“Not in my lifetime”

 ”There will be no eurobonds as long as I live.”

On the face of it, it’s a potty statement. OK, there’s the proverbial bus she might fall under, but surely she should have said: “As long as I am Chancellor.”

Still, nuances aside, will AT LAST Borroso get the message or try YET AGAIN with his eurobonds”?

Hollane is reported to have given up on eurobonds and now going for ‘eurobonds-lite” or “eurobonds by another name” ……

This is of course par for the course in Euroland. If it’s really a bailout but you don’t like to admit it then you call it something else and so on.

Still, Merkel and the dreaded “markets” seem to have sussed out this particular nonsense.

The thing which one struggles to understand is that Spain et al want eurobonds to bring the cost of borrowing down. A pleb would ask: “WHY DON’T YOU JUST STOP BORROWING?”

I think the answer is that they need to borrow to cover current expenditure, and if there is anything more insane than that I would really like to hear it.

 

Merkel must “do something”

The Germans were doing FINE before the euro. Do you remember them struggling economically?

They were ONLY persuaded to abandon the DM on the PROMISE that this very eventuality happening now would NOT occur. STRICT rules were set up at the insistence of Germany about the ECB and the ratio of debt to GDP.

ALL THESE RULES WERE BROKEN. When France was challenged, some spokesperson said: “Those rules were designed for little countries, not those like France.”

In essence, THE GERMANS HAVE BEEN BETRAYED and are now being made into the big nasty for not bankrupting themselves by bailing out the useless, non-working, non tax-paying leeching states all around.  Germany has paid HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS NET into the poorer EU states, and STILL they want more. Greece has had MORE money pro rata than Germany under the Marshall Plan post WWII, but STILL it isn’t enough.

There is sod all sympathy here in Germany for this nonsense. The Germans BELIEVE in “Europe” and in being “good soldiers”, but NOT AT ANY INSANE PRICE. And NOBODY likes the piss being taken out of them.

Lagarde is a French political crony only placed in her position to further the French vision of the EU, i.e. where there is massive bureaucracy and Germany pays for everything. She did SOD ALL as French Finance Minister to put France’s finances right. She and Borroso should team up as a stand-up comic double-act.

 

The Resistible Force v the Immovable Object?

I am astonished that we can’t keep things simple.

For a start, in LAW a state should NOT be permittted to borrow AT ALL.

Several states have finally recognized this, though they are at last at least proposing to allow borrowing up to a limit.  The hilarious thing is that there was ALREADY an AGREEMENT to do this when the euro started, but THEY ALL IGNORED IT, including France and Germany, of whom only the latter can afford it.

ALL THOSE GUILTY OF BREAKING the 3% debt v GDP rule should be imprisoned under a  new European law of “Reckless Misuse of Public Money”. Why the hell we haven’t had this law for decades is beyond me.

As for Hollande, the following seems true.

A) Only a moron (Gordon Brown, Zapatero, Chirac et al for a start) thinks you can without disaster eternally spend more than your income. France has not set a balanced budget for nearly four decades. For me, that makes Chirac a moron – and Lagarde come to that; great job SHE did as France’s Finance Minister, didn`t she?)

B) Hollande is simultaneously promising to balance the budget by 2015 AND spend billions more NOW to “create jobs”. He is doing EXACTLY what France has done for the last 40 years and which has led to this shambles – spending money NOW which he hasn’t got on the vague assumption that “growth” will pay for it one day ……

C) Either he is a moron OR he is wilfully lying.

D) He is probably not quite a moron in medical terms, so he MUST BE LYING.

E) Most likely the ONLY reason he could get elected was to LIE – otherwise he would have sounded much like Sarko with his austerity thinggy.

ERGO:

- The new leader is a liar.

- He lied because he knows the public are too stupid to recognize the truth.

Not exactly a great scenario, is it – a new Presidency beginning on a lie. How soon will all his promises turn to dust in yet another U-turn forced on him by the dreaded “markets”?

As for the meeting next week with Merkel,

A) Hollande is the irresistible force; he has PROMISED to renegotiate the fiscal pact. It is the BASIS of his election.

B) Merkel is the immovable object; she has ALREADY said the pact is not negotiable.

Even Houdini himself could not have got out of this one. I can’t want to see what sort of gobbledegook Eurofudgespeak comes out of their meeting

 

Why don’t the Germans tell the EU to sod off?

It is the WW guilt, upon which France is only too keen to play. It’s very subtle, however, in contrast to those Greeks who – having sucked from a German teat for years – now accuse them of being Nazis for putting on the brake and demanding – WHAT NERVE – that Greeks pay their debts.

BUT – if Germany ever gets over the wars, then it’s a different ball game. The “Germans” are great people and there is no danger whatsoever of history being repeated (The UK could ALSO have had its own Hitler in different conditions.), but they might at some stage simply refuse to let themselves be milked. After all, ALL THOSE GUILTY ARE LONG DEAD.

Germans have now been NET contributors to “Europe” for DECADES. HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of German marks and euros have gone to pay for the EU, French farmers, infrastructure in Southern Europe etc. They didn’t HAVE to do this. They did it because of A) guilt and B) a genuine neighbourliness, especially that of the strong for its weaker brothers.

BUT – someone somewhere ALWAYS takes generosity for granted and abuses it. The Germans are getting close to the point where their largesse is being abused. The unelected Trotskyist Boringoso demands “eurobonds”. This is code for: “Let the Germans take on all the debt.”

Sorry Fatso, WHY THE HELL SHOULD THEY. YOU racked up the debt. YOU lived wildly beyond your means. “We will help, but UP TO A POINT.”

As for the usual analysis of why Germany went along with the creation of the eurozone, I believe it to be wrong. The Germans were quite happy with the DM. They did VERY WELL with the DM. It increased in value year-on-year because of the quality of their economy and goods. They did not want to give up the DM, but were persuaded to so so by others who played the “If you don’t, then you are un-European; you haven’t REALLY changed.” card. And the Germans were PROMISED that this shambles WOULD NOT HAPPEN. It was the ONLY way they could be persuaded to give up the DM.

This stuff about Germany needing the euro is utter rubbish. Do you remember Germany struggling BEFORE the euro? I don’t. It’s more EU-fanatic psychops – or if you prefer in layman’s language, lying bollocks from the EU Propaganda Office, of which Goebbels himself would have been proud.

 

Sarko’s Wagging Finger

 

Caption Competition?

Him;
“But you said you’d bail us out …….”

“But who else will save us from our own folly if not the Germans?”

“Come on Angela – hand over the money; you know it makes sense.”

“We must stick together against those Anglo-Saxons; it’s all their fault.”

“I’ll raise you one Tobin tax and two Greek Gauleiters.”

“Look Angela; there IS no Europe without France …..”

“Angela my dear. Germany may be bigger than us, but size isn’t everything.”(Ed. well, he should know.)

“If we just stick together, we should be able to bully the rest into submission.”

HER:

“Look; everyone knows you’re a stroppy, nerdish dwarf – let’s move on.”

“No Sarko – you DIDN’T win the war …..”

“Do I understand this right? What’s yours is yours and what’s ours is yours, too?”

“You wag that at me just once more and I’ll bite it off.”

“We don’t really want to make enemies of the UK, do we? Oh, sorry – silly question.”

 

LETTER TO MERKEL

A nice letter from Frederick Forsyth. Not sure where it first appeared …..

AN OPEN LETTER TO GERMAN CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL

Dear Madame Chancellor,

Permit me to begin this letter with a brief description of my knowledge of, and affection for, your country.

I first came to Germany as a boy student aged 13 in 1952, two years before you were born. After three extended vacations with German families who spoke no English I found at the age of 16 and to my pleasure that I could pass for German among Germans.

In my 20s I was posted as a foreign correspondent to East Germany in 1963, when you would have been a schoolgirl just north of East Berlin where I lived.I know Germany, Frau Merkel, from the alleys of Hamburg to the spires of Dresden, from the Rhine to the Oder, from the bleak Baltic coast to the snows of the Bavarian Alps. I say this only to show you that I am neither ignoramus nor enemy.

I also had occasion in those years to visit the many thousands of my countrymen who held the line of the Elbe against 50,000 Soviet main battle tanks and thus kept Germany free to recover, modernise and prosper at no defence cost to herself. And from inside the Cold War I saw our decades of effort to defeat the Soviet empire and set your East Germany free.

I was therefore disappointed last Friday to see you take the part of a small and vindictive Frenchman in what can only be seen as a targeted attack on the land of my fathers.We both know that every country has at least one aspect of its society or economy that is so crucial, so vital that it simply cannot be conceded.

For Germany it is surely your automotive sector, your car industry. Any foreign-sourced measure to target German cars and render them unsaleable would have to be opposed to vetopoint by a German chancellor. For France it is the agricultural sector. For more than 50 years members of the EU have been taxed under the terms of the Common Agricultural Policy in order to subsidise France’s agriculture. Indeed, the CAP has been the cornerstone of every EU budget since the first day. Attack it and France fights back.

For us the crucial corner of our economy is the financial services industry. Although parts of it exist all over the country it is concentrated in that part of London known even internationally as “the City”.It is not just a few greedy bankers; we both have those but the City is far more. It is indeed a vast banking agglomeration of more banks than anywhere else in the world. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Also in the City is the world’s greatest concentration of insurance companies.Add to that the brokers; traders in stocks and shares worldwide, second only, and then maybe not, to Wall Street. But it is not just stocks. The City is also home to the “exchanges” of gold and precious metals, diamonds, base metals, commodities, futures, derivatives, coffee, cocoa… the list goes on and on. And it does not yet touch upon shipping, aviation, fuels, energy, textiles… enough. Suffice to say the City is the biggest and busiest marketplace in the world.

It makes the Paris Bourse look like a parish council set against the United Nations and even dwarfs your Frankfurt many times. That, surely, is the point of what happened in Brussels. The French wish to wreck it and you seem to have agreed. Its contribution to the British economy is not simply useful nor even merely valuable. It is absolutely crucial. The financial services industry contributes 10 per cent of our Gross Domestic Product and 17.5 per cent of our taxation revenue. A direct and targeted attack on the City is an attack on my country. But that, although devised in Paris, is what you have chosen to support. You seem to have decided that Britain is once again Germany’s enemy, a situation that has not existed since 1945.I deeply regret this but the choice was yours and entirely yours. The Transaction Tax or Tobin Tax you reserve the right to impose would not even generate money for Brussels.

It would simply lead to massive emigration from London to other havens. Long ago it was necessary to live in a city to trade in it. In the days when deals can flash across the world in a nanosecond all a major brokerage needs is a suite of rooms, computers, telephones and the talent of the young people barking offers and agreements down the phone. Such a suite of rooms could be in Berne, Thun, Zurich or even Singapore. Under your Tobin Tax tens of thousands would leave London. This would not help Brussels, it would simply help destroy the British economy.

Your conference did not even save the euro. Permit me a few home truths about it. The euro is a Franco-German construct.It was a German chancellor (Kohl) who ordered a German banker (Karl Otto Pohl) to get together with a French civil servant (Delors) on the orders of a French president (Mitterrand) and create a common currency.

Which they did. IT was a flawed construct. Like a ship with a twisted hull it might float in calm water but if it ever hit a force eight it would probably founder.Even then it might have worked for it was launched with a manual of rules, the Growth And Stability Pact. If the terms of that book of rules had been complied with the Good Ship Euro might have survived. But compliance was entrusted to the European Central Bank which catastrophically failed to insist on that compliance. Rules governing the growing of cucumbers are more zealously enforced. This was a European Bank in a German city under a French president and it failed in its primary, even its sole, duty.

This had everything to do with France and Germany and nothing whatever to do with Britain. Yet in Brussels last week the EU pack seemed intent only on venting its spleen on the country that wisely refused to abolish its pound. You did not even address yourselves to saving the euro but only to seeking a way to ensure it might work in some future time.

But the euro will not be saved. It is crumbling now. And since you have now turned against my country, from this side of the Channel, Madame Chancellor, one can only say of the euro: YOU MADE IT, YOU MEND IT.

 

EUROSOAP UPDATE

“Jose Manuel Barroso has defended the concept of a eurozone bond, claiming that they will make sense once there is tighter fiscal union.”

I’ve lost count of the times Merkel has more or less said: “Over my dead body.” However, it is hard to see a way out of this. Merkel has the choice:

A) break the law, break her word, disgust her compatriots, lose her parliamentary majority, take a huge gamble with inflation and destroy the reputation of the ECB and any vestige of seriousness that Germany has left.

OR

B) both accept the sovereign default of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and even France AND ensure the destruction of the euro

Since Germany – though not innocent – is not the prime cause of all this, this is rather an unfair position to be in. I don’t envy her this dilemma.

As for Boringoso, he will only make sense once back in Portugal trying to sell whelks.

 

EUROCRISIS CAPTION COMPETITION

from "The Telegraph" - Friday 18 Nov.

My efforts so far …..

“My fingerwag is much better than Snarlkozy’s.”

“You seem to forget that we won the war.”

“Come on Angela – you know it makes sense.”

“When you send an ex ECB, Goldman-Sachs or other EU crony to replace me, pls don’t make it Peter Mandelscum …..”

“Can you get me a good deal on a new Merc?”

“No, I’m not carrying any concealed weapons; it’s Snarlkozy that wants to shoot you, not me …”

“You want the shirt off my back, too?”

“Fancy a game of strip poker while we’re waiting?”

“I’ve got a quid in my wallet; that’s all I can manage at the moment.”

“Look – I can pass on to you everything that Labour left us when they got kicked out; can’t say fairer than that ….”

 

Squaring the Circle

What’s going on in Merkel’s mind is the most interesting aspect of all this. She and Schaeble have both said NEIN to going over Germany’s existing 211 billion euro commitment. Both have consistently refused to accept “eurobonds” Both have said that the idea of a “big bazooka” is “silly” and indeed “stupid”. Various German banking worthies have also said “NO” to the ECB printing money (GOOD FOR THEM) and the German Constitutional Court has said “No more powers to Brussels without a referendum.”

BUT, UNLESS Germany IGNORES all that and (idiotically in my view) puts all her resources into a multi-trillion bailout fund then it seems to me CERTAIN that Greece and Italy will default, if not others.

Yet Merkel and her gang have ALSO said they will prevent the collapse of the euro. I CANNOT see how they are going to square this circle. Can anyone else?

 

Changing the Constitution

Merkel wants to change German Constitution
to transfer sovereignty to Brussels.

Well, she’ll have a problem getting THAT past the German people. I fundamentally object to changing the Constitution to pass even more powers to Brussels. It is not necessary and is very dangerous. Large states = big danger, = Big Brother = big problems. Big states are a big threat. Europe was doing fine until the euro, which should have been introduced very gradually as and when states were ready, which half of them were NOT.

This is NOT a matter of hindsight; most reputed economists and indeed the EU’s OWN experts told them it couldn’t work and that was EVEN WITHOUT Greece lying.

LYING. Once you have politicians and officials LYING, the trust is gone; the game is up. How the hell can the Greeks trust their new PM, a man who as Directer of the the Bank of Greece was instrumental in LYING to the EU about the state of his country’s finances?  I NO LONGER TRUST THESE PEOPLE. It’s as simple as that and has NOTHING to do with being “eurosceptic” or “Un-European”. As I pointed out yesterday, nobody can convincingly argue that I am either of the latter.

Note that Greece can organise itself the way it wants. If countries want a perverted clown (BurlesqueOnly), a known liar (Greece), an economic moron (Gordon Brown) or a bloated state sector (France), that’s ENTIRELY their affair; only DON’T ASK ME TO PAY FOR THEM, or sort out the shambles they create through their reckless overborrowing.

Europe? It can survive very well with a variety of currencies, open borders, a single market. Keep the euro but as a secondary currency in addition to drachma or whatever. Then countries could join when ready. THAT was the way to do it, but these obsessive pillocks in Brussels had to do it their way, flagrantly and recklessly gambling with our money and many people’s livelihoods. And they are BULLIES. You HAVE to join the euro if you want to be in the EU, NO MATTER WHAT the nature or state of your economy. The plebs CAN’T have a vote, and if by miracle they DO get one then they have to vote AGAIN till they get it right, in the meantime their government being subject to all kinds of threats to support the EU PC position.

“You want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.” NON, mais NON – Je N’AI PAS DIT CELA!!!  …..  As I said, the problem is the pathologically-insane rush towards a European superstate. There is – I repeat – NO REASON not to continue with the open borders, single market and gradual coming-together of standards and even – WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT – currency. I do NOT want to go back to pre 1956, but NEITHER do I want to be ruled from Brussels, no matter WHICH country I live in.

As for changing the Constitution, this is almost always a danger sign and reminds me of tin-pot African and South-American regimes. And if you ASK THE PEOPLE in almost every European country they’ll all say the same, WHICH of course is why they are almost NEVER asked. Naturally, since compared to the elite we are brainless sheep who must do what is good for us.

However, the most shameful aspect of all this is the way this this fascist, incompetent, overpaid, self-rightous, arrogant and unaccountable elite in Brussels has pushed the REAL problems of the planet off the radar. David Attenborough was recently at the North Pole, which in a few decades will be ice-free …… I’d really like to know the relevance of the pathetic EU headless-chicken navel-gazing has to THAT.