The Eurozone Crisis Thread

BREAKING: Angela Merkel will quit as head of Germany's Christian Democratic party after nearly 20 years, source says https://t.co/RJ1VPouz4b pic.twitter.com/0QaxynRZCg

— Bloomberg (@business) October 29, 2018

The Green vote is up and other left party votes have held up I think.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqnaYAaWoAEk35B.jpg

good day for the Greens.

And for Fascists :(

every day seems to be a good day for them unfortunately.

I don't know how these things work in the Federal Republic but SDP/Greens/FDP/Left coalition for Hesse, get in!

allegedly now the "grown up in the room" has gone, all hell will break loose!

I think its a good day. Another centrist down!

Angie is still the chancellor. Also the AfD result is pretty low compared to East Germany (24% in the Saxony-Anhalt election two years ago, probably a majority of seats in Saxony next summer)

The FT Alphaville podcast Alphachat is regularly excellent. The most recent one with Ashoka Mody (Princeton) and Waltraud Schelkle (LSE) is fascinating on the future of the Eurozone.

Mody is by no means universally admired for his negative view of the Eurozone aiui, but I find him pretty compelling here.

The Chinese economy, even if it does not have a hard landing, will inevitably slow down. China *has* to slow down – China cannot keep growing at 6% a year. With Chinese slowdown comes an inevitable slowdown in world trade growth. With a slowdown in world trade growth comes an inevitable slowdown in Eurozone growth. We are leading to an economic and political conjuncture over here, where the Eurozone is set on a long-term basis to slow down and we are set on at least a medium-term basis to have dysfunctional politics to resolve these extraordinarily complex international co-ordination issues.

As they address elsewhere, and as generally seems to be the consenus, Italy is due a banking crisis in the next couple of years at most. That seems to me to be potentially existential for the European project. Italy is undoubtedly too big to fail. I think it's fair to say the Eurozone has not learnt the lessons of the crisis, and it's not clear what the response would be to a failure of Italy's banking system. If Italy is too big to fail, it also feels like it's too big to rescue.

Part of the point, not obvious from the quote, is that those dysfunctional politics are a consequence to the productivity crisis. So effectively the tools you get to solve a productivity crisis are dysfunctional politics, as the pre-crash liberal political consensus (or w/e u want to to call it) is de-legitimised and replaced more clearly by traditional questions of power and distribution.

The far-right is now in government in Estonia:

https://www.dw.com/cda/en/estonia-far-right-set-to-enter-government-for-first-time/a-48240943

https://www.dw.com/cda/en/far-right-party-deputy-we-are-the-mainstream-in-estonia/a-47893557

EKRE leader Mart Helme would become interior minister and his son, Martin Helme, finance minister. The party would also control the environment, rural affairs, foreign trade and IT portfolios, while defense, justice, foreign affairs and culture would go to Fatherland.

”If you're black, go back," Helme said during a television appearance in 2013, adding, "I want Estonia to be a white country." In the Conflict Zone interview, Helme told Sebastian "80 percent of Estonians agreed with that statement."
Has he changed his views now? "No, no."

Instead Helme offered his own view of the problem: "What is racist in Europe nowadays is the replacement of indigenous people. That is pure racism."

Telling how countries that have little to no experience with non-white immigration (or immigration, period, other than Russian colonists in all but name, which are ultimately palatable as long as they're white) are scared shitless of 'the great replacement'.

Reminds me of the first time I went back to Romania and some family 'friend' started spewing casually racist shit about Asians. 'Have you ever met one?' 'No.' Chances are he never will, either, but he knows that what he knows is the incontrovertible truth.

I was going to say the biggest pro-Brexit votes in the UK were in areas with least immigration, it's not entirely true but not far off it.

I remember talking to a girl in Romania who was terrified of Chinese people because she’d been told they alI carry knives and have gang brawls in the street. If was a few years ago but I was also struck by how much tv programming was made up of dodgy 80s Hollywood action films, complete with every racist stereotype of the era, which probably didn’t help.

Estonia had a moderately liberal immigration policy until relatively recently iirc - though non-EU migration was capped at a couple of thousand per year, they didn’t put huge barriers in the way. There has always been a dodgy nationalist streak to domestic politics, though.

A common theme, too, meant to dissuade people from emigrating to Western countries, is Fear of Indians. It may be specific to Romania due to centuries of discrimination against the Roma, but it comes up almost systematically on the internet when an expat takes issue with the prevalence of racism back home: 'enjoy your Indian neighbour', like it were some kind of curse.

*as if it were…

fwiw my sense is that anti-semitism hasn't been a big problem in Estonia. I knew a Russian Jew who was exiled to Estonia in the 1970s, before escaping to the USA in the 1990s; the Soviets didn't want Jewish mathematicians to get positions at home but they could be sent to friendly auxiliaries without it being a death sentence.

Antisemitism might not be but they’ve linked citizenship and language / ethnicity pretty strongly in order to render hundreds of thousands of non-ethnic-Estonian residents stateless or (practically) incapable of obtaining future citizenship. That is going to have an impact on how immigration is thought of.

I mean, "white genocide"/"the great replacement" is itself a wildly antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Salvini trying to form a new far-right bloc:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/08/matteo-salvini-launches-campaign-to-forge-far-right-alliance

Yeah, the Danish Peoples Party want to be a part of that. So far they've only used EU to embezzle funds for political purposes. Apparently, the larger the alliance, the larger the funds available for misuse will be.

Those who support such parties tend to view them as Robin Hood figures, stealing from the elites to give back to the people. The level of delusion is off the charts.

The far-right bloc is certainly something that I've been seeing for a quite a while. Years of lib triangulation and media driving migrants under and now, well, they have the votes.

Speaking of 'the great replacement', the loathsome Renaud Camus has just announced that he will stand as a candidate in the EU elections against the 'replacists' who are supposedly preventing Europe from waging its 'war of decolonization'. We must embrace 'remigration', he says, and acknowledge that those who 'deny the great replacement' are the real 'negationists of our time'. Because 'Europe is more colonized today than it has ever colonized Africa', deporting all non-white Europeans is the sole means of avoiding a 'bloodbath'. 'If we may only choose between submission and war, let there be war'. Utterly sickening, all the more so after Christchurch. This is hate speech, full stop.

I always wonder why schmucks like that don't shut up & just raise families of their own, but I see from his bio that that was never going to happen. self-loathing as usual.

Not sure how him being gay is relevant or worth mentioning in that context. Gay people can have families too?

His campaign posters are like “no to anti Semitism!” while he’s famously ranted about French media having too many Jewish people.

They can, but they often don't, and it would have in any case been a source of internal tension, which dreams of replacement might have manifested.

Or he could just be a raving racist and his sexuality isn’t relevant? Plenty of them out there with massive families spouting out his disgusting theories.

My point was less about him in particular and more about how a more practical solution to what they perceive as a problem would be to have large families, without having to do anything about the already-rather-meager legal immigration to Europe.

rethink this one maybe

'Europe is more colonized today than it has ever colonized Africa'

Does this man have any idea how the European colonization of Africa operated?

He thinks it was good lol

It was armed robbery on a continental scale.

I think everyone (well almost) itt is aware that France in Africa was bad - though never as bad as Belgium. God!

Belgium still had a Human Zoo in the late 50's, but still not as bad as the UK's 60's gulags in Kenya, where lots of ww2 veterans who fought Rommel in N Africa on a zero pay - only rations deal ended up.

Assume these far right fascists are getting ready for the brown skinned climate refugees that are coming in the upcoming decades.

make this work u fux

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/10/italy-pm-conte-left-leaning-coalition-vote-of-confidence

I know it's Goodwin but EU is showing itself to be utterly inadequate.

New poll in Italy hints at the possible political effects of #coronavirus if EU does not get its act together

88% of Italians say "EU is not helping us"

% who say "EU membership is advantage" has dropped 16 pts to 21%. "EU membership is disadvantage" up 20 pts to 67% pic.twitter.com/o0b7U0I2wq

— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) March 15, 2020

What would be adequacy in this regard?

I don't know but this isn't it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/12/ecbs-plan-to-support-eurozone-banks-is-underwhelming

Also lack of co-ordinated action beyond market stability. Italy might need further funds. It will be interesting to see how the EU react (although maybe they should be proactive).

Just noting the silence.

Agreed, I just don't think a poll about "are they doing enough or not" this early in the crisis, asking Italians at this point, is unlikely to show a different result imo. They can't rest on their laurels like they have done until now, I'm def with you on that.

Xxp So you’re basically asking for more integration and coordination at EU level?
I don’t see how a poll shows anything about efficiency of EU response. Real problem right now is haphazard and uncoordinated measures from Member States

Yes, and while it's just one poll it could be a sign of things to come.

It's interesting that while the EU sets all kinds of regulatory standards on any and everything it has basically let member states do what they want in this public health crisis.

it has basically let member states do what they want in this public health crisis.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, March 16, 2020 12:15 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It doesn't have any authority to do otherwise. And why should they want to? Leaving this to the individual countries is the best (least worse) option here imo. If only because "EU said so" makes swathes of people do the opposite these days.

It's about leadership and coordination of activity across sectors. The EU has no problems dictating to member states when it wants to. It has done so in the past when the markets demanded so it definitely has authority.

But again it's not about imposing so much as getting countries together to coordinate a plan of cross-border action. That kind of thing.

In the case of Italy it's also showing solidarity with the most affected. It's recession will be deep, they will need a lot of financial assistance.

I do think this could turn into an existential crisis for the EU. Would it survive Italy going under? It would be so, so much worse than the Greek crisis.

A shitty piece of axe-grinding from Matthew Goodwin is a terrible pretext for starting this discussion and it doesn't feel like it's progressing from a place of either good faith or any real knowledge of what is and isn't happening.