton’s comeback, Cinderella Bloggerfeller went on indefinite hiatus, so I hope it’s not some kind of cosmic law of balance thing.
I just chided the others for making too many non-euro posts but whatever
I want to make sure Edward doesn’t miss this.
Josh Marshall quotes from a Fortune interview with Peter Drucker:
“FORTUNE: You sound fairly sanguine about the state of the U.S. economy. Do you see any danger signs?
DRUCKER: Oh, yes. The biggest problem I see is our total dependence on foreign money to cover our government debt. Never before has a major debtor country owed its debt in its own currency. It is unprecedented in economic history. Japan, by contrast, owes all its foreign debt in dollars. Now if you devalue the dollar, the Japanese economy benefits, because their imports become much cheaper. And the value of their debt goes down also. The individual Japanese companies that invest in dollars would lose, but the overall Japanese economy gains. But we have no experience about what will happen here when we owe so much debt in our own currency and we’re forced to devalue the dollar. Sooner or later, we’re going to find out.
What’s more, there is an enormous amount of surplus capital in the world for which there is no productive investment. The supply greatly exceeds the demand. So there is a very jittery body of excess money that is desperately in need of returns, and it could become panic-prone. We have no economic theory or model for this.
FORTUNE: Does the U.S. still set the tone for the world economy?
DRUCKER: The dominance of the U.S. is already over. What is emerging is a world economy of blocs represented by NAFTA, the European Union, ASEAN. There’s no one center in this world economy. India is becoming a powerhouse very fast. The medical school in New Delhi is now perhaps the best in the world. And the technical graduates of the Institute of Technology in Bangalore are as good as any in the world. Also, India has 150 million people for whom English is their main language. So India is indeed becoming a knowledge center.
In contrast, the greatest weakness of China is its incredibly small proportion of educated people. China has only 1.5 million college students, out of a total population of over 1.3 billion. If they had the American proportion, they’d have 12 million or more in college. Those who are educated are well trained, but there are so few of them. And then there is the enormous undeveloped hinterland with excess rural population. Yes, that means there is enormous manufacturing potential. In China, however, the likelihood of the absorption of rural workers into the cities without upheaval seems very dubious. You don’t have that problem in India because they have already done an amazing job of absorbing excess rural population into the cities–its rural population has gone from 90% to 54% without any upheaval.
Everybody says China has 8% growth and India only 3%, but that is a total misconception. We don’t really know. I think India’s progress is far more impressive than China’s.”
Drucker makes two very interesting points that I haven’t seen disussed anywhere else
Comments?
Because we care
As of yesterdeay, we have archives by author. Click on the eternity symbol after our names. Thanks to Kieran Healy for helping me out.
Good news indeed
Mrs. Tilton has come out of retirement, and if you don’t know how good news that is, take a look at her old blog, and your in for a treat. Note the new address.
Pigs threaten Romanian EU membership
“Across Romania, fear is growing of a looming porcine genocide as the country prepares to negotiate its way into the EU. For the fact is that most pigs are bred and slaughtered here in a way that fails to meet EU standards, and no one is prepared to invest the money needed to get our piggeries up to Union levels. But will our beloved pig be permitted to put the supreme national interest in jeopardy?
[…]
The problem is that, in Romania, we have a hard enough time comprehending and protecting human rights, let alone animal rights. Veterinarians are few, but our human health services are in ruin as well.
Indeed, most people cannot afford proper medication, and hospitals suffer from gross under-funding. So it seems to most Romanians not only preposterous, but immoral, for the EU to care so much for a pig’s last moments of life when it seems to care so little for the everyday life of ordinary Romanians.
Moreover, how is our government supposed to get millions of farmers to give up their barbaric ancestral habit? By trying to coerce them with fines? In America, I am told, a slang word for the police is “pigs.” Are we to have pig police here?
Our ruling social democratic party has its stronghold in Romania’s rural areas. If Romania’s peasants come to believe that the EU insists that they hug their pigs, not butcher them with knives, their fidelity towards the social democrats will wither.
Those lost votes, however, won’t go to responsible center-right parties, but to the fiercely nationalistic, anti-European, Greater Romania Party, perhaps the closest thing Europe now has to a fascist party. This is a nightmare that both European and mainstream Romanian politicians want to avoid.”
But:
“Fortunately, there seems to be a way to conciliate both EU bureaucrats and even our most diehard peasants. Our ugly pre-Christmas ritual butchery can be christened a “traditional, folk custom,” a sacred rite deeply embedded in the fabric of Romanian nationhood. The proximity of Christmas will provide the ritual with a religious patina.”
Also see this story from the Moscow Times