Author Archives: Edward Hugh

About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

The Danish Job

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This is really a hybrid post, although perhaps the unifying theme – for reasons which should be clear by the end – is Denmark.

In the first place Danish journalist Kjeld Hansen has a hard-hitting article in EU Observer about just what does actually happen to all that money paid-out in the form of agricultural subsidies (hat tip New Economist), whilst in the second one there is news today that the Commission is preparing a position paper on the EU’s social model for discussion at the October 27/28 summit.
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The Horse-Trading Model

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Earlier in the week Doug Muir posted on the generally negative attitude most Austrians seem to have towards EU enlargement. Others in comments have been suggesting that it is important not to go soft on human rights issues in the case of Turkey’s application. Well……

According to the French newspaper Le Figaro (as reported in EUPolitix) “Croatia forms part of the total bargaining on Turkey.” (that’s a quote from an anonymous diplomat btw).
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Once In Another Lifetime

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Former UK prime minister Harold Wilson coined the phrase ‘a week is a long time in politics’. Well I don’t know about a week, but two months certainly is. Back on July 12 Doug Merrill was wryly posting about “Things You Can Do When You’re 20 Points Up in the Polls“. Maybe he’d now like to do another one about things you can’t do when you’ve just lost your overall majority. I think Merkel’s face tells it all, we’re now back with Fassbinder and deeply ensconced in ‘fear eats the soul’ territory. Whatever the outcome on Sunday, this will surely have to go down as one of the worst run political campaigns in recent history. As Tobias was suggesting to me at the weekend, maybe somewhere deep down inside they just don’t want to win.

Department of Wow

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Aside from revealing the extent to which internecine warfare seems to have broken out in the CDU camp, I was pretty much stopped in my tracks by this statement in Heinrich von Pierer’s interview with the FT:

“The important problems, such as the ageing of the population or what kind of immigration policy we need, are not being discussed at all”

Note: Heinrich von Pierer is Angela Merkel’s chief economic adviser and was formerly chief executive at Siemens.

A Good First Step

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The Financial Times reports this morning that EU Commission President José Barroso is about to launch a major ‘deregulation campaign’. He is reported as saying that he was determined to get the Commission to embrace better regulation, to carry out more systematic impact assessments and to make more frequent use of the option of not legislating at all. “The important thing is to change the culture of the organisation”. Maybe all this won’t turn out to be the last word in sliced bread, but it is moving in the right direction. According to the FT:

Mr Barroso wants to axe a wide variety of laws designed to impose EU-wide standards, claiming that some legislation was “absurd” and brought Europe into disrepute….
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Flattened By The Flat Tax?

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Following Alex, more opinion polls seem to be showing that Merkel will struggle to get a majority in partnerhip with the FDP. At the same time voices are being raised within the CDU suggesting that the principal responsibility for this debacle lies with the Professor from Heidelberg.

Some indication of why flat tax ideas might impact so negatively on German voters is offered by the Financial Times this morning in a leader commenting on similar proposals from within the UK Conservative Party:
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Ukraine Government Dismissed

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Crickey, this is news:

“Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said on Thursday he was sacking the government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.”

That didn’t last long, did it? The background is clearly this.

Yesterday EU Observer was reporting MEPs as saying that the Orange Revolution needed a ‘shot in the arm‘, it looks like what it may have received was something nearer to a lethal dose.

Eurozone More Exposed?

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Chief OECD economist Jean Philippe Cotis wasn’t only proferring recommendations to the Federal reserve yesterday. He was also not backward in coming forward with his opinions about future growth in the eurozone. Even if Cotis isn’t exactly my favourite economist I feel here he may be a little nearer the truth.

The occasion for M. Cotis’ observations was the official press briefing for an interim OECD assessment of the economic situation in Europe, the United States and Japan.
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Close Call

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The reference here isn’t to the actual hurricane (which was far from that if you were black, poor, and lived in downtown New Orleans) but to the economic ‘near miss’ I think we are watching, and to the difficult decision Alan Greenspan and his team will now have to take on 20 September next.

The blogs are of course rife with speculation.

Update: Dave at MacroBlog just came up with one more reason the Fed might steadfastly remain on course: poor productivity readings.
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