Small personal contribution to Macrodesiac, on why I am skeptical about the Recovery Fund.

 Link to Article

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

EUROPE, A CONTINENT WITH NO FRIENDS

Image
  A continent with no friends   "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow." (Lord Palmerston)   Transatlantic relations haven't been easy in the past ten years, but 2025 takes the cake so far ; European countries and the EU (overlapping but not identical concepts) have been caught napping by Trump's reelection ; Trump 2 is apparently similar to Trump 1, but he's not, yet for all the well known vicissitudes that intervened  (two life attempts, raid on Mar e Lago, dawn raids to arrest staff in front of media alerted to the purpose) the appearance is that Europe is not changing its ways in any appreciable sense if not scale ; The Munich meeting and the speech by Vice President Vance remain for me a seminal point in two ways, because they dictated the terms of the transatlantic dialogue from the US point of view and because the initial Euro...
Read more

With enemies like these

Image
  With enemies like these The EU has frozen Russian assets in Belgium permanently, with a view to use those as guarantee for loans to Ukraine in order to fund the continuation of hostilities and perhaps a more favourable outcome for Ukraine. The EU has decided to use art. 122 to circumvent the need to obtain unanimity on the EU commission decision to permanently freeze Russian assets already frozen , in custody in Belgium through Euroclear; There is objectively a wide gulf between what the official text of the article says and both the reasons and the purpose for which it has been applied in this case; Russia apparently has already filed a suit against Euroclear in a Russian court; The amount in question is approximately 50% of Belgium's GDP; No formal guarantees to Belgium by other EU countries has been finalized previous to the decision. A leaders' summit is due on December 18 th , where some of these issues will have to b...
Read more

Darkest before the sunset

  Darkest before the sunset Why Europe is on the cusp of existential change - and why “wrong” pessimists and optimists are right Europe has been slowly changing allegiance from some kind of “western” value based one to a “China” based system; So far, it has managed to do so without alerting citizens of that ( they are such children ). This is fast becoming untenable, hence the internal and external pushback, see my previous piece ; The Stated EU model , “rule based change from above towards an environmentally friendly and uniform social contract” has its optimists and pessimists, and the same happens for those postulating that it won't work and opposing this; Both positions are based on the unstated assumption that while it's possible to exchange a religious oligarchy for another, religious oligarchy works long term. The assumption is wrong; All else being equal, from this starting point, the continents most likely to become prominent are the Asi...
Read more