Brussels
is a city you simply don't want to miss out on. As
the
headquarters to the EU (European Union) and NATO it is often referred
to as The Capital of Europe.
It is an international metropolis – a mosaic of languages, cultures,
and traditions. Aside from the spectacular and unique
architectural styles of the city, Brussels also hosts over 80
museums, numerous tourist attractions, a vibrant nightlife, and more
restaurants than you could count.
The
starting point for any visit to Brussels is the Grand Place which was
built as a merchant’s market in the 13th century. It serves as the
center of the city and hosts a variety of festivals including
the
Ommegang pageant held every July .
Shopping in
the distinctive fashion boutiques, lingering over a delicious lunch in
a bistro or a top restaurant, people watching from a street cafe, or
picking up an original antique on the Sablon -
Brussels is a
city you can call your own.
For
more information on what to see please check out Brussels Highlights.
Historic
& Cultural Overview of Brussels.
The
popular image of Brussels is that of a capital of European
bureaucracy, with the city centre densely packed with EU
office buildings and thousands of uniformly-dressed Eurocrats pacing
the busy streets.
The truth is, there's much more to the city than the steady rhythm of
business life, for Brussels is a rare gem of cultural and social
uniqueness.
Many
inhabitants of Brussels complain that the presence of the numerous EU
institutions and NATO headquarters overshadows the true spirit of the
Belgian capital, making it look stiff and formal. One stroll down a
street in central Brussels is enough to make one believe that the city
is anything but boring. It's estimated that over 20 percent of
Brussels' population are foreigners, mostly working for the
international institutions and companies. Even the natives of Brussels
are divided into speakers of French and Dutch, and all of the places
and street names in the city are given in those two languages. A
colourful, multicultural crowd fills the streets day and night, giving
the city a unique, cosmopolitan feeling.
The
earliest records of a settlement in the area come from the late 7th
Century, when a chapel was established on a river island. The official
date of establishment of the town is 979, when relics of St. Gudula
from Moorsel were transferred to the chapel. Permanent fortifications
around the settlement were constructed by Charles, the banished son of
French King Louis IV. Brussels developed fast thanks to its strategic
location on the banks of the Senne, and on a major trade route running
from Bruges and Ghent to Cologne. By the Middle Ages, it was no less a
cosmopolitan city than it is today.
Throughout
its history, Brussels has witnessed a number of important events. The
magnificent Palace Coudenberg, the traditional residence of the Belgian
rulers, was an important stopover for diplomats from all over the
continent. In 1555, the palace saw the abdication of the Holy Roman
Emperor Charles V. In 1731, it was destroyed in a disastrous fire and
never rebuilt. An archaeological site is all that remains of it. A
great part of Brussels' beautiful Medieval architecture was also
destroyed in a French attack in 1695, during which the houses around
the Grand Place were set on fire.
Previously
a part of the Netherlands, France and the Habsburg Empire, Brussels
became capital of Belgium only after the Revolution of 1831.
Because of the city's potential and continuous prosperity, it was
always a desirable location for major European powers. The city survived
World War II largely intact.
After
the end of the Second World War, moves towards European integration
were seen by many as an escape from the extreme forms of
nationalism which had devastated the continent. One such
attempt
to unite Europeans was the European
Coal and Steel Community
which, while having the modest aim of centralised control of
the
previously national coal and steel industries of its member states, was
declared to be "a first step in the federation of Europe". The
originators and supporters of the Community include Jean
Monnet,Robert Schuman, Paul
Henri Spaak and Alcide de Gasperi.
The founding members of the Community were Belgium,
France, Italy, Luxembourg,
the Netherlands and West
germany.
Belgium actively participated
in the creation of the European Union
(then the European
Economic Community), and as a result its
capital was designated as the administrative core of the organisation.
Brussels
celebrates its rich and varied cultural, social and economic history in
the more than 100 museums and galleries scattered around the city.
The
Royal Museum of Fine Arts (Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts) displays a
magnificent collection of works by Dutch and Flemish masters, including
Memling, Bosch, Cranach, Brueghel, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck and
Frans Hal; paintings by van Gogh, Chagall, Miro, Dali, Matisse can also
be found. The Horta Museum is devoted to the life and works of noted
Belgian architect Victor Horta, who introduced the Art Nouveau style in
the city.
A
city as diverse as Brussels has such museums as the Royal Museum for
Central Africa (Musée Royaux d'Afrique Centrale, RMCA) and the comics
shrine Musée BD sit almost side by side. The former holds a unique
collection of African ethnographic artefacts. Experts claim it's the
only one of its kind in the world. The latter, located in Europe's
earliest shopping mall, Jugendstil Palais, holds a permanent exposition
presenting the beginnings and development of comics.
Prominent
Brussels landmarks include cultural icons recognisable all over the
world. The Grand-Place, also known as the Grote Markt, is a true
spectacle at night, when carefully arranged lights illuminate the
façades of beautiful old buildings. The legendary figure of the peeing
boy, Manneken Pis, is located very nearby. Inhabitants of Brussels
believe that the small bronze statue symbolises the 'irreverent spirit'
of their city. Manneken Pis has a collection of outfits for all
occasion, each with a small hole placed strategically in order to let
the water flow.
The
Atomium, built for the Expo '58 (then known as the World’s Fair), is a
102-metre-tall construction representing a unit cell of an iron
crystal, enlarged 165 billion times. Nine giant spheres are connected
with enormous tubes through which passenger lifts move. The top-most
sphere provides an absolutely spectacular view of the Belgian capital,
making the Atomium the single most popular attraction in the city.
The
Belgian capital offers plenty of entertainment options with which to
fill your day. The lovely Parc du Cinquantenaire (Jubelpark), in
eastern Brussels, is a quiet and peaceful place, a true refuge from the
fast-paced centre. A viewing terrace above the Arc de Triomphe
(Triomfboog) offers a charming alternative to the view of the city
available from the Atomium. A fascinating day out might be an excursion
to the Waterloo Battlefield, located around 12 kilometres away from the
city centre. Napoleon's final battle against Wellington, which took
place there on June 18, 1815, forever changed the face of Europe.
Today, the site holds a memorial in the form of a mound upon which
stands a statue of lion looking towards France.
Whatever
you decide to fill your days in Brussels with, remember to embark upon
a delicious tour of the city's famous restaurants, offering the best of
what refined Belgian cuisine has to offer. Specialities such as rabbit
stewed in beer served with some of the famous kriek will make your stay
a memorable experience. While strolling around the city, don't forget
to have one of the Gauffre Liègoise (Luikse Wafel), the famous Belgian
waffles with caramelised sugar, a true delight on both a sunny
afternoon and a chilly evening.
The
Grand Place, with its ornate baroque and gothic guild houses, is listed
as a UNESCO World Heritage site, and one of the most beautiful squares
in Europe. Built as a merchants market in the 13th century, it serves
as the city center and a great place to enjoy Belgian hospitality at
one of the many terrace cafes. It is also a venue for many concerts
& events throughout the year and during the warmer months has a
vibrant, daily flower market.
Town Hall (Hotel de Ville)
The
first building you notice upon entering the Grand Place is the striking
gothic town hall, which dates back to the 13th century. Its beautiful
facade features the famous needle-like crooked spire which is 315 feet
in height and is topped by the archangel St. Michael. Tours are
available of the interior, which contains 15th century tapestries and
works of art.
Manneken Pis
This
famous statue of a little boy peeing in a fountain is a perfect
representative of the irreverent Belgian humor. The unique Brussels
icon has been amusing visitors on the corner of Rue de L’Etuve
&
Stroofstraat since 1619. Over time it has become a tradition for
visiting heads of state to donate miniature versions of their national
costume for the little naked boy. The wardrobe of Mannekin Pis can be
seen at the Brussels museum and includes over 760 outfits – even an
authentic Elvis jumpsuit.
Galeries St Hubert
This
gorgeous, glass roofed arcade in the center of town, lined with cafes,
theaters and luxury stores has the distinction of being the first
shopping arcade in Europe. Built in 1847 and recently renovated, the
Royal Galleries (Galerie de la Reine, du Roi and du Prince) are one of
the most astonishing places to visit in Brussels.
Mont des Arts
Situated
half way between the broad avenues of Brussels’ Park and the pretty
gardens of Petit Sablon and Egmont, this area marks the transition
between the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ town. It boasts a profusion of museums,
theaters and historical monuments, attracting locals and visitors alike
to Brussels.
On
any given day there are over 20,000 people working in the offices of
the EU. The infrastructure of the EU is divided into 3 big
institutions: the European
council, the European
commission and the European parliament.
Ommegang festival (Grand Place)
Take
a seat on the tiered stands or lean on the low barriers and find
yourself transported to 1549. Every year, the lavish Ommegang
procession commemorates the tribute paid to Emperor Charles V and his
VIP guests. Richly-colored costumes, horses, embroidered banners, flag
throwing and stilt jousting are always on the menu for this annual
event.
MIM (The Museum of Musical Instruments)
Architectural
styles of Neo-Classic and Art Nouveau. Housed in the museum is a
collection of more than 7000 instruments of varying kinds and origins.
On the top floor, the indoor & outdoor MIM Restaurant provides
visitors with a magnificent 360° view of Brussels.
The Cantillon Brewery
This
brewery, which uses the same brewing process as it did when it was
founded in 1900, has been converted into a working museum providing
visitors with tours and tastings throughout the year. In an hour and a
half the Van Roy-Cantillon family invites you to discover all the trade
secrets of making lambic beer, faro, kreik and the archetypal Brussels
beer known as geuze. Geuze is a blend of lambic beers and has the
dryness and sparkle of a good champagne.
Cathedral of Saints Michel and Gudule
This
magnificent cathedral, tactfully dedicated to the male and female
patron saints of Brussels, is located near Central Station. It was
completed by the end of the 15th century in the Brabant Gothic style,
but was damaged by the French shelling of 1695. The white stone façade
is from the year 1250 and the interior is splendidly proportioned and
stuffed with treasures.
The Belgian Center for Comic Strip Art
(Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinee)
Housed
in an art nouveau masterpiece designed by Victor Horta, this museum
pays homage to a particular Belgian passion, cartooning. Tintin and the
Smurfs are the most famous Belgian comic strip characters but the
museum also displays artwork from over 670 cartoonists. Other displays
detail the stages of putting together a comic strip, from examples of
initial ideas and pencil sketches through to final publication.
Arranged over three levels, the museum also has a library and an art
nouveau brewery.
The Dinosaur gallery at the Royal belgian
Institute of Natural Sciences
Explore
the largest dinosaur museum in Europe on permanent display at the
Museum of Natural Sciences starting on October 27. This is a great
exhibit for the whole family, with many new dinosaur skeletons to
discover and learn about as well as hands-on activities for children.
The Royal Palace (Palais Royal)
The
official home of the Belgian king, you will always know if he is in the
country when you see the Belgian flag flying on top of the building.
The building is a highlight of Neo-Classical architecture and overlooks
Brussels Park. The Royal Palace is open to the public during the summer
months.
Royal Greenhouses
Built
in 1874 by King Leopold II, it contains one of the largest &
finest
private botanical collections in the world. The complex itself consists
of 16 huge interconnected greenhouses, a dining hall, theater and
reception areas. Every year, usually from the last week of April
through the 1st week of May, the king invites the public to visit the
greenhouses & the exuberant display of flowers.
Place du Grand Sablon
This
picturesque square is situated on the slope that divides Brussels
between the upper and lower halves of the city. Decked out with chic
boutiques, al fresco cafes, fashionable restaurants, and trendy bars,
the Grand Sablon is most famous for its lively open-air antiques market
which attracts antiques dealers from all over the world. Open every
weekend (Sat 9-6, Sun 9-2).
Place du Petit Sablon
Just
above the Grand Sablon is the jewel of a square - Petit Sablon.
Originally a horse market, it was converted in 1890 into an elegant
& charming flower garden with lavish fountains, surrounded by
wrought-iron fences decorated with stone statuettes. Each figure
represents a medieval trade or craft that brought prosperity to
Brussels. Today it is a favorite area to relax while taking in the
pretty view.
Museum Horta
The
former home of Art Nouveau’s best-known architect, Victor Horta, is now
the Horta Museum - a showcase of stained glass and subway tile, pale
wood and wrought iron whose every corner seems magically bathed in
golden sunlight.
Comic Strip Route
There
are currently 38 large comic strip images decorating the sides of
buildings around Brussels city center. This outdoor exhibition is known
as the comic strip route and is organized by the Belgian
Center for Comic Strip Art and
the city of Brussels. Begun in 1991 as a tribute to Belgium’s talent
for comic strip art, this street art project continues to grow.
Palais de la Nation
Home
of the Belgian Parliament since the country’s independence in 1830,
this magnificent building was constructed in the late 18th century by
the Neo-Classical architect Guimard, who also designed the expansive
stone facade and many of the surrounding state buildings.
Cinquantenaire Arch
Erected
to mark the 50th anniversary of Belgium’s independence from Holland,
the monument is 144 ft high at the head of Ave. de Tervuren and is
topped by a bronze chariot being ridden by the female personification
of a triumphant Belgium. Adjacent are the Royal
Museum of Art & History, Royal Museum of Army
& Military History and the 90-acre Jubilee
Park forming a lush backdrop for all three.
Mini Europe
This
kitschy village houses over 300 doll-sized versions of the most famous
European monuments including the Eiffel Tower and Acropolis. This
popular family destination is located in Bruparck, which is in the
Heysel area of northern Brussels. Also found in Bruparck are an
assortment of themed restaurants, and IMEX movie theater (movies in
English) and Oceade, a tropically heated water park.
Atomium
Built
for the 1958 World Fair, the Atomium represents a molecule’s nine atoms
– magnified 165 billion times. Something of a symbol of the city, it
provides a panoramic view of Brussels and its surroundings. The 9
spheres that make up the “atom” are linked by escalators. The Atomium
hosts a museum and is also a venue for special events.
In
Summer : take part in a unique activity: a Death-Ride from the top
sphere of the Atomium! A breathtaking descent of more than 100 meters!
For
individual visitors, the European Parliament
offers audio-guided visits and, during part-sessions, the
chance to attend a parliamentary sitting. Visitors must be at
least 14 years old. Information visits are organized for groups
composed of a minimum of 20 people and a maximum of 45.
Rue de Bouchers
Known
more for the atmospheric charm than the cuisine, Rue de Boucher is a
walking thoroughfare abounding with 17th century stepped gables,
decorated doorways, cafes and restaurants with lavish pavement displays
of seafood, piled high on mounds of ice. It is not recommended to eat
there and is often called a "tourist trap" in regards to menu prices
and quality of food.
Christmas Markets
During
the month of December Brussels’ Grand Place is magically transformed
into a winter wonderland of holiday delights with an enormous Christmas
tree and nightly sound & light shows. Nearby on Place Sainte
Catherine resides a European Christmas Market village made up of wooden
cottages filled with Christmas goodies, European food specialties and
handicrafts.
How must it
feel to pimp for a slovenly whore, doped and ravaged and destroyed by her
abductors, who was once the happiest, most innocent, most beautiful girl in
town?
He
is Baselitz, a name tuberose, not only acoustically, with dirty connotations. He is
Germany’s foremost Modern artist. He is one of those who accepted the thirty
pieces of silver and turned them into a heap of gold. He is a well-received
guest at the London Royal Academy of Arts, which strikes you as odd since
the Brits and the Krauts, never mind what they tell you in Brussels, regard
each other warily. He is loved by the country’s foremost gazettes, like the
FAZ, or the SZ, or the old pansy ZEIT. He can be found in Tate modern. He owns a Giant
Schnauzer with a degree in psychology who handles his castration complex, the
foremost source of his creative inspiration. He produces his masterpieces
watching BigBrother on TV while reclining on a sofa next to a canvas previously splattered
with an undisclosed amount of colours on which he diverts an occasional glance
and then arranges artistically by means of an Italian bread roll using his left
hand only. Once dry, he signs it with his illustrious name, waits until that
one is dry as well, and hangs it up upside-down.
This,
the upside-down, has made him famous.
Ever
repentant Germany, foremost bastion of politically correct forces, where,
rather en passant and widely unnoticed, book burnings and show trials have been
reintroduced and hefty jail sentences are handed down to those who dare to
insist on their constitutional rights and challenge the official credo, is an
El Dorado for those in Modern art with the necessary connections. It is less so
for the ordinary citizen, because here the crunch has shown its ugly claw as
well, particularly since seventy percent of the country’s produce is earmarked
for export and thus a recipe for disaster once the cash flow begins to stagger.
The lawmakers and law enforcers feel uneasy as well, wondering in moments of
quiet reflection if the hate laws they have so carelessly set afloat or applied
might come back and bite them in the backside, once the hour of reckoning
arrives. Like in Nuremberg not long ago. Or in London right now, where the
country’s supreme PC warriors, though not their minders, are accused of
invading Iraq without the faintest shred of legal support and causing the death
of hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders, while the folks at the
International Court of Justice in Den Haag are popping their garters for fear
of being saddled with a trove of their own kind.
As
for the Baselitz’ meteoric ascent on the murky skies of Modern art, the usual
machinations were set in motion. Among thousands of candidates, both academics
or naturals, all waiting eagerly for a hint from the established Modern art
Mafia, now and then one is chosen. Since he is, just like his many contenders,
about as gifted as a bedbug, nobody with a sane mind would assume that
considerations of artistic merit ever played a part. What counts is a rigorous
talent for self-representation, unfettered by the smallest grain of aesthetics
or ethics, an inborn and unlimited vulgarity, and the stated objective to be
the most ruthless Judas Iscariot to the Fine Arts that ever set foot on our
sacred earth. As to the operational level, it works more or less in the
following way. One of the great Modern art dealers, a highly visible member of
the afore mentioned Mafia, contacts a few of his highly invisible godfathers,
strikes a deal, and the Baselitz (or anyone like him) is launched.
Surprised by the sudden onslaught, goes the latter into high gear and produces
twenty masterpieces a day, all of which fetch prices that increase
breathtakingly fast. The press is informed, the usual dolls and pansies from
the art section do their job and tell the astonished aficionado in exalted
crap-art parlance what it is all about, and a new star is born. Next he has the
so far unheard-of idea to present his work hanging upside-down, a clear sign of
sublime genius if there ever was one, and prices go through the roof.
Retrospections in the artist’s honour are arranged, Modern art sanctuaries like
the Moma or Tate modern buy his crap, even the occasional sausage-and-ham
manufacturer is impressed and lays out a sack of ill-gotten money for a slice
of Baselitz.
Now
all this isn’t obviously any news and serves only to cast a quick glance at the
antics of Modern-art-Quislings who are either in direct league with the art
Mafia or have sold their souls, if not to the Devil, then at least to one of
the Mafia’s representatives. Which doesn’t make much of a difference in any
case.
The
antics in detail look like this.
Baselitz is perhaps best
known for painting his motifs upside down as a strategy to free the subject
matter from its content. (Royal
Academy of Arts)
The
act of turning his paintings upside down endows them with instant drama. (The
Times, London)
His work is painted and
displayed upside down to emphasize its surface rather than its subject matter. (Britannica
Online Encyclopaedia)
Upside down is his way to
liberate representation from content. (Gargosian
Gallery)
The
butcher-painter’s upside-down paintings reinvented art. (Royal
Academy of Arts)
In
his paintings he describes the chaos from which order might, or might not come. (National
Galleries of Scotland)
Baselitz’ main interest is
the investigation of his emotional and artistic attitude towards his own work. (L.
Ferrari)
Baselitz’ new watercolours
are the perception of time as a ray stationed on a linear axis supported by the
notion of there being a fixed, infinite future. (David
Nolan)
Just
a few examples of the most hilarious, dumbest, saddest travesty since the
invention of letters. How is it humanly possible that an educated and
intelligent person can write anything like this and still face him- or herself
in a mirror? How must it feel to pimp for a slovenly whore, doped and ravaged
and destroyed by her abductors, who was once the happiest, most innocent, most
beautiful girl in town?
If
I remember well, it was Germaine Greer in her callous and so revealing clobber
of Robert Hughes who is, with some reservations, one of the few vertical men in
the art business. Smart money, she called it. New York real estate tycoons
who laid out ten million greenbacks at a Sotheby’s auction for a rotting old
shark. Put there in the first place by an abominable creep called Hirst. Well,
we know by now how that money was made. In fact, we knew it all along, but
until recently did not dare to call a spade a spade for fear of being labelled
racists. As for the poor shark, one can only presume that it was dropped
immediately after arrival into the Hudson river where it caused considerable
stink before disintegrating completely. Because it is simply inconceivable that
someone can be so absolutely barbarous and keep something so absolutely hideous
in his living room. Or is it?
My
son, if he stands a chance against the many Third-World competitors, will soon
enter one of Europe’s more hallowed Fine Art Academies. To avoid the
Installations, Representations, Videolations, Fecalisations, all exhaustively
underpinned by Marx, Gramsky, Adorno or Foucault, has he opted for Comics, with
the possibility to develop a sound base in realistic drawing that might serve
him well in case things get better and he decides one day to take up the torch.
Not everybody is that lucky.
Take
a young person who has absolved an academy, or studied History of Arts, or
journalism. So many dreams, so many high expectations! Then comes the crude
reality, namely the realization that nearly the entire art establishment,
including academies, the press, the art councils and what not are controlled by
a worldwide Mafia with a rigorous codex that allows no dissent. Which leaves
only two choices: to be upright and brave and turn the back on the whole
pandemonium and face an uncertain future, or to join the Fifth Column, that
veritable thorn in our side, and accept smart money, mountains of it. And
become willing helpers for a band of cultural barbarians who seem to lack any
access to Beauty’s divine joy, and therefore hate it, and thus try to destroy
what they can’t have.
If
a present-day mammon acrobat can siphon billions from a given economy with
impunity, it is an inspired guess that to him the hundred million bucks he lays
out for one of Jackson Pollocks’ hogwash canvasses are only peanuts. The
transaction, widely disseminated in the Wikipedia and similar agitprop annals
as the highest price ever paid for a painting, is of course only another ruse
to make us believe that hogwash art must necessarily be the logical
continuation of our great Christian-European art, simply in view of the sum
involved. A sum so astronomical and obscene that any hardworking citizen would
need thousands of years to accumulate it. But it seems the ruse has backfired,
even turned into an indictment. Because what once provoked only tired disgust,
has now fired a cold anger.
How must it
feel to pimp for a slovenly whore, doped and ravaged and destroyed by her
abductors, who was once the happiest, most innocent, most beautiful girl in
town?
He
is Baselitz, a name tuberose, not only acoustically, with dirty connotations. He is
Germany’s foremost Modern artist. He is one of those who accepted the thirty
pieces of silver and turned them into a heap of gold. He is a well-received
guest at the London Royal Academy of Arts, which strikes you as odd since
the Brits and the Krauts, never mind what they tell you in Brussels, regard
each other warily. He is loved by the country’s foremost gazettes, like the
FAZ, or the SZ, or the old pansy ZEIT. He can be found in Tate modern. He owns a Giant
Schnauzer with a degree in psychology who handles his castration complex, the
foremost source of his creative inspiration. He produces his masterpieces
watching BigBrother on TV while reclining on a sofa next to a canvas previously splattered
with an undisclosed amount of colours on which he diverts an occasional glance
and then arranges artistically by means of an Italian bread roll using his left
hand only. Once dry, he signs it with his illustrious name, waits until that
one is dry as well, and hangs it up upside-down.
This,
the upside-down, has made him famous.
Ever
repentant Germany, foremost bastion of politically correct forces, where,
rather en passant and widely unnoticed, book burnings and show trials have been
reintroduced and hefty jail sentences are handed down to those who dare to
insist on their constitutional rights and challenge the official credo, is an
El Dorado for those in Modern art with the necessary connections. It is less so
for the ordinary citizen, because here the crunch has shown its ugly claw as
well, particularly since seventy percent of the country’s produce is earmarked
for export and thus a recipe for disaster once the cash flow begins to stagger.
The lawmakers and law enforcers feel uneasy as well, wondering in moments of
quiet reflection if the hate laws they have so carelessly set afloat or applied
might come back and bite them in the backside, once the hour of reckoning
arrives. Like in Nuremberg not long ago. Or in London right now, where the
country’s supreme PC warriors, though not their minders, are accused of
invading Iraq without the faintest shred of legal support and causing the death
of hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders, while the folks at the
International Court of Justice in Den Haag are popping their garters for fear
of being saddled with a trove of their own kind.
As
for the Baselitz’ meteoric ascent on the murky skies of Modern art, the usual
machinations were set in motion. Among thousands of candidates, both academics
or naturals, all waiting eagerly for a hint from the established Modern art
Mafia, now and then one is chosen. Since he is, just like his many contenders,
about as gifted as a bedbug, nobody with a sane mind would assume that
considerations of artistic merit ever played a part. What counts is a rigorous
talent for self-representation, unfettered by the smallest grain of aesthetics
or ethics, an inborn and unlimited vulgarity, and the stated objective to be
the most ruthless Judas Iscariot to the Fine Arts that ever set foot on our
sacred earth. As to the operational level, it works more or less in the
following way. One of the great Modern art dealers, a highly visible member of
the afore mentioned Mafia, contacts a few of his highly invisible godfathers,
strikes a deal, and the Baselitz (or anyone like him) is launched.
Surprised by the sudden onslaught, goes the latter into high gear and produces
twenty masterpieces a day, all of which fetch prices that increase
breathtakingly fast. The press is informed, the usual dolls and pansies from
the art section do their job and tell the astonished aficionado in exalted
crap-art parlance what it is all about, and a new star is born. Next he has the
so far unheard-of idea to present his work hanging upside-down, a clear sign of
sublime genius if there ever was one, and prices go through the roof.
Retrospections in the artist’s honour are arranged, Modern art sanctuaries like
the Moma or Tate modern buy his crap, even the occasional sausage-and-ham
manufacturer is impressed and lays out a sack of ill-gotten money for a slice
of Baselitz.
Now
all this isn’t obviously any news and serves only to cast a quick glance at the
antics of Modern-art-Quislings who are either in direct league with the art
Mafia or have sold their souls, if not to the Devil, then at least to one of
the Mafia’s representatives. Which doesn’t make much of a difference in any
case.
The
antics in detail look like this.
Baselitz is perhaps best
known for painting his motifs upside down as a strategy to free the subject
matter from its content. (Royal
Academy of Arts)
The
act of turning his paintings upside down endows them with instant drama. (The
Times, London)
His work is painted and
displayed upside down to emphasize its surface rather than its subject matter. (Britannica
Online Encyclopaedia)
Upside down is his way to
liberate representation from content. (Gargosian
Gallery)
The
butcher-painter’s upside-down paintings reinvented art. (Royal
Academy of Arts)
In
his paintings he describes the chaos from which order might, or might not come. (National
Galleries of Scotland)
Baselitz’ main interest is
the investigation of his emotional and artistic attitude towards his own work. (L.
Ferrari)
Baselitz’ new watercolours
are the perception of time as a ray stationed on a linear axis supported by the
notion of there being a fixed, infinite future. (David
Nolan)
Just
a few examples of the most hilarious, dumbest, saddest travesty since the
invention of letters. How is it humanly possible that an educated and
intelligent person can write anything like this and still face him- or herself
in a mirror? How must it feel to pimp for a slovenly whore, doped and ravaged
and destroyed by her abductors, who was once the happiest, most innocent, most
beautiful girl in town?
If
I remember well, it was Germaine Greer in her callous and so revealing clobber
of Robert Hughes who is, with some reservations, one of the few vertical men in
the art business. Smart money, she called it. New York real estate tycoons
who laid out ten million greenbacks at a Sotheby’s auction for a rotting old
shark. Put there in the first place by an abominable creep called Hirst. Well,
we know by now how that money was made. In fact, we knew it all along, but
until recently did not dare to call a spade a spade for fear of being labelled
racists. As for the poor shark, one can only presume that it was dropped
immediately after arrival into the Hudson river where it caused considerable
stink before disintegrating completely. Because it is simply inconceivable that
someone can be so absolutely barbarous and keep something so absolutely hideous
in his living room. Or is it?
My
son, if he stands a chance against the many Third-World competitors, will soon
enter one of Europe’s more hallowed Fine Art Academies. To avoid the
Installations, Representations, Videolations, Fecalisations, all exhaustively
underpinned by Marx, Gramsky, Adorno or Foucault, has he opted for Comics, with
the possibility to develop a sound base in realistic drawing that might serve
him well in case things get better and he decides one day to take up the torch.
Not everybody is that lucky.
Take
a young person who has absolved an academy, or studied History of Arts, or
journalism. So many dreams, so many high expectations! Then comes the crude
reality, namely the realization that nearly the entire art establishment,
including academies, the press, the art councils and what not are controlled by
a worldwide Mafia with a rigorous codex that allows no dissent. Which leaves
only two choices: to be upright and brave and turn the back on the whole
pandemonium and face an uncertain future, or to join the Fifth Column, that
veritable thorn in our side, and accept smart money, mountains of it. And
become willing helpers for a band of cultural barbarians who seem to lack any
access to Beauty’s divine joy, and therefore hate it, and thus try to destroy
what they can’t have.
If
a present-day mammon acrobat can siphon billions from a given economy with
impunity, it is an inspired guess that to him the hundred million bucks he lays
out for one of Jackson Pollocks’ hogwash canvasses are only peanuts. The
transaction, widely disseminated in the Wikipedia and similar agitprop annals
as the highest price ever paid for a painting, is of course only another ruse
to make us believe that hogwash art must necessarily be the logical
continuation of our great Christian-European art, simply in view of the sum
involved. A sum so astronomical and obscene that any hardworking citizen would
need thousands of years to accumulate it. But it seems the ruse has backfired,
even turned into an indictment. Because what once provoked only tired disgust,
has now fired a cold anger.
From collapsible matryoshkas to inflatable Mickeys
The globe is spinning. Its leading team of bumbling spinmeisters, statist incompetents, unalloyed greedsters, malicious socialists and phony conservatives is running this tired Western jalopy toward The Rock of Immovable Reality. Harpo, Gekko, Barko and Sarko are together in the catbird seat, still throwing off comforting gibberish but testing the buckles on their ejection seats.
The systemic faults created by the gross incompetence and corruption of governments (1) have been exploited by the bankers to raid the bank. When reality check came and real estate values crashed, governments bailed out the malefactors and fanned the flames of fear to implement “solutions.” Such solutions took two forms: “bailout,” i.e. the transfer of toxic debt from the banks’ balance sheets to the governments’ balance sheets, or “stimulus,” i.e. throwing easy money at the hoi polloi and further inflating the governments’ balance sheets.
All that was merely another instance of the Western model of misgovernance, based on rolling over the consequences of wickedness and folly onto future generations. That protects the perpetrators but worsens the ultimate consequences for the rest.
The moral hazard and future consequences of bailing the banksters out were known. The Telegraph’s 11 February 2009 headline said it all: “European banks' toxic debts risk overwhelming EU governments.” Furthermore, the monetary/fiscal plague afflicting the world now erupted not in 2007 but in 1998. Its course was predicted and warnings were sounded fromthe outset by several Cassandras unwelcome in the corridors of power (2).
It started when Russia defaulted on its sovereign debt in 1998, precipitating the collapse of Long Term Capital Management and the subsequent near-collapse of stock markets worldwide. Central banks, particularly the U.S. Fed, responded by what money pros call “opening the spigot.” All that easy money created the Tech Bubble of 1998-1999, and the inevitable crash of 2000-2002. And that opened the central banks’ spigots much more than the first time – particularly the American spigots that were controlled by the hugely misguided Alan Greenspan.
Torrents of cheap money looking for a harbor found their way to the real estate market as of 2000. Real estate price doubled and tripled, particularly in places that had a sunny climate and beaches (e.g. Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Florida, Coastal California) or a boomtown location (e.g. London, New York, Las Vegas). Thus, the worldwide housing bubble and its subsequent and, again, inevitable, crash. According to Martin Weiss of Weiss Research, just the American investors’ losses were $6.6 trillion from the Tech Wreck and $15.5 trillion from the burst Housing Bubble, a total of $22.1 trillion.
Central banks, however, read from the same book that has only one paragraph. With the third crash precipitated by exactly the same policies of cheap credit and too much money sloshing about, they just tore off the spigots completely, set interest rates at near zero, and let it rip. Hence “bailout,” “stimulus” and the resulting fourth bubble: the bubble of sovereign debt.
Between 15 September 2008 and 1 July 2009, for instance, the central banks of England, U.S., Switzerland and EU expanded their balance sheets (i.e. printed more paper money) by 127%, 119%, 80% and 39%, respectively (3). It’s the biggest bubble of them all. And now, this inflatable Mickey too is collapsing with a hiss.
They who inflated all these liquidity monsters in the first place, cannot but create “solutions” that are worse than the problems. The only problem that they have solved is the problem of governments’ lust for more power. Now they have much more such power.
With Ben Bernanke on the cover of Times Magazine, and Martin Wolf declaring at Financial Times that economists saved civilization, it’s worth reasserting that this has been just a classical Club of Crooks and Loons swindle: transform a Wall Street bankruptcy into a sovereign debt bankruptcy. Print money in a dozen underhanded ways to postpone a deflationary depression on your watch, even if that entails hyperinflation some years down the road. Or, to paraphrase the financial publisher Bill Bonner, Japan first, Zimbabwe later.
Gravity contra the toxic triflers
The rollover process underlies all of Western society. Evolving since 1945, it’s an unsustainable socialist-utopian model of government munificence in bountiful welfare, generous retirement privileges, socialized health care, heavily subsidized immigration, social engineering, streaming torrents of money and other unilateral favors onto Third World peoples and, in the tragic case of America’s unique madness, fighting costly wars for them too. This, coupled with socialist legislation, coddling labor unions, restricting and perverting employers’ hiring standards and practices, subverting meritocracy for the sake of a soothing race-and-gender fancy, and robbing at gunpoint the productive half of the state’s subjects in order to finance the chimera for the unproductive half.
This socio-economic model, entailing the state’s outlay of 40-50% of GDP annually, mostly for social transfers, had been leading the West to bankruptcy even before the earthquake of 2007-2009. The good intentions have been so vast and decoupled from reality, so conducive to financial rot and corruption that no possible tax-grabs could pay for them. The consumer plenty and coddling of minorities in America and the thick social safety net of Europe had to be based on government debts and government schemes to roll them over onto future generations.
Now, when the severe global recession has resulted in stalled business and wide unemployment everywhere, the tax revenues of the redistributive state with an aging population are going steeply down, while its social outlays would be going steeply up even without bailout and stimulus. With those two instruments of fiscal destruction added, the neo-socialist model is facing fiscal and social catastrophe. It’s kept alive with money printing, fleecing the last possible ducat from the working serfs, and fudging government accounting books -- but that cannot last.
What is needed is dismantling the utopian/corrupt model of Snatcher State (4) – the fiefdom of the Club of Crooks and Loons. This would entail reducing drastically the areas that are subject to counterproductive government meddling (5), letting go the people benefiting from such meddling as paid dispensers or beneficiaries, and reducing government outlays accordingly. That, however, is no longer possible due to the Looters Coalition in the 50-50 State – both concepts elaborated in previous chapters. In a democracy, when those in power engineer a 50%+ electoral majority whose self-interest demands the perpetuation of the status quo, change is not possible except after society has ruined itself.
Democracy depends on virtue and self-restraint. As Benjamin Franklin stated, “When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” But even Franklin could not have foreseen that through demographic engineering and multicultural indoctrination, social capital in the West will so diminish that people don’t care anymore if their grabbing precipitates the end of what used to be their republic.
The Western neo-socialist welfare state therefore finds itself unable to curb the social privileges and entitlements that it has been dispensing with such abandon. The tax-eating half, inured to the easy life, is unwilling to let go of the teat of state. The lavish payrolls, privileges and retirement benefits won by public sector unions from corrupt politicians drive all levels of governments into guaranteed future bankruptcy, despite the rollover tricks. Private sector labor unions do the same to their employers. The latter don’t have the luxury of the accounting fraud that proliferates in government, so they move their manufacturing to Asia or go bankrupt. They can’t even go bankrupt in peace anymore, for the government shows up with a potful of taxpayers’ money, as it did with General Motors.
A year ago, Newsweek ran a cover proclaiming “We are all socialist now” and showing two hands shaking: a blue one symbolizing the Left and the red one symbolizing the Right. But these two colors actually relate as per this icon:
At any rate, these debates are now obsolete. We are all pigs now.
From PIGS to PIIGS to PIIGS JAUK BABEL FR US
PIIGS JAUK, BABEL FR US may be read as “Pigs trifle, Babel for us” (6). But it may also be read as Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Japan, United Kingdom, Baltics, Belgium, France, United States. And that’s not including teetering Eastern Europe, and China that may blow up for its own unique reasons. All are pigs that have been trifling with basic rules of common sense reality, bequeathing a crumbling global Babel to their subjects jointly and severally.
The acronym initially contained Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, later added Italy, but that is not nearly enough. 16 countries in the Eurozone have deficits more than twice the allowed 3% limit, with heavy debt burdens and limited ability to sell more debt paper. Wherever one looks in the global economy, one sees nothing but a trail of erroneous premises and fraudulent promises – 45 years of rule by the criminals and the utopians, the crooks and the Body Snatchers (7), all in a pile in that Western jalopy careening toward the immutable majesty of Reality.
All the PIIGS JAUK BABEL FR US are propping their near-bankrupt financial systems. While Greece occupies the headlines now, we are in a Twilight Zone here where every shadow has a penumbra, every word may mean its opposite, and every agency has its own agenda. While most worry about the budget deficit of Italy, Deutsche Bank estimates that Italys’ 2010 deficit of 5.4% of GDP will be lower than Germany’s 6.3%. While media are astir with speculations of Greece’s bankruptcy, insiders talk about a “Greek-style budget crisis” in the UK, and American pundits ask “Will California go Greek?”
The index of global Sovereign Debt illness is in these metrics (8):
Debt to GDP ratio Govt. Budget Deficit Projected 2010 as % of GDP Projected 2010
The Gekko-tripped neo-socialist state in Europe, North America and Japan is hollowing out financially. The taxonomy comprises three main groups: countries whose metastized banks broke their hosts’ backs despite an otherwise healthy economic environment, e.g. Iceland and Ireland; countries whose socialist governance destroyed fiscal sanity even with a healthy banking sector, e.g. Spain; or the majority of countries that got it from both sides by mixing Gekko financial capitalism with socialist bailout for the crooks and wasteful “stimulus” for the flyover people.
Iceland almost went under through the gross malfeasance of its banksters and their government cronies. Iceland’s banks had €100 billion-worth of dubious assets on their books when its central bank had €2 billion in foreign currency reserves. The three largest banks, Landsbanki, Kaupthing and Glitnir had a balance sheet total ten times the size of Iceland's Gross Domestic Product. In September 2008, three weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, they had all been nationalized.
Iceland had converted the imminent bankruptcy of its banks into a near-bankruptcy for itself. “All of a sudden,” relays Der Spiegel, “Iceland was Europe's crash-test lab, for it seemed that what it was experiencing would sooner or later befall the rest of the world: a huge national debt, economic crisis, unemployment and inflation.”
Just to honor the claims of British and Dutch depositors in Icesave, which Iceland must do as per guarantees of its government, comes to €12,000 per each of Iceland’s nearly 320,000 residents. The ruling elite of this nice country of fire and ice has effectively deep-frozen it for the next 15 years.
"Will sovereign debt be the next sub-prime?” asked the Financial Times in November 2009. Yes, answered a sovereign debtor, Dubai World, seeking to “restructure” a major part of its $59-billion debt in loans from Western (primary British) banks. Apparently, the world does not need a sail-shaped 7-star hotel and a palm-shaped artificial island for artificial kitsch homes in the middle of nowhere, after all. But Dubai’s $59 billion is not even the appetizer in this giant feast of gargantuan debt gluttons.
The engines were still warm in the Ferraris and Porsches abandoned in panic at the Dubai International Airport by fleeing expat deadbeats, when European stock markets dropped 3%. Soon thereafter, the PIGS contagion erupted.
Greece, where the loons are few but the crooks abound, is leading the bacchanal vanguard, as may be expected of any warm Mediterranean hard-socialist plutocrat oligarchy powered by corruption and retsina. There is an interesting parallel in chardonnay-fuelled California, except there the loons far outnumber the crooks, the socialist corruption is more genteel, and government budget deficit is a paltry $41.6 billion versus Greece’s $50 billion, if incurred for similar reasons.
That Greece is even a part of the euro-zone demonstrates how defenseless the pigment-challenged Northerners are against the fanciful poetry (from the Greek poiēsis) of people with thousands of years of practice. With $420 billion government debt at 124% of GDP – twice the official Eurozone limit and nearly three times what Russia owned when it defaulted in 1998– Greece would lead the PIIGS the way of bacon even if its deficit were not over four times the official limit of 3% of GDP. For years, the Greek government hid this situation by accounting gimmicks and complex derivative swaps.
The hedge vultures are betting that Greece will default on its sovereign debt, the Greek government repeats the windup promise of austerity, and Germany is mumbling, "We give you cash, you give us Corfu". But fifty thousand rampaging Che Guevarra wannabes on Syntagma Square in Athens, a few Molotov cocktails on Ermou Street, a blockade of the major roads by farmers inured to handouts, and the promised tight belt and the tight purse will both come undone.
No one knows how the bitter Greek socialist satire will end. But some hint may again be deduced by observing where the vultures perch. Hedge funds currently have the largest short position against the euro ever: €11.5 billion, with €4.4 billion long euro leaving the net at €7.1 billion (9). And George Soros recently opined, “The euro will face bigger tests than Greece”.
It’s not coincidental that German banks carry $43 billion in Greek debt. Germany’s economy is famously strong, but it’s in jeopardy. By the end of 2008, Germany’s bank bailout program had committed €480 billion of taxpayers’ money and had become a “Bottomless Pit”. Mimicking the American model it derided, the German government approved this bonfire, whipped it through the upper and lower houses of the parliament and enacted it — all in the space of five days. Hypo Real Estate alone, Europe’s largest mortgage bank, received €52 billion in guarantees from Germany's bank rescue fund. It will not be enough, as Hypo has billions more in unrealized losses.
Germany’s economy contracted by 5% in 2009, despite its stimulus schemes like the copycat of the American “cash for clunkers” program, and increasing the public deficit to over 6% of GDP. And that’s before considering the de facto devaluation of the euro it may have to accept in order to save the far worse sovereign debtors in the Eurozone. What Germany is not considering is overhauling its tax-and-redistribute fiscal premises that must derail it eventually.
Germany can at least semi-afford its socialism, for now. But countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal that do not possess Germany’s industrial might but play in the socialist sandlot have been brought to their knees by Reality. The model relying on the coddling of workers unions and shafting employers, slack work ethic, generous unemployment and retirement benefits, public health care, high taxation, a crushing burden of bureaucracy and disincentives to entrepreneurship is the same old rollover chimera of Western neo-socialism, waiting for history’s inevitable spike.
All you had to know about the future of Portugal’s economy you could have predicted when its Maoist-Trotskyist Block won 10% of the vote in 2009. All you needed to predict the future of Spain’s sovereign debt transpired when in 2004 a utopian Socialist, José Luis Zapatero, was elected by popular vote as Spain’s Prime Minister.
Leviathan’s debt-stoked teats entice, and the lure of the free lunch is irresistible to most that lost the old compass of virtue. And so, the needed belt-tightening in Portugal cannot pass the legislature, but increased outlays do pass. The government is impotent, and parliamentary figures talk of the country no longer being governable and losing international credibility.
Spain will have $203.7 billion of maturing syndicated debt in the next six years, equivalent to one fifth of the country’s annual GDP and much more than Italy or even Greece will have to face. Yet, Finance Minister Elena Salgado talks of reduction in government expenditures, except the little matters of “social welfare,” education, foreign aid and anti-terrorism efforts plus the more reasonable outlays of unemployment benefits and unidentifiable “research and development.”
The multiculti neo-socialist state does have a penchant for spending on foreign aid when its own people need aid, decreasing incentives to work via its “social welfare,” and increasing in perpetuity spending to counter declines in education results and rises in terrorism while continuing to import the people who cause such declines and rises. Not to speak of its anathema on such bits of simple “extreme right” wisdom like, Immigration or Welfare; choose one.
Ratings agencies are probably going to downgrade the sovereign debt of both Spain and Portugal, their financing costs will rise even more steeply than their steep rises in taxes, but the Socialist model will stand fast until it crashes.
Poor Ireland, the erstwhile European Tiger, had a better model for running a country, and it earned what it was spending. But it also had its Gekkos that blew the bank. Lenders covered by state guarantees had tens of billions euros in speculative property loans on their books. They were hammered by falling local property prices as badly as American banks were in the bigger frog pond. According to Bloomberg, Irish property prices have fallen by half over the last two years.
Anglo Irish Bank, the most aggressive mortgage lender, was nationalized after discovery of over 100 million euros in sweetheart credit it had extended to its own chairman. The Irish government has pumped €3 billions into Anglo-Irish, and pledged to inject €3.5 billion each into Allied Irish Bank and Bank of Ireland. As well, the government is eating up a staggering total of €77 billions of reckless loans made by all Irish financial institutions. That reads like a script written in Lower Manhattan.
Ireland at least seems to be able to squeeze itself with austerity measures enough to pull trough. The problem is that contagion spreads. While you may be worrying about Ireland’s debt, Morgan Stanley is already preparing for a UK sovereign debt crisis in 2010. British citizens will soon be paying a 20% VAT, and the yield on 10-year British debt notes is now 4.06% -- higher than Spain’s. But it won’t be enough.
Cool Britannia is like a nightmare virtual reality prophecy for the United States, on display ten years before the due date for the larger doppelgänger financially and in every other way. Its deficits are not the result of just a banking crash and a cyclical recession, but of decades of mismanagement and consuming the seed stock of future harvests per the game rules of a debauched democracy.
The Bank of International Settlements has disclosed that European banks have $2.1 trillion in exposure to sovereign debt of the PIGS alone, with French and German banks carrying almost half of that. In news lingo, “PIGS Exposure Explains ‘Shotgun Greek Wedding.” To show that its economists read the same books as the keepers of open spigots do at the U.S. Fed, the European Central Bank (ECB) had loaned €442 billion (then $622 billion) at an easy 1% to European banks. They promptly spent it on buying the high-yield sovereign debt of the fiscally weak EU members. Not only is this a camouflaged “quantitative easing,” i.e. American-style money printing, but it has added to the tremendous overhang of risky debt in Europe too, like in the United States.
And even that is just the surface. EU, Swiss and Swedish banks hold $1.5 trillion in mortgage and consumer loans from Eastern Europe. “Ur All Pigs From Hell!”, states an American financier, Gordon T. Long who shows that Eastern Europe is the banking industry’s ultimate subprime pit, with investors short the region’s debt more than that of the PIGS. On top of that, per the IMF, European and British banks have ¾ as much exposure to US toxic debt as American banks do. The reckoning is far from completed.
What is clear is that eventually, in one way or another, the ECB will have to open the euro spigots far more, to avoid the collapse of this debt tower. Not the debts of banks any longer, but the debts of nations. Euro pashas will shrug-off their serfs’ plaints in the more disciplined Eurozone countries with tales of how higher inflation rates are the cost they have to pay to prevent a break-up of the European Monetary Union, which would be even more expensive. In other words, like all the calamities the ruling Crooks & Loons have visited on their peoples since the 1960s, “The terrible mess we have unleashed upon you is now so deep that digging yourselves out will be more expensive than adding onto the pile.”
The problem is that it may not be enough, unless Germany wants to relive its Weimar, which it won’t. Hence the existential question: When we are all pigs, in a system run by swineherds, who ultimately holds up the collapsing tower of defaulting sovereign debt?
By permission, Jesse's Café Américain. Left to right, Timothy Geithner of the U.S. Treasury, Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs.
When Athens ruins in Illinois
The IMF forecast in November that U.S. debt will be 99.5% percent of GDP in 2011. The U.K.’s will reach 94.1%. The Obama wrecking crew has proposed a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011, to “spur the recovery”. Total US government (fed, state, local) outlay in 2010 will be 44.5% of GDP -- coasting toward a perch in the “50-50 Club” from which there is no exit but through social catastrophe. In the entire history of the United States, this level was breached only during three years of World War 2, and otherwise not approximated even remotely, until 2008.
These are the strangest of times. If would take a Gibbon to paint the whole picture, and the sagas of even the smaller players like Belgium’s Dexia and Fortis Bank could make Thomas Mann proud. How then, to deal with the wily octopus, Goldman Sachs, that straddles Wall Street, the U.S. Government, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and may bag the European Central Bank too? How to deal in a paragraph with its lucrative currency swaps engineering that hid Greece’s debt then, and its shorting of Greece’s debt now? Moreover, according to ongoing revelations, e.g. here, Goldman was not the only bank, and Greece not the only country to have engaged in debt-hiding swap transactions. There is a whole family of cephalopods to deal with, and many more shoes will drop relative to the eight-legged banksters.
Athens too signifies more than meets the eye. While the corruption and spending promiscuousness of the Greek state occupies the news as this is being written, it’s Athens, New York, and Athens, Illinois where the ruin is just as compelling. There are towns named Athens in 15 American states, and some of those states are at a greater risk of bankruptcy than Greece. 48 of the 50 of them have budget deficits, the worst being in California (-49%), Illinois (-47%) Arizona (-41%), Nevada (-38%) and New York (-32%). Some may go bankrupt, as will some American cities.
California, the world’s eighth-largest economy, has a hole of $41.6 billion in an $82.9 billion budget (10). It has a bottomless well in education, as over 50% of its students are largely uneducable “Hispanic” immigrants, legal and illegal. The state has a bottomless well in healthcare, transportation, justice and prison systems, for the same reason. All this grows the size of state bureaucracy too, and Public Employee Unions are bleeding California dry. Repair is not possible, except for temporary Band-Aids, because it is now a 55% - 45% society with the tax-eaters in the majority. The tax-payers, mostly white, are leaving and raising the tax-eaters’ proportion even more. California voters rejected a bill called, The California Live Within Our Means Act, and will continue draining from the state everything they can, until they leave it a decayed husk.
Illinois has a $13 billion hole in a $28 billion budget and is “in utter crisis” (hat-tip, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard). New York's budget deficit is $8.2 billion and the state, per The Wall Street Journal, has become “a carnival of spendthrifts, sexual miscreants and the all-purpose ethically challenged." Even Oklahoma has an 18.5% shortfall, making it No. 1 in the U.S, as boasts, incorrectly, a Tulsa newspaper.
Basically, America is finished, says Charles Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner in Berkshire Hathaway. Mr. Munger excoriates the same illusory elements of greedy financial capitalism that we have limned in the last few chapters. But as a left-liberal, he only sees Gekko and Sarko (i.e. Wall Street and war-happy Republicans) as culpable, whereas Harpo and Barko, which is to say Big Government incompetence, socialist corruption and unions’ greed (11), plus the bi-partisan mega-sabotage through Third World immigration, have much to do with it too.
Essentially, in every Western nation, government has grown beyond the capacity of taxpayers to bear, the tax base is diminishing through declining birth rates, and the outlays are growing exponentially through immigration acting upon the welfare state and unions’ pressure acting upon socialist politicians.
The texture of the Rock of Reality that the West will meet entails the end of a 90–year, gradually intensifying experiment in fiat money, fake prosperity based on growing debt, statist stifling of liberty through excessive taxation and unwarranted redistribution, and nutty economic theories. This hodgepodge has rested on two theoretic pillars. The first is the grafting of Bismarckian social safety nets that protected hard-working people with an average life expectancy of 46, onto a whole range of fruity freeloaders whose life expectancy is 76 (German male). The second is Keynesianism, specious already 90 years ago and currently breaking the back of the world’s economic system through “bailout” and “stimulus.” To this, one must add such awful and particularly Anglo-Saxon cripples like the Efficient Markets Theory, Supply-side Economics, and self-hollowing through “free trade” (12) and globalization. To top it all is the quaint notion that the way to prosperity is via consumption of imports on credit rather than through the production of exportable goods on savings.
Let us think again about the phrase that encapsulates the sentiment of “Austrian” economists or just people with a hand calculator and no PhD: Japan now, Zimbabwe later. That obviously refers to a prolonged deflationary recession that the ruling elite tries to beat back by means that do not take out the power-sharing malefactors who have caused it, but instead ensure future sovereign defaults or hyperinflation for all. But that phrase is apposite in another way, for the West is slowly turning from resembling Japan, i.e. an ordered society of high-intelligence people largely sharing the norms and nourishing content of their evolved civilization, into a miserable Babel of breakdown, chaos, social cacophony, crime, terror, fraud, incompetence, and inferiority to societies not run according to the same insane formula, most notably China and the former Soviet satellites in Central Europe (13). It’s no longer just about very big financial problems. It’s about this:
The Garden of Earthly Delight, Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1504) – detail from the right wing
The progressive transformation into Zimbabwe may take another five years or forty, and it won’t be the same everywhere. But the time to start preparing is now. The time to start acting toward regaining what has been lost is now. To this, the rest of this cogitation will be devoted.
Previous articles in this series can be read here.
(1) As an example of both in America one might adduce the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (a.k.a. The U.S. Taxpayers’ Rape Act); the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (a.k.a. The Extended U.S. Taxpayers’ Rape Act); the 1999 U.S. Congress repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that since 1933 had kept deposit banking separate from “investment”, i.e. casino, banking; the numerous failures by the same body to enact controls on margin and derivatives trading. Books may be filled with such stupid or evil legislation in every Western country.
(2) A quick sampling of the Americans would include Karl Denninger, Mish Shedlock, Bill Bonner, Richard Doughty, Martin Weiss, Michael Hodges.
(3) Data compiled by Agorafinancial.
(4) Snatcher State, Body Snatcher, Pod, all relate to the central metaphor of this series. The basic analogy reverts to Part 1, where we cited the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the film, alien “Body Snatchers” produce giant legume Pods in hothouses and other hatcheries. The developed Pods become Body Snatchers who replace living people while appearing to be identical to them. The new Body Snatchers then grow new Pods from which new Body Snatchers develop – until the whole population has been “snatched.”
(5) While increasing government activity in areas which it was originally constituted to handle and in which its activity has been conspicuously absent or deficient. Those include the control of borders and admission to residency and citizenship, control of instruments of greed and recklessness such as fractional banking, derivatives, stock manipulations etc.
(6) jauk = “trifle” in Scots, e.g. “And ne'er, tho' out o' sight, to jauk or play” in Robert Burns’ The Cotter’s Saturday Night.
(7) See footnote #5.
(8) The most recent data sources were selected as indicated below. Note that these metrics are published by various credible institutions, yet they differ widely. For instance, the widely quoted Nov. 2009 OECD deficit estimates differ significantly from the ones in the table here, most of which are from January 2010.
P - Portuguese government estimate reported by AP on 27 January 2010
P1 - Portugal deficit ratio as per 20 January 2010 IMF pronoucement.
UK - Every source gives a different estimate. Deutsche Bank estimates 11.5%, UK’s Alistair Darling projects 12.6%, Business Week, 13.2%. We chose the 13% estimate of EconomyWatch.com.
US – Debt to GDP per US Government Spending.com. The ratio here is the one used in all the major sources: Federal debt to GDP. But the overspending being as outrageous in many American states as it is at the Federal level, it makes sense to look at the aggregate debt level too. With states’ and local authorities’ debt added, the aggregate 2010 debt level changes from $13.786 trillion to $16.984 trillion. With the 2010 GDP at $14,623.9 billion, it changes the Debt-to-GDP metric from 94.27% to 116.14%. US Government (Federal only) deficit ratio estimate per US Government Spending.com here. This is only the Federal deficit metric.
(9) Per Société Générale, monthly hedge fund report, posted here.
(10) Accurate numbers are impossible to ascertain. There are as many numbers as there are reputable sources, not even counting those less so. This ratio therefore, $41.6 / $82.9 is slightly higher than the 49% deficit relayed in the preceding paragraph.
(11) According to The Sunshine Review, total states’ expenditures exceeded $2.2 trillion last year, of which wages and benefits amounted to $1.1 trillion. Which means that 50% of all state budgets are driven by the unsustainable contracts that civil service unions squeezed from corrupt politicians in exchange for votes.
(12) See Ian Fletcher and Edward Luttwak, Free Trade Doesn't Work: What Should Replace it and Why, U.S. Business & Industry Council, 2010.
(13) We are not glossing over China’s own faults and problems, many of which are endemic, very serious, and would take pages to describe; it’s just that China has chosen to banish most of the particular depravity that is destroying the West.
From collapsible matryoshkas to inflatable Mickeys
The globe is spinning. Its leading team of bumbling spinmeisters, statist incompetents, unalloyed greedsters, malicious socialists and phony conservatives is running this tired Western jalopy toward The Rock of Immovable Reality. Harpo, Gekko, Barko and Sarko are together in the catbird seat, still throwing off comforting gibberish but testing the buckles on their ejection seats.
The systemic faults created by the gross incompetence and corruption of governments (1) have been exploited by the bankers to raid the bank. When reality check came and real estate values crashed, governments bailed out the malefactors and fanned the flames of fear to implement “solutions.” Such solutions took two forms: “bailout,” i.e. the transfer of toxic debt from the banks’ balance sheets to the governments’ balance sheets, or “stimulus,” i.e. throwing easy money at the hoi polloi and further inflating the governments’ balance sheets.
All that was merely another instance of the Western model of misgovernance, based on rolling over the consequences of wickedness and folly onto future generations. That protects the perpetrators but worsens the ultimate consequences for the rest.
The moral hazard and future consequences of bailing the banksters out were known. The Telegraph’s 11 February 2009 headline said it all: “European banks' toxic debts risk overwhelming EU governments.” Furthermore, the monetary/fiscal plague afflicting the world now erupted not in 2007 but in 1998. Its course was predicted and warnings were sounded fromthe outset by several Cassandras unwelcome in the corridors of power (2).
It started when Russia defaulted on its sovereign debt in 1998, precipitating the collapse of Long Term Capital Management and the subsequent near-collapse of stock markets worldwide. Central banks, particularly the U.S. Fed, responded by what money pros call “opening the spigot.” All that easy money created the Tech Bubble of 1998-1999, and the inevitable crash of 2000-2002. And that opened the central banks’ spigots much more than the first time – particularly the American spigots that were controlled by the hugely misguided Alan Greenspan.
Torrents of cheap money looking for a harbor found their way to the real estate market as of 2000. Real estate price doubled and tripled, particularly in places that had a sunny climate and beaches (e.g. Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Florida, Coastal California) or a boomtown location (e.g. London, New York, Las Vegas). Thus, the worldwide housing bubble and its subsequent and, again, inevitable, crash. According to Martin Weiss of Weiss Research, just the American investors’ losses were $6.6 trillion from the Tech Wreck and $15.5 trillion from the burst Housing Bubble, a total of $22.1 trillion.
Central banks, however, read from the same book that has only one paragraph. With the third crash precipitated by exactly the same policies of cheap credit and too much money sloshing about, they just tore off the spigots completely, set interest rates at near zero, and let it rip. Hence “bailout,” “stimulus” and the resulting fourth bubble: the bubble of sovereign debt.
Between 15 September 2008 and 1 July 2009, for instance, the central banks of England, U.S., Switzerland and EU expanded their balance sheets (i.e. printed more paper money) by 127%, 119%, 80% and 39%, respectively (3). It’s the biggest bubble of them all. And now, this inflatable Mickey too is collapsing with a hiss.
They who inflated all these liquidity monsters in the first place, cannot but create “solutions” that are worse than the problems. The only problem that they have solved is the problem of governments’ lust for more power. Now they have much more such power.
With Ben Bernanke on the cover of Times Magazine, and Martin Wolf declaring at Financial Times that economists saved civilization, it’s worth reasserting that this has been just a classical Club of Crooks and Loons swindle: transform a Wall Street bankruptcy into a sovereign debt bankruptcy. Print money in a dozen underhanded ways to postpone a deflationary depression on your watch, even if that entails hyperinflation some years down the road. Or, to paraphrase the financial publisher Bill Bonner, Japan first, Zimbabwe later.
Gravity contra the toxic triflers
The rollover process underlies all of Western society. Evolving since 1945, it’s an unsustainable socialist-utopian model of government munificence in bountiful welfare, generous retirement privileges, socialized health care, heavily subsidized immigration, social engineering, streaming torrents of money and other unilateral favors onto Third World peoples and, in the tragic case of America’s unique madness, fighting costly wars for them too. This, coupled with socialist legislation, coddling labor unions, restricting and perverting employers’ hiring standards and practices, subverting meritocracy for the sake of a soothing race-and-gender fancy, and robbing at gunpoint the productive half of the state’s subjects in order to finance the chimera for the unproductive half.
This socio-economic model, entailing the state’s outlay of 40-50% of GDP annually, mostly for social transfers, had been leading the West to bankruptcy even before the earthquake of 2007-2009. The good intentions have been so vast and decoupled from reality, so conducive to financial rot and corruption that no possible tax-grabs could pay for them. The consumer plenty and coddling of minorities in America and the thick social safety net of Europe had to be based on government debts and government schemes to roll them over onto future generations.
Now, when the severe global recession has resulted in stalled business and wide unemployment everywhere, the tax revenues of the redistributive state with an aging population are going steeply down, while its social outlays would be going steeply up even without bailout and stimulus. With those two instruments of fiscal destruction added, the neo-socialist model is facing fiscal and social catastrophe. It’s kept alive with money printing, fleecing the last possible ducat from the working serfs, and fudging government accounting books -- but that cannot last.
What is needed is dismantling the utopian/corrupt model of Snatcher State (4) – the fiefdom of the Club of Crooks and Loons. This would entail reducing drastically the areas that are subject to counterproductive government meddling (5), letting go the people benefiting from such meddling as paid dispensers or beneficiaries, and reducing government outlays accordingly. That, however, is no longer possible due to the Looters Coalition in the 50-50 State – both concepts elaborated in previous chapters. In a democracy, when those in power engineer a 50%+ electoral majority whose self-interest demands the perpetuation of the status quo, change is not possible except after society has ruined itself.
Democracy depends on virtue and self-restraint. As Benjamin Franklin stated, “When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” But even Franklin could not have foreseen that through demographic engineering and multicultural indoctrination, social capital in the West will so diminish that people don’t care anymore if their grabbing precipitates the end of what used to be their republic.
The Western neo-socialist welfare state therefore finds itself unable to curb the social privileges and entitlements that it has been dispensing with such abandon. The tax-eating half, inured to the easy life, is unwilling to let go of the teat of state. The lavish payrolls, privileges and retirement benefits won by public sector unions from corrupt politicians drive all levels of governments into guaranteed future bankruptcy, despite the rollover tricks. Private sector labor unions do the same to their employers. The latter don’t have the luxury of the accounting fraud that proliferates in government, so they move their manufacturing to Asia or go bankrupt. They can’t even go bankrupt in peace anymore, for the government shows up with a potful of taxpayers’ money, as it did with General Motors.
A year ago, Newsweek ran a cover proclaiming “We are all socialist now” and showing two hands shaking: a blue one symbolizing the Left and the red one symbolizing the Right. But these two colors actually relate as per this icon:
At any rate, these debates are now obsolete. We are all pigs now.
From PIGS to PIIGS to PIIGS JAUK BABEL FR US
PIIGS JAUK, BABEL FR US may be read as “Pigs trifle, Babel for us” (6). But it may also be read as Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Japan, United Kingdom, Baltics, Belgium, France, United States. And that’s not including teetering Eastern Europe, and China that may blow up for its own unique reasons. All are pigs that have been trifling with basic rules of common sense reality, bequeathing a crumbling global Babel to their subjects jointly and severally.
The acronym initially contained Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, later added Italy, but that is not nearly enough. 16 countries in the Eurozone have deficits more than twice the allowed 3% limit, with heavy debt burdens and limited ability to sell more debt paper. Wherever one looks in the global economy, one sees nothing but a trail of erroneous premises and fraudulent promises – 45 years of rule by the criminals and the utopians, the crooks and the Body Snatchers (7), all in a pile in that Western jalopy careening toward the immutable majesty of Reality.
All the PIIGS JAUK BABEL FR US are propping their near-bankrupt financial systems. While Greece occupies the headlines now, we are in a Twilight Zone here where every shadow has a penumbra, every word may mean its opposite, and every agency has its own agenda. While most worry about the budget deficit of Italy, Deutsche Bank estimates that Italys’ 2010 deficit of 5.4% of GDP will be lower than Germany’s 6.3%. While media are astir with speculations of Greece’s bankruptcy, insiders talk about a “Greek-style budget crisis” in the UK, and American pundits ask “Will California go Greek?”
The index of global Sovereign Debt illness is in these metrics (8):
Debt to GDP ratio Govt. Budget Deficit Projected 2010 as % of GDP Projected 2010
The Gekko-tripped neo-socialist state in Europe, North America and Japan is hollowing out financially. The taxonomy comprises three main groups: countries whose metastized banks broke their hosts’ backs despite an otherwise healthy economic environment, e.g. Iceland and Ireland; countries whose socialist governance destroyed fiscal sanity even with a healthy banking sector, e.g. Spain; or the majority of countries that got it from both sides by mixing Gekko financial capitalism with socialist bailout for the crooks and wasteful “stimulus” for the flyover people.
Iceland almost went under through the gross malfeasance of its banksters and their government cronies. Iceland’s banks had €100 billion-worth of dubious assets on their books when its central bank had €2 billion in foreign currency reserves. The three largest banks, Landsbanki, Kaupthing and Glitnir had a balance sheet total ten times the size of Iceland's Gross Domestic Product. In September 2008, three weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, they had all been nationalized.
Iceland had converted the imminent bankruptcy of its banks into a near-bankruptcy for itself. “All of a sudden,” relays Der Spiegel, “Iceland was Europe's crash-test lab, for it seemed that what it was experiencing would sooner or later befall the rest of the world: a huge national debt, economic crisis, unemployment and inflation.”
Just to honor the claims of British and Dutch depositors in Icesave, which Iceland must do as per guarantees of its government, comes to €12,000 per each of Iceland’s nearly 320,000 residents. The ruling elite of this nice country of fire and ice has effectively deep-frozen it for the next 15 years.
"Will sovereign debt be the next sub-prime?” asked the Financial Times in November 2009. Yes, answered a sovereign debtor, Dubai World, seeking to “restructure” a major part of its $59-billion debt in loans from Western (primary British) banks. Apparently, the world does not need a sail-shaped 7-star hotel and a palm-shaped artificial island for artificial kitsch homes in the middle of nowhere, after all. But Dubai’s $59 billion is not even the appetizer in this giant feast of gargantuan debt gluttons.
The engines were still warm in the Ferraris and Porsches abandoned in panic at the Dubai International Airport by fleeing expat deadbeats, when European stock markets dropped 3%. Soon thereafter, the PIGS contagion erupted.
Greece, where the loons are few but the crooks abound, is leading the bacchanal vanguard, as may be expected of any warm Mediterranean hard-socialist plutocrat oligarchy powered by corruption and retsina. There is an interesting parallel in chardonnay-fuelled California, except there the loons far outnumber the crooks, the socialist corruption is more genteel, and government budget deficit is a paltry $41.6 billion versus Greece’s $50 billion, if incurred for similar reasons.
That Greece is even a part of the euro-zone demonstrates how defenseless the pigment-challenged Northerners are against the fanciful poetry (from the Greek poiēsis) of people with thousands of years of practice. With $420 billion government debt at 124% of GDP – twice the official Eurozone limit and nearly three times what Russia owned when it defaulted in 1998– Greece would lead the PIIGS the way of bacon even if its deficit were not over four times the official limit of 3% of GDP. For years, the Greek government hid this situation by accounting gimmicks and complex derivative swaps.
The hedge vultures are betting that Greece will default on its sovereign debt, the Greek government repeats the windup promise of austerity, and Germany is mumbling, "We give you cash, you give us Corfu". But fifty thousand rampaging Che Guevarra wannabes on Syntagma Square in Athens, a few Molotov cocktails on Ermou Street, a blockade of the major roads by farmers inured to handouts, and the promised tight belt and the tight purse will both come undone.
No one knows how the bitter Greek socialist satire will end. But some hint may again be deduced by observing where the vultures perch. Hedge funds currently have the largest short position against the euro ever: €11.5 billion, with €4.4 billion long euro leaving the net at €7.1 billion (9). And George Soros recently opined, “The euro will face bigger tests than Greece”.
It’s not coincidental that German banks carry $43 billion in Greek debt. Germany’s economy is famously strong, but it’s in jeopardy. By the end of 2008, Germany’s bank bailout program had committed €480 billion of taxpayers’ money and had become a “Bottomless Pit”. Mimicking the American model it derided, the German government approved this bonfire, whipped it through the upper and lower houses of the parliament and enacted it — all in the space of five days. Hypo Real Estate alone, Europe’s largest mortgage bank, received €52 billion in guarantees from Germany's bank rescue fund. It will not be enough, as Hypo has billions more in unrealized losses.
Germany’s economy contracted by 5% in 2009, despite its stimulus schemes like the copycat of the American “cash for clunkers” program, and increasing the public deficit to over 6% of GDP. And that’s before considering the de facto devaluation of the euro it may have to accept in order to save the far worse sovereign debtors in the Eurozone. What Germany is not considering is overhauling its tax-and-redistribute fiscal premises that must derail it eventually.
Germany can at least semi-afford its socialism, for now. But countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal that do not possess Germany’s industrial might but play in the socialist sandlot have been brought to their knees by Reality. The model relying on the coddling of workers unions and shafting employers, slack work ethic, generous unemployment and retirement benefits, public health care, high taxation, a crushing burden of bureaucracy and disincentives to entrepreneurship is the same old rollover chimera of Western neo-socialism, waiting for history’s inevitable spike.
All you had to know about the future of Portugal’s economy you could have predicted when its Maoist-Trotskyist Block won 10% of the vote in 2009. All you needed to predict the future of Spain’s sovereign debt transpired when in 2004 a utopian Socialist, José Luis Zapatero, was elected by popular vote as Spain’s Prime Minister.
Leviathan’s debt-stoked teats entice, and the lure of the free lunch is irresistible to most that lost the old compass of virtue. And so, the needed belt-tightening in Portugal cannot pass the legislature, but increased outlays do pass. The government is impotent, and parliamentary figures talk of the country no longer being governable and losing international credibility.
Spain will have $203.7 billion of maturing syndicated debt in the next six years, equivalent to one fifth of the country’s annual GDP and much more than Italy or even Greece will have to face. Yet, Finance Minister Elena Salgado talks of reduction in government expenditures, except the little matters of “social welfare,” education, foreign aid and anti-terrorism efforts plus the more reasonable outlays of unemployment benefits and unidentifiable “research and development.”
The multiculti neo-socialist state does have a penchant for spending on foreign aid when its own people need aid, decreasing incentives to work via its “social welfare,” and increasing in perpetuity spending to counter declines in education results and rises in terrorism while continuing to import the people who cause such declines and rises. Not to speak of its anathema on such bits of simple “extreme right” wisdom like, Immigration or Welfare; choose one.
Ratings agencies are probably going to downgrade the sovereign debt of both Spain and Portugal, their financing costs will rise even more steeply than their steep rises in taxes, but the Socialist model will stand fast until it crashes.
Poor Ireland, the erstwhile European Tiger, had a better model for running a country, and it earned what it was spending. But it also had its Gekkos that blew the bank. Lenders covered by state guarantees had tens of billions euros in speculative property loans on their books. They were hammered by falling local property prices as badly as American banks were in the bigger frog pond. According to Bloomberg, Irish property prices have fallen by half over the last two years.
Anglo Irish Bank, the most aggressive mortgage lender, was nationalized after discovery of over 100 million euros in sweetheart credit it had extended to its own chairman. The Irish government has pumped €3 billions into Anglo-Irish, and pledged to inject €3.5 billion each into Allied Irish Bank and Bank of Ireland. As well, the government is eating up a staggering total of €77 billions of reckless loans made by all Irish financial institutions. That reads like a script written in Lower Manhattan.
Ireland at least seems to be able to squeeze itself with austerity measures enough to pull trough. The problem is that contagion spreads. While you may be worrying about Ireland’s debt, Morgan Stanley is already preparing for a UK sovereign debt crisis in 2010. British citizens will soon be paying a 20% VAT, and the yield on 10-year British debt notes is now 4.06% -- higher than Spain’s. But it won’t be enough.
Cool Britannia is like a nightmare virtual reality prophecy for the United States, on display ten years before the due date for the larger doppelgänger financially and in every other way. Its deficits are not the result of just a banking crash and a cyclical recession, but of decades of mismanagement and consuming the seed stock of future harvests per the game rules of a debauched democracy.
The Bank of International Settlements has disclosed that European banks have $2.1 trillion in exposure to sovereign debt of the PIGS alone, with French and German banks carrying almost half of that. In news lingo, “PIGS Exposure Explains ‘Shotgun Greek Wedding.” To show that its economists read the same books as the keepers of open spigots do at the U.S. Fed, the European Central Bank (ECB) had loaned €442 billion (then $622 billion) at an easy 1% to European banks. They promptly spent it on buying the high-yield sovereign debt of the fiscally weak EU members. Not only is this a camouflaged “quantitative easing,” i.e. American-style money printing, but it has added to the tremendous overhang of risky debt in Europe too, like in the United States.
And even that is just the surface. EU, Swiss and Swedish banks hold $1.5 trillion in mortgage and consumer loans from Eastern Europe. “Ur All Pigs From Hell!”, states an American financier, Gordon T. Long who shows that Eastern Europe is the banking industry’s ultimate subprime pit, with investors short the region’s debt more than that of the PIGS. On top of that, per the IMF, European and British banks have ¾ as much exposure to US toxic debt as American banks do. The reckoning is far from completed.
What is clear is that eventually, in one way or another, the ECB will have to open the euro spigots far more, to avoid the collapse of this debt tower. Not the debts of banks any longer, but the debts of nations. Euro pashas will shrug-off their serfs’ plaints in the more disciplined Eurozone countries with tales of how higher inflation rates are the cost they have to pay to prevent a break-up of the European Monetary Union, which would be even more expensive. In other words, like all the calamities the ruling Crooks & Loons have visited on their peoples since the 1960s, “The terrible mess we have unleashed upon you is now so deep that digging yourselves out will be more expensive than adding onto the pile.”
The problem is that it may not be enough, unless Germany wants to relive its Weimar, which it won’t. Hence the existential question: When we are all pigs, in a system run by swineherds, who ultimately holds up the collapsing tower of defaulting sovereign debt?
By permission, Jesse's Café Américain. Left to right, Timothy Geithner of the U.S. Treasury, Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs.
When Athens ruins in Illinois
The IMF forecast in November that U.S. debt will be 99.5% percent of GDP in 2011. The U.K.’s will reach 94.1%. The Obama wrecking crew has proposed a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011, to “spur the recovery”. Total US government (fed, state, local) outlay in 2010 will be 44.5% of GDP -- coasting toward a perch in the “50-50 Club” from which there is no exit but through social catastrophe. In the entire history of the United States, this level was breached only during three years of World War 2, and otherwise not approximated even remotely, until 2008.
These are the strangest of times. If would take a Gibbon to paint the whole picture, and the sagas of even the smaller players like Belgium’s Dexia and Fortis Bank could make Thomas Mann proud. How then, to deal with the wily octopus, Goldman Sachs, that straddles Wall Street, the U.S. Government, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and may bag the European Central Bank too? How to deal in a paragraph with its lucrative currency swaps engineering that hid Greece’s debt then, and its shorting of Greece’s debt now? Moreover, according to ongoing revelations, e.g. here, Goldman was not the only bank, and Greece not the only country to have engaged in debt-hiding swap transactions. There is a whole family of cephalopods to deal with, and many more shoes will drop relative to the eight-legged banksters.
Athens too signifies more than meets the eye. While the corruption and spending promiscuousness of the Greek state occupies the news as this is being written, it’s Athens, New York, and Athens, Illinois where the ruin is just as compelling. There are towns named Athens in 15 American states, and some of those states are at a greater risk of bankruptcy than Greece. 48 of the 50 of them have budget deficits, the worst being in California (-49%), Illinois (-47%) Arizona (-41%), Nevada (-38%) and New York (-32%). Some may go bankrupt, as will some American cities.
California, the world’s eighth-largest economy, has a hole of $41.6 billion in an $82.9 billion budget (10). It has a bottomless well in education, as over 50% of its students are largely uneducable “Hispanic” immigrants, legal and illegal. The state has a bottomless well in healthcare, transportation, justice and prison systems, for the same reason. All this grows the size of state bureaucracy too, and Public Employee Unions are bleeding California dry. Repair is not possible, except for temporary Band-Aids, because it is now a 55% - 45% society with the tax-eaters in the majority. The tax-payers, mostly white, are leaving and raising the tax-eaters’ proportion even more. California voters rejected a bill called, The California Live Within Our Means Act, and will continue draining from the state everything they can, until they leave it a decayed husk.
Illinois has a $13 billion hole in a $28 billion budget and is “in utter crisis” (hat-tip, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard). New York's budget deficit is $8.2 billion and the state, per The Wall Street Journal, has become “a carnival of spendthrifts, sexual miscreants and the all-purpose ethically challenged." Even Oklahoma has an 18.5% shortfall, making it No. 1 in the U.S, as boasts, incorrectly, a Tulsa newspaper.
Basically, America is finished, says Charles Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner in Berkshire Hathaway. Mr. Munger excoriates the same illusory elements of greedy financial capitalism that we have limned in the last few chapters. But as a left-liberal, he only sees Gekko and Sarko (i.e. Wall Street and war-happy Republicans) as culpable, whereas Harpo and Barko, which is to say Big Government incompetence, socialist corruption and unions’ greed (11), plus the bi-partisan mega-sabotage through Third World immigration, have much to do with it too.
Essentially, in every Western nation, government has grown beyond the capacity of taxpayers to bear, the tax base is diminishing through declining birth rates, and the outlays are growing exponentially through immigration acting upon the welfare state and unions’ pressure acting upon socialist politicians.
The texture of the Rock of Reality that the West will meet entails the end of a 90–year, gradually intensifying experiment in fiat money, fake prosperity based on growing debt, statist stifling of liberty through excessive taxation and unwarranted redistribution, and nutty economic theories. This hodgepodge has rested on two theoretic pillars. The first is the grafting of Bismarckian social safety nets that protected hard-working people with an average life expectancy of 46, onto a whole range of fruity freeloaders whose life expectancy is 76 (German male). The second is Keynesianism, specious already 90 years ago and currently breaking the back of the world’s economic system through “bailout” and “stimulus.” To this, one must add such awful and particularly Anglo-Saxon cripples like the Efficient Markets Theory, Supply-side Economics, and self-hollowing through “free trade” (12) and globalization. To top it all is the quaint notion that the way to prosperity is via consumption of imports on credit rather than through the production of exportable goods on savings.
Let us think again about the phrase that encapsulates the sentiment of “Austrian” economists or just people with a hand calculator and no PhD: Japan now, Zimbabwe later. That obviously refers to a prolonged deflationary recession that the ruling elite tries to beat back by means that do not take out the power-sharing malefactors who have caused it, but instead ensure future sovereign defaults or hyperinflation for all. But that phrase is apposite in another way, for the West is slowly turning from resembling Japan, i.e. an ordered society of high-intelligence people largely sharing the norms and nourishing content of their evolved civilization, into a miserable Babel of breakdown, chaos, social cacophony, crime, terror, fraud, incompetence, and inferiority to societies not run according to the same insane formula, most notably China and the former Soviet satellites in Central Europe (13). It’s no longer just about very big financial problems. It’s about this:
The Garden of Earthly Delight, Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1504) – detail from the right wing
The progressive transformation into Zimbabwe may take another five years or forty, and it won’t be the same everywhere. But the time to start preparing is now. The time to start acting toward regaining what has been lost is now. To this, the rest of this cogitation will be devoted.
Previous articles in this series can be read here.
(1) As an example of both in America one might adduce the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (a.k.a. The U.S. Taxpayers’ Rape Act); the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (a.k.a. The Extended U.S. Taxpayers’ Rape Act); the 1999 U.S. Congress repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that since 1933 had kept deposit banking separate from “investment”, i.e. casino, banking; the numerous failures by the same body to enact controls on margin and derivatives trading. Books may be filled with such stupid or evil legislation in every Western country.
(2) A quick sampling of the Americans would include Karl Denninger, Mish Shedlock, Bill Bonner, Richard Doughty, Martin Weiss, Michael Hodges.
(3) Data compiled by Agorafinancial.
(4) Snatcher State, Body Snatcher, Pod, all relate to the central metaphor of this series. The basic analogy reverts to Part 1, where we cited the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the film, alien “Body Snatchers” produce giant legume Pods in hothouses and other hatcheries. The developed Pods become Body Snatchers who replace living people while appearing to be identical to them. The new Body Snatchers then grow new Pods from which new Body Snatchers develop – until the whole population has been “snatched.”
(5) While increasing government activity in areas which it was originally constituted to handle and in which its activity has been conspicuously absent or deficient. Those include the control of borders and admission to residency and citizenship, control of instruments of greed and recklessness such as fractional banking, derivatives, stock manipulations etc.
(6) jauk = “trifle” in Scots, e.g. “And ne'er, tho' out o' sight, to jauk or play” in Robert Burns’ The Cotter’s Saturday Night.
(7) See footnote #5.
(8) The most recent data sources were selected as indicated below. Note that these metrics are published by various credible institutions, yet they differ widely. For instance, the widely quoted Nov. 2009 OECD deficit estimates differ significantly from the ones in the table here, most of which are from January 2010.
P - Portuguese government estimate reported by AP on 27 January 2010
P1 - Portugal deficit ratio as per 20 January 2010 IMF pronoucement.
UK - Every source gives a different estimate. Deutsche Bank estimates 11.5%, UK’s Alistair Darling projects 12.6%, Business Week, 13.2%. We chose the 13% estimate of EconomyWatch.com.
US – Debt to GDP per US Government Spending.com. The ratio here is the one used in all the major sources: Federal debt to GDP. But the overspending being as outrageous in many American states as it is at the Federal level, it makes sense to look at the aggregate debt level too. With states’ and local authorities’ debt added, the aggregate 2010 debt level changes from $13.786 trillion to $16.984 trillion. With the 2010 GDP at $14,623.9 billion, it changes the Debt-to-GDP metric from 94.27% to 116.14%. US Government (Federal only) deficit ratio estimate per US Government Spending.com here. This is only the Federal deficit metric.
(9) Per Société Générale, monthly hedge fund report, posted here.
(10) Accurate numbers are impossible to ascertain. There are as many numbers as there are reputable sources, not even counting those less so. This ratio therefore, $41.6 / $82.9 is slightly higher than the 49% deficit relayed in the preceding paragraph.
(11) According to The Sunshine Review, total states’ expenditures exceeded $2.2 trillion last year, of which wages and benefits amounted to $1.1 trillion. Which means that 50% of all state budgets are driven by the unsustainable contracts that civil service unions squeezed from corrupt politicians in exchange for votes.
(12) See Ian Fletcher and Edward Luttwak, Free Trade Doesn't Work: What Should Replace it and Why, U.S. Business & Industry Council, 2010.
(13) We are not glossing over China’s own faults and problems, many of which are endemic, very serious, and would take pages to describe; it’s just that China has chosen to banish most of the particular depravity that is destroying the West.
George Handlery on the week that was. Hand-outs that
undermine the economy. Sovereign debt and politics’ inability to stop the bleeding.
How to use science to generate hot air for politics’ balloon? How to get
accused of hate speech without an effort?
1. Social policy likes to spend on the governors’ favorites.
Reelection is in this case more important than is the project into which the
money is funneled. Predictably, the temptation produces negative outcomes. Here
everybody will think of the allocation of money to activities that make no
sense – a practice, which guarantees that the supposed beneficiaries remain
dependent of support payments. The reward-for-failure policy also creates
deficits. That undermines the currency’s value. It also results in barriers
that limit efficient producers whose contribution has to pay for the outlays.
An additional consequence deserves mentioning. In time, such squandering
creates a crisis and undermines society’s ability to cope with the economic
earthquake once bankruptcy cannot be hidden any more. We are now witnessing
several cases in which the ability of government to remedy the ailment it had
caused is impeded.
Greece, Germany and Iceland are all states with damaged
public finances. Other candidates are dancing on the edge of the precipice. In
all these cases, the course to avoid a hard landing is clearly stated by
economics as a science. Especially in the case of Greece, the ability of the
governors to act effectively is limited by the threatened mass disobedience (as
in “general strike”) of the beneficiaries of over spending.
As a discipline striving to be objective, economics, as well
as other Euro-users warn Greece to cut expenditures and to collect taxes. The
latter is difficult where, according to the declarations filed, even the rich
are paupers. Raising taxes is no medicine as evasion has become a natural
right. More serious than the income gap is the ailment of inflated
expenditures. Now politics is to correct the chaos caused by its fantasy-fueled
finances. However, politicians, as of candidates seeking a mandate, can hardly
afford to do what is expected of them. Welfare spending –in the extended
meaning of the term- has created numerous constituencies. The beneficiaries
might even be a majority, addicted to receiving more than it is giving.
The worse result of past sins is not the debt to be
serviced. Really damaging is the inability of majority-dependent governments to
implement corrections. Typical are the paralyzing strikes in Greece. By now,
Iceland’s rejection to debt repayment is in. Even if offered favorable
conditions, the voters are unwilling to pay a debt incurred by a bank whose
deposits the country guaranteed. (The consequences of the vote are not subject
to balloting. They could bring more hardship than negotiated repayment would
have.) In this, as well as in other yet to emerge cases, peoples that used to
“get” from government are, not without logic, unwilling to pay for past sins.
Not even when they benefited from economic magic once promoted as a realistic
strategy. This makes out of the crisis that looms around sovereign debt an
acute problem. It impairs the credit worthiness of countries and qualifies the
doctrines of spending.
2. Regardless of the attempt to manage the issue by under-reporting
it, climate gate has become the topic of discussion. Here a reconstruction of
the process by which the climate hysteria and its ongoing deflation have come
about.
I. A thesis is proposed. By the rules of scientific inquiry,
it is questionable which is why science demands that initially every thesis is
to be doubted.
II. It might happen, as it did in case of the predicted
climate catastrophe, that the postulate confirms the hard-core doctrine of a
political theory. If the needs of a political network that is short of
confirming arguments are met, the thesis – originally an open question – becomes
PC. With that, the thesis ceases to be a thesis in the scientific sense of the
term. It will be elevated to the level of an article of faith.
III. The advocates of the “cause” isolate and exclude those
scientists that question the theory. With that, no officially “serious”
challengers remain on the market place of ideas. As a dogma, the original
postulate will, attain “fact” status.
IV. Becoming an instrument in public affairs, what might
have originally been decent science, deteriorates as is hitches its cart to
politics in exchange for funding.
V. Pure politics is now confirmed by prestigious “science”
that affirms its case. The upshot: a concept of significant political utility.
At this stage, a community crystallizes around the originally scientific
thesis. For this association science is secondary, while the contribution to
its political agenda is of primary importance. Everything that is of use has a
value. Accordingly, money is injected into the circle that bolsters the
validity of the theory. Officially, the funds will flow to further research. In
fact, the hope of the funders will not be better science but “research” results
that confirms its politics. Therefore, the search is not for objective facts
but to confirm a party’s agenda.
VI. The engaged scientist’s stake in the cause is fortified
by pecuniary advantage. A role is played by the honors that politics can confer
upon those who fight for its “good cause”. We had example confirming the
generalization when a certain politician received a prize for advancing science
by giving it political support. He shared the honor with a scientist who
delivered ammunition for politics.
VII. Distortions are three-legged dogs: it is easy to catch
up with them. One has to hope that this can happen in time. For being late, the
illustrative cases are of Nazi Rassenlehre
and Stalinist biology or cybernetics. In time, exaggerations lead to
irrepressible contradictory data. The reaction is to suppress it with help from
politics.
VIII. At this stage, the current state of “climate-gate”
enters the picture. Uppity experts and the society’s general skeptics rally.
The “convenient truth by consensus” is gradually rebutted. The defensive
response is to invent proof that supports the thesis that has firmed into a
dogma. This means that facts are created and that correctness is confirmed by
elevating doubtful statistics into unchallengeable proof. This is the process
in which bad science becomes good politics. Until you are caught, that is.
3. How to be accused of hate speech while the charge implies
automatic sentencing? It is easy. Zero in on a problem. Make it one that all
think exists and which is, therefore, anathema to local elites. Discover, as
you look for the causes, a group that is, besides its professed ideas and
actions identifiable by correlating with an ethnic background or a religion.
Surmise to your misfortune that, the group’s ideas and activities amount to an
attempt to reduce your freedom, security and well-being. Having drawn your
conclusions, you will want to air your concerns. Doing so, you are not
necessarily guilty of anything beyond raising an unpleasant question.
Nevertheless, you will now be accused of hate speech.
Hate speech does exist in the real world. So does the
lawless encouragement of violence against groups with characteristic traits.
However, finding such elements to be intent on damaging non-members, or
alleging that they are advocating ideas that would cause you unwanted
curtailments, is not a rallying call for hate. If there are plausible grounds
for leveling the charge then, if proper procedures are applied, the allegation
is investigated. Hate and persecution is present when such fact-finding is skipped.
By leveling a charge all we have is, at worst, an error in
judgment. Hate speech is when the charge is not only untrue but is known to the
accuser to be libelous. Oh, yes, in this case the litigant will also use his
power to prevent inquiries that could prove him wrong.
George Handlery on the week that was. Hand-outs that
undermine the economy. Sovereign debt and politics’ inability to stop the bleeding.
How to use science to generate hot air for politics’ balloon? How to get
accused of hate speech without an effort?
1. Social policy likes to spend on the governors’ favorites.
Reelection is in this case more important than is the project into which the
money is funneled. Predictably, the temptation produces negative outcomes. Here
everybody will think of the allocation of money to activities that make no
sense – a practice, which guarantees that the supposed beneficiaries remain
dependent of support payments. The reward-for-failure policy also creates
deficits. That undermines the currency’s value. It also results in barriers
that limit efficient producers whose contribution has to pay for the outlays.
An additional consequence deserves mentioning. In time, such squandering
creates a crisis and undermines society’s ability to cope with the economic
earthquake once bankruptcy cannot be hidden any more. We are now witnessing
several cases in which the ability of government to remedy the ailment it had
caused is impeded.
Greece, Germany and Iceland are all states with damaged
public finances. Other candidates are dancing on the edge of the precipice. In
all these cases, the course to avoid a hard landing is clearly stated by
economics as a science. Especially in the case of Greece, the ability of the
governors to act effectively is limited by the threatened mass disobedience (as
in “general strike”) of the beneficiaries of over spending.
As a discipline striving to be objective, economics, as well
as other Euro-users warn Greece to cut expenditures and to collect taxes. The
latter is difficult where, according to the declarations filed, even the rich
are paupers. Raising taxes is no medicine as evasion has become a natural
right. More serious than the income gap is the ailment of inflated
expenditures. Now politics is to correct the chaos caused by its fantasy-fueled
finances. However, politicians, as of candidates seeking a mandate, can hardly
afford to do what is expected of them. Welfare spending –in the extended
meaning of the term- has created numerous constituencies. The beneficiaries
might even be a majority, addicted to receiving more than it is giving.
The worse result of past sins is not the debt to be
serviced. Really damaging is the inability of majority-dependent governments to
implement corrections. Typical are the paralyzing strikes in Greece. By now,
Iceland’s rejection to debt repayment is in. Even if offered favorable
conditions, the voters are unwilling to pay a debt incurred by a bank whose
deposits the country guaranteed. (The consequences of the vote are not subject
to balloting. They could bring more hardship than negotiated repayment would
have.) In this, as well as in other yet to emerge cases, peoples that used to
“get” from government are, not without logic, unwilling to pay for past sins.
Not even when they benefited from economic magic once promoted as a realistic
strategy. This makes out of the crisis that looms around sovereign debt an
acute problem. It impairs the credit worthiness of countries and qualifies the
doctrines of spending.
2. Regardless of the attempt to manage the issue by under-reporting
it, climate gate has become the topic of discussion. Here a reconstruction of
the process by which the climate hysteria and its ongoing deflation have come
about.
I. A thesis is proposed. By the rules of scientific inquiry,
it is questionable which is why science demands that initially every thesis is
to be doubted.
II. It might happen, as it did in case of the predicted
climate catastrophe, that the postulate confirms the hard-core doctrine of a
political theory. If the needs of a political network that is short of
confirming arguments are met, the thesis – originally an open question – becomes
PC. With that, the thesis ceases to be a thesis in the scientific sense of the
term. It will be elevated to the level of an article of faith.
III. The advocates of the “cause” isolate and exclude those
scientists that question the theory. With that, no officially “serious”
challengers remain on the market place of ideas. As a dogma, the original
postulate will, attain “fact” status.
IV. Becoming an instrument in public affairs, what might
have originally been decent science, deteriorates as is hitches its cart to
politics in exchange for funding.
V. Pure politics is now confirmed by prestigious “science”
that affirms its case. The upshot: a concept of significant political utility.
At this stage, a community crystallizes around the originally scientific
thesis. For this association science is secondary, while the contribution to
its political agenda is of primary importance. Everything that is of use has a
value. Accordingly, money is injected into the circle that bolsters the
validity of the theory. Officially, the funds will flow to further research. In
fact, the hope of the funders will not be better science but “research” results
that confirms its politics. Therefore, the search is not for objective facts
but to confirm a party’s agenda.
VI. The engaged scientist’s stake in the cause is fortified
by pecuniary advantage. A role is played by the honors that politics can confer
upon those who fight for its “good cause”. We had example confirming the
generalization when a certain politician received a prize for advancing science
by giving it political support. He shared the honor with a scientist who
delivered ammunition for politics.
VII. Distortions are three-legged dogs: it is easy to catch
up with them. One has to hope that this can happen in time. For being late, the
illustrative cases are of Nazi Rassenlehre
and Stalinist biology or cybernetics. In time, exaggerations lead to
irrepressible contradictory data. The reaction is to suppress it with help from
politics.
VIII. At this stage, the current state of “climate-gate”
enters the picture. Uppity experts and the society’s general skeptics rally.
The “convenient truth by consensus” is gradually rebutted. The defensive
response is to invent proof that supports the thesis that has firmed into a
dogma. This means that facts are created and that correctness is confirmed by
elevating doubtful statistics into unchallengeable proof. This is the process
in which bad science becomes good politics. Until you are caught, that is.
3. How to be accused of hate speech while the charge implies
automatic sentencing? It is easy. Zero in on a problem. Make it one that all
think exists and which is, therefore, anathema to local elites. Discover, as
you look for the causes, a group that is, besides its professed ideas and
actions identifiable by correlating with an ethnic background or a religion.
Surmise to your misfortune that, the group’s ideas and activities amount to an
attempt to reduce your freedom, security and well-being. Having drawn your
conclusions, you will want to air your concerns. Doing so, you are not
necessarily guilty of anything beyond raising an unpleasant question.
Nevertheless, you will now be accused of hate speech.
Hate speech does exist in the real world. So does the
lawless encouragement of violence against groups with characteristic traits.
However, finding such elements to be intent on damaging non-members, or
alleging that they are advocating ideas that would cause you unwanted
curtailments, is not a rallying call for hate. If there are plausible grounds
for leveling the charge then, if proper procedures are applied, the allegation
is investigated. Hate and persecution is present when such fact-finding is skipped.
By leveling a charge all we have is, at worst, an error in
judgment. Hate speech is when the charge is not only untrue but is known to the
accuser to be libelous. Oh, yes, in this case the litigant will also use his
power to prevent inquiries that could prove him wrong.
Members of the eurozone are working on the details of a possible bail-out for Greece ahead of a meeting in Brussels on Monday, although obstacles to a final agreement have yet to be overcome, according to officials
The 17th Brussels Development Briefing on “Biodiversity and Rural Development in ACP countries” took place on Wednesday 10th March 2010 in the context of the International Year of the Biodiversity. More than 100 experts discussed the key role Biodiversity plays in rural development, especially for ACP countries, and issues such the relationship between poverty and biodiversity.
European Parliament (Brussels): -16th March: Exchange of views with Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht on the state of play of trade negotiations -17th March: The international trade committee will discuss the Millenium Development Goals -17th March: Hearing about the future of the CAP after 2013
EU Presidency (Brussels): - 15th March: Council of the Environment -16th March: Council of Economy and Finances
ACP Secretariat (Brussels): -16th March: Sub-Committe on sustainable development -17th March: Sub-Committee on Trade and Commodity -18th March: Committee of Ambassadors
Protocols For more information please consult the calendar on our webpage http://brussels.cta.int/
European Union ambassadors agreed to propose protecting bluefin tuna as an endangered species on Wednesday (10 March), a move that would effectively ban international trade in the species. The agreement reached by EU governments, based on a proposal from the European Commission last month, was formally adopted by EU energy ministers meeting in Brussels on 11th March.
"A little stone came off a lorry on the motorway carrying rocks and it chipped my windscreen. I..." - Posted by lilly. 1 reply - last discussed on 12/03/2010
"Can anyone recommend a good acupuncturist in or around Brussels? I have been suffering with..." - Posted by serena. New discussion topic, posted on 12/03/2010
To manage further growth, EurActiv.de – operated by EMM Europäische Multiplikatoren-Medien GmbH - is seeking a dynamic Marketing Director and future CEO, based in Berlin.
He or she will increase and refine the business of EurActiv.de, create a detailed marketing and sales plan and drive its successful implementation. The Marketing Director/ CEO will closely co-operate with EMM’s founder and publisher, with its editor-in-chief, and with EurActiv.com in Brussels.
The Digital Week (from 6 to 12 March 2010) is the opportunity to observe the appearance of novelties and improvements on the website of the City of Brussels. Furthermore, relegated computers of the City are sold at 50 euro, including formation. (Lire article)
Industrial production in the eurozone grows at its fastest level for over 20 years in January, amid signs of a far more sustained recovery than had been seen previously
"Has anyone been on one of these in the Benelux region? I would love to give it a go just as soon as..." - Posted by lilly. 7 replies - last discussed on 12/03/2010
Wolfgang Schäuble, German finance minister, wants a European monetary fund to be backed by tough sanctions to enforce budgetary discipline, with countries facing expulsion from the eurozone 'as a last resort'
On the occasion of International Women's Day and of the 15 th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration, the European Commission services have outlined an EU Action Plan on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in Development for the period 2010-2015.
The European Commission today set out a strategy to help maintain the momentum of global efforts to tackle climate change. The Communication proposes that the EU swiftly begin implementing last December's Copenhagen Accord, in particular 'fast start' financial assistance to developing countries. In parallel the EU should continue to press for a robust and legally binding global agreement that involves all countries in real climate action.
MEPs believe the EU must enhance its strategic autonomy and conduct a strong and effective foreign, security and defence policy, and mean to use their budgetary power and democratic right to scrutinise these policies, including funding for the EU external action service, say two resolutions adopted on Wednesday 10 March.
Share scary expat stories
How to avoid looking ridiculous...
Building cultural awareness
Understanding lifestyle differences
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How to communicate with the locals
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Culture shock - how to master it effectively
Come and join us!
Wednesday 17 March 2010 at 6:30 pm café des épices, Place Jourdan 21!
And… the first drink is offered!
This informal drink/meeting is the second 'Babel Apéro' organised for young EU professionals.
The aim is to offer a space for a fun 'group therapy' where we can all
share our experiences, discuss hot topics of everyday life as well as
exchanging ideas, tips and hints or confess the problems we face in our
lives in Brussels.
The Museums of the City offer guided tours for children (5-8 years, 9-12 years) and teenagers in Dutch and French. The educational game for children is available in English. (Lire article)
Egypt announced Monday that the European Union had decided to allocate 15 million euros to African countries to set up joint funds to finance scientific research in the continent. The Egyptian program manager of research and development and innovation, Hamid Zuheiry told reporters Monday on the sidelines of a meeting of experts being held in Cairo to prepare for the Conference of African Ministers of science and technology, to be held in Cairo on Wednesday.
The European Court of Auditors has analysed whether European Development Fund support for regional economic integration has been effective in East Africa and West Africa, which together account for well over 50 % of the total amount allocated to regional EDF programmes. The Court examined the European Commission’s approach, its management of the support provided and a sample of individual projects and concludes that, overall, EDF support for regional economic integration has so far been only partially effective, due to a number of factors.
"Looking for an English speaking tree surgeon to help us out with a big old oak in our garden...." - Posted by serena. 4 replies - last discussed on 11/03/2010
"I am making a tikka for my boyfriend this weekend and need naans, popadums, spices and mango..." - Posted by serena. 2 replies - last discussed on 11/03/2010
The European Union is often derided for policy confusion and speaking with a multitude of voices - but sometimes it’s not the EU’s fault, it’s the fault of one of the member-states. Take the idea of setting up a European Monetary Fund. This emerged as a serious possibility for the first time when Wolfgang Schäuble, [...]
European Union lawmakers voted in favour of a proposal to exempt 'micro enterprises' across Europe from drawing up annual accounts if they meet two of three criteria
Diplomats in Brussels will try to agree a compromise on controversial proposals to regulate the hedge fund and private equity industries on a pan-European basis for the first time
Germany and France have called on the European Union to consider banning speculative trading in credit default swaps and set up a compulsory register of derivatives trading
Central bank president hints that he might yet support proposals for a European Monetary Fund to help crisis-hit countries, despite scepticism from German ECB governing council members
Tim Geithner, US Treasury secretary, has delivered a blunt warning to the European Commission that its plans to regulate the hedge fund and private equity industries could cause a transatlantic rift by discriminating against US groups
"Can anyone recommend a company that replaces broken double-glazed windows? We have to get a quote..." - Posted by pettefar. 1 reply - last discussed on 10/03/2010
The planned global alliance between British Airways, American Airlines and Iberia moves closer to securing regulatory approval as European officials begin testing the concessions offered by the airlines
Motivated by its own experience over the past fifty years, the European Union (EU) has been a long-standing supporter of regional integration throughout the world, including in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries where there has been a steady expansion, in both depth and breadth, of regional integration initiatives.
Lady Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy chief, hit back at her critics, by blaming rivalry among the EU's institutions for slow progress in establishing the bloc's new diplomatic service
The operational headquarters of the International News Safety Institute has
moved to London, on the premises of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Their new office contact details are the following:
International News Safety Institute
Thomson Reuters Foundation (5th floor)
The Thomson Reuters Building
30 South Colonnade
Canary Wharf
London E14 5EP
UK
Tel: +44 20 7542 1063
Fax: +44 20 7542 8599
Email: info@newssafety.org
Yoletta Nyange is Researcher.
Email: yoletta.nyange@newssafety.org
Mobile: [...]
After 50 years of continuous increase, the number of EU accredited media has begun to decline. What does this mean for you as a journalist? What are the implications for media diversity and informed reporting? Personally or professionally, we all have views on this. Is the trend inevitable? Can we try to make our work [...]
Germany and France are stepping up pressure for urgent EU action to tighten regulation in sovereign debt markets – in particular of credit default swaps – in the wake of the Greek crisis
Various documents of the department of Demography (Registry office and Population) are available online: either via a secured process of Irisbox for people with an electronic ID card, or via an online request form. (Lire article)
Forms of the Property Management Agency of the City of Brussels can be downloaded here. These forms are about renting houses in the city. (Lire article)