The exemplary Swiss case
June 26, 2025In about fifteen years, the Swiss franc has soared by over 25% against the euro… without decimating the Swiss economy. Quite the opposite, in fact, as its industrial output has even increased by 40%, while Europe is faltering
Europe: Out of Love
June 3, 2025The election of the nationalist Nawrocki in Poland? … even though the country is experiencing full employment and Poland is the largest beneficiary of European aid? Yes, indeed! A thriving economy is no longer a political life insurance. We must come to terms with the fact that Western Europe — hesitant and technocratic — acts…
From Realpolitik to Empty Chair Politics
January 17, 2025Tensions Between Scholz and His Foreign Minister Baerbock at Breaking Point. She turned her back on him without even responding to him, and did so publicly and ostentatiously. What caused this volte-face? Scholz rejected a €3 billion aid package for Ukraine, concocted by Baerbock and Boris Pistorius, the Defense Minister. I myself attended meetings…
European divergences
September 11, 2024Germans work one-third less than in 1970 Prosperity in Switzerland is based on hard work. 2112 hours a year and 20 days of vacation a year. Poland is nothing short of economic wonder. Standard of living in Poland overtaking Spain & Italy within just one generation is simply amazing. One of…
European disUnion
May 16, 2024Graphs of exports from certain European countries to Kyrgyzstan, which then transfers these goods to Russia. After 13 EU sanctions packages against Russia, this is the reality. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine highlighted the dysfunctions within the EU, whose members engage in unhealthy internal competition. Remember the grand statements about European unity?
Europe, the eternal indecisive
May 10, 2024The interests only on their public debt has cost the United States more than $1 trillion in the past 12 months, and these amounts are condemned to increase due to the maintenance, for some time still, of the current level of interest rates. But it doesn’t matter: they have the King $. While we…
The Year 0 of Germany
March 20, 2024This is striking! The energy crisis of 2022 has been the worst economic crisis in Germany since WWII when looking at the decline of real wages. The increase in the price level is very likely permanent – those with savings have unexpectedly lost some of their purchasing power. The real estate owners (upper middle class)…
Germany holds back Europe
January 21, 2024The most serious economic mistake of Germany in the last 20 years. Celebrated at the time as a victory for fiscal and budgetary discipline, breaking away from the carelessness attributed to the vast majority of European Union members strongly encouraged to follow suit. Engraved in the marble of the Constitution. Today, German politicians no longer…
Europe: a sleeping beauty
April 24, 2023How not to be shocked by the near-economic disappearance of Europe? The “acceleration of the European economy” mentioned by Emmanuel Macron in China this April is a tale that no longer comforts or deceives anyone. Readers: your first electric car will most likely be Chinese, as China has now surpassed Germany as the world’s second-largest…
How do we escape Europe’s purgatory?
March 7, 2021There are good reasons to fear the future of Europe – and to fear for the future of Europe – when a moderate and deeply pro-European figure like Clément Beaune launches what is basically a petition in Les Echos, as he did on March 3rd. But let’s be real, because the old timers who…
The Rome syndrome
April 11, 2019The Italians were, for centuries, Europe’s bankers. The Medici’s, for their part, lent extensively to the British and French crowns. Let us not forgetthe marriage – of convenience – between Henry IV and Marie de Medicis, who was also known as “the fat banker’s daughter”. What happened in the second half of the 20th…
Brexit is a chance for Europe
March 26, 2019The chaos that’s shaking Britain to its core has come a long distance. The constitutional crisis, the 2 million protesters in the streets of London on Saturday 23rd March, the likely fall of Theresa May this week, and even the 2016 referendum itself are merely the culmination of more than 40 years of turbulence between…
To cleanse Europe, dismantle the Stability Pact!
March 12, 2019Europe’s not out of danger yet. A meltdown is still on the cards due to the eurozone members’ lack of any control over their interest rates and currency. In fact, in these conditions, how can diverse national economies using the euro not diverge? And what would be the instrument that could harmonise consumption and economic…
The future of Europe is going through a rehabilitation of its experts
March 4, 2019Growth since 2009: China +139%, India +96%, the US +34%, Europe –2%. These figures tell the story of the European Union’s spiralling macroeconomic decline. The lack of reactivity of our public policies, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, led to a reduction in imports, with the most hard-hit eurozone countries seeing their balance of…
A precarious euro in a Europe with no ambition
November 8, 2018The dollar has been an integral part of America’s foreign policy for decades. Much more than the currency of reference for global trade, greatly surpassing the privileged status of reserve currency for the central banks, the Greenback is the supreme arbiter. With the simple press of a button, the US can refuse access for any…
Leaving the euro would be a coup d’état!
April 27, 2017Let us not forget the convulsive shocks brought on by Italy and Great Britain who were forced to leave the EMS in 1992. Since it was then merely a matter of abandoning a monetary regime, it goes without saying that one of the member-states leaving the euro would have an otherwise much more immediate and…
The Soviet and European Unions: same lies, same destiny
April 4, 2017The parallels between the European Union of 2017 and the Soviet Union of 1989 are troubling. Didn’t these two systems pride themselves on being “apolitical”, meaning that they were led by a technocratic elite that was detached from real life and “real people”? Faced with economic stagnation, didn’t these two systems react by calling on…
The European illusion
March 15, 2017The infamous Treaty of Versailles which was imposed on Germany following the First World War forced the nation to pay the astronomical sum of 132 billion Marks. This iniquitous treaty was to provoke the Occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 by France, displeased at the delays in German payments. In 1924 however, the Dawes Plan,…
Disintegrating Europe
December 6, 2016Europe was founded and edified on the famous principle of the four liberties. Capital, goods, services and work are meant to be able to move without any restriction anywhere in this mercantile Europe. Unlimited competition goes hand in hand with minimum control over the private sector, which together are supposed – according to the irrefutable…
The year zero of Western depression
November 26, 2016Up to the present moment, peace, democratic values and even happiness have been intimately linked to economic growth. It is thus public notoriety that economic depression is the royal path that leads to war, or to extreme and extremist situations and stances in any case. Negative interest rates now seem to be one of the…
Brexit versus globalisation
November 5, 2016Brexit was much more than a British electoral consultation to leave the Union. The issues were actually much more serious – and critical for some – than the relatively anecdotal aspect of a country that had never really integrated into Europe. Despite what had been stigmatised by the partisans of the Remain camp, Brexit was…
Europe is the weak link in the global economy
October 29, 2016Today, the crisis confronts those who delivered Europe to the technocrats, bankers and industrial types who are hardly concerned with a united and social Europe. This crisis is not only financial: it consecrates the failure of the European ultra-liberal model. The Founding Fathers of the ECB will focus all the vital energy of their institution…
The euro and the gold standard
October 23, 2016Well before the creation of the euro, the Canadian, Robert Mundell, was to enumerate the conditions of success for a monetary union. His works won him the Nobel Prize in 1999, precisely the year that the euro was launched. According to Mundell, a currency shared by a large geographic area is only viable when there…
The euro isn’t solvent in growth
October 15, 2016What a shame it is that politicians aren’t historians too! And that it is regrettable for all of us that they aren’t looking back to the year 1931 – a tragedy, among other things – in order to draw parallels and precious lessons for today. Let’s remember the bankruptcy of the very large Austrian bank,…
Globalisation: R.I.P.
August 10, 2016Globalisation is dead: long live deglobalisation! While Brexit has (fortunately) not been the cataclysm that analysts had so predicted, it is nonetheless the most spectacular manifestation of the end of the reign of globalisation. A revolt against the elites has indeed been brewing – across Western countries – since the crises of the years 2007…
Luxembourg: the worm in Europe’s apple
December 20, 2015It is the backbone of European tax evasion. A financial colony. One of the most fervent representatives of the money empire at the heart of Europe. It has been a systematic saboteur of the fight against tax fraud for several decades. Luxembourg is still the leading nation for secret banking benefits, a genuinely barbaric relic…
The exorbitant German privilege
November 4, 2015Germany has a huge demographic problem, but not necessarily the one you might suspect. While its population is indeed stable at slightly over 80 million inhabitants, it is the age of the total payroll that threatens to derail the country’s economy. This is because they are dangerously increasing the dependency ratio, that is, the proportion…
In Europe, growth is a curse!
May 19, 2015Let us be inspired by the British example where, against all expectations, David Cameron was re-elected Prime Minister. He had previously imposed on UK’s citizens and economy a pitiless austerity. But, a few months before the election he authorized a recovery in economic growth. Had he not done so, he would not have been re-elected!…