European Union: Discussion Thread

Surging mistrust of the euro during Europe’s debt crisis fed a campaign to bring Germany’s entire $141 billion gold reserve home from New York and London. Now, after politics shifted in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition, the government has concluded that stashing half its bullion abroad is prudent after all.

“The Americans are taking good care of our gold,” Norbert Barthle, the budget spokesman for Merkel’s Christian Democratic bloc in parliament, said in an interview. “Objectively, there’s absolutely no reason for mistrust.”

Werewolf wrote:I really hope that enough people here in Germany will wake up among those please Bundeswehr and sieze Rammstein AFB of the US in Germany, capture Nuclear weapons and take americans hostage, and force US to give german Gold back with interest but keep the nuclear weapons to assure that no american ever will step a foot on German soil again.

magnumcromagnon wrote:

Werewolf wrote:I really hope that enough people here in Germany will wake up among those please Bundeswehr and sieze Rammstein AFB of the US in Germany, capture Nuclear weapons and take americans hostage, and force US to give german Gold back with interest but keep the nuclear weapons to assure that no american ever will step a foot on German soil again.

Charles De Gaulle approves of this message:

Paul Krugman - NY Times wrote:OK, arrived in Hong Kong, and IT is working a lot better. So let me weigh in a bit more on the Swiss miss. Basically, my take is the same as Brad DeLong’s: what we have here is a central bank that let itself be bullied by the balance sheet bugaboo brigade.

The way to think about the franc peg, I’d argue, is to view currency intervention as essentially a form of quantitative easing. What we mean by QE is open-market operations in which the central bank buys stuff other than the usual purchases of short-term government debt. This could be long-term assets, it could be private-sector debt, or it could be foreign securities. Obviously the channels of influence depend to some extent on which route you choose, although remember that the Fed was accused of waging currency war when it was only purchasing domestic assets, and the main clear effect of Abenomics so far has run through the exchange rate. But the main point is to think of any kind of non-Treasury-bill open market operation as a form of QE.

This in turn helps us put the explicit exchange rate target into the right slot: it was about making QE effective through commitment, so that you got the maximum impact on expectations. Actually, the success of the currency program suggests that other central banks might want to try things like setting a ceiling on some long-term interest rate.

But back to Switzerland: they had a policy that was working, so why did they stop? And the answer, Brad and I both suspect, is that the SNB, like the Fed, faced constant pressure from finance types saying “Your balance sheet is too big! Debasement! Inflation! Unnatural monetary acts! Francisco d’Anconia!” But unlike the Fed, the SNB lacked the intellectual self-confidence (and perhaps the institutional strength, seeing as how it’s partially privately owned) to stand up to that pressure.

The irony is that having been bullied into worrying about its own profitability, which is not what central banks should do, the SNB ended up imposing huge losses on itself. But that’s neither here nor there for Swiss national interests. The main thing is that the credibility essential to getting traction at the zero lower bound has been dissipated for Switzerland, and damaged for everyone else.

ahmedfire wrote:What is the problem ?

The so-called ‘fast-track' legislation limits Congress' ability to tweak the opaque details of Obama's trade deals with East Asia and the EU, allowing them to vote only yes or no on the entire package as a whole. The Administration is urging Congress to push the bill through so that the President can supposedly be in a stronger position to negotiate with his foreign counterparts. The real reason for the hurried rush, however, is that the US wants to jam the secretive trade package through before the election season heats up next year, and also before the EU public wakes up to the fact that the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is in fact a very unbalanced and neo-colonial deal for the continent.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20150524/1022516328.html#ixzz3b6ia6Pcc

Locky wrote:They are rather wily guys, all of them in Kiev and Riga and Vilius and Warsaw! Look how Poles do it
beforeitsnews.c o m /international/2015/08/
poland-lacking-confidence-in-iran-wants-more-money-for-anti-missile-system-2487512.h t m l
They just use Iran or Russia or other as some scarecrows and deadly threat to their security to get financial and other aid from Brussels. Why should we bow to those tricks?

sepheronx wrote:

Locky wrote:They are rather wily guys, all of them in Kiev and Riga and Vilius and Warsaw! Look how Poles do it
beforeitsnews.c o m /international/2015/08/
poland-lacking-confidence-in-iran-wants-more-money-for-anti-missile-system-2487512.h t m l
They just use Iran or Russia or other as some scarecrows and deadly threat to their security to get financial and other aid from Brussels. Why should we bow to those tricks?

Because, US will demand it.  US wants the bases in Poland to be closer to Russia and to stir more trouble for Belarus.  Simple as that.

Werewolf wrote:

sepheronx wrote:

Locky wrote:They are rather wily guys, all of them in Kiev and Riga and Vilius and Warsaw! Look how Poles do it
beforeitsnews.c o m /international/2015/08/
poland-lacking-confidence-in-iran-wants-more-money-for-anti-missile-system-2487512.h t m l
They just use Iran or Russia or other as some scarecrows and deadly threat to their security to get financial and other aid from Brussels. Why should we bow to those tricks?

Because, US will demand it.  US wants the bases in Poland to be closer to Russia and to stir more trouble for Belarus.  Simple as that.

The poles are poled to be so russophobic that they just become like americans, brainless, ready to poke the bear, while being completley unarmed and unprepared.