Tricky Trichet Rides AgainThe only economical behaviour in the EU involves the truth. [Apologies for the late start this morning: wrong sort of cloud over southern France]
“There has been a tendency for outsiders to be excessively pessimistic” said EU Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet this morning. I can well imagine that Spartacus said something similar just before the Roman armies swept him into the sea, but the penalties for failure were rather greater in those days. I know of at least two ECB Board members who, if asked by the lending legions tomorrow the famous question, would instantly point at Jean-Claude and yell “He’s Spartacus!” But the late J-C will simply retire soon at the end of his incompetent stint, cream off his fat, instant EU pension, and leave the rest of us wondering exactly how he managed it.
This latest straw at which Trichet had grasped was the continuing fall in jobless figures in the EU, and the unexpectedly high growth in German exports last month. Jean-Claude is just a tad off message with this latter which-way-is-up observation, given that most of the other member states think German exports are the problem in the first place. (They aren’t, but it was classically cynical of the Frenchman Trichet to use any argument in a crisis).
As for the ‘falling’ jobless figures, that really is cynical bollocks of the worst sort. Germany’s growth in employment once again explains much of it. There is no fall in productive sector unemployment; and in countries like Greece, Spain and Italy, all forms of it are rocketing. The reality is that in France – the biggest Government employer in the Union – not a single redundancy has yet been enacted, and the deficit there is rising at Euro 3 billion a month: but the French private sector is struggling just as hard as it ever was.
Also on the horizon are Spanish banking insolvency (the stress test there isn’t getting any more exhaustive, because it daren’t) and the unsquared circle of federal spending surveillance plans that the UK will reject in any and all forms.
I suppose if Europe can’t get real with itself, then we must expect it to be clueless on the subject of getting real with us. But it does behove supposedly on-the-ball investment media to interrogate some of the nonsense put out by the EU in general, and the ECB in particular.
The Slog 