Money and politics?

 My post on  Brussel Report, hosted by the gracious Pieter Cleppe:

Article 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

DISTANT GLOW AND SMOKE: WHY RENEWABLES DO NOT PRODUCE ELECTRICITY

Image
  DISTANT GLOW AND SMOKE M y take on “Why #European countries are going for Coal over #Nuclear? “ DISCLAIMER: I am not an engineer, nuclear or otherwise, I shun titles of any sort if I possibly can, but my job in finance involves analysing and assessing the economic prospect of.. things. I have been doing that for a living for over 30 years and I am still here. Countries and areas of the world at the tip of the spear of the “Green” movement, Germany being the most shining example, have been frantically turning to COAL instead of Nuclear in their plan for their future electricity provision. My lack of surprise at that has been duly noted, coupled with some of my most outrageous interjections. But first, my usual “materials and methods” preamble: I do not claim to be right. I simply look at alternative explanations of the reality I live in, provided that nothing material disproves them, and order them in order of descending likelihood according to my taste, until and u...
Read more