#European economy

[head-post]

Rachel Reeves “happy” to look at UK joining pan-European trade area

Rachel Reeves has said she is “absolutely delighted” to consider joining a pan-European customs area to ease restrictions on trade, Mirror reports.

Maroš Sefcovic, the new head of the EU’s trade body, said last week that the UK joining the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention (PEM) is “something we could consider” as part of the post-Brexit reset. It would allow tariff-free trade in goods across Europe, as well as some countries in North Africa and the Levant.

The Chancellor told Sky:

“We are absolutely happy to look at these different proposals because we know that the deal that the previous government secured is not working well enough. It’s not working well enough for small businesses trying to export, it’s not working well enough for larger businesses either. We’re grown-ups who admit that, whereas the previous government said there were no problems at all. And where there are constructive ideas we are happy to look at those, as long as they’re consistent with the red lines we set out in our manifesto.”

Labour has ruled out joining the EU customs union or single market before the 2024 election. But Keir Starmer wants to seek closer ties with Europe after years of fighting over Brexit.

The comments immediately sparked howls of outrage from the Tories, who said it risked “cancelling Brexit from the back door.” Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith said:

“This scheme is not the silver bullet to growth the Government thinks it is. Whenever Labour negotiates, Britain loses. So, we need to make sure they don’t surrender important assets like our fishing rights. We must avoid undoing Brexit by the back door by aligning with the EU’s low-growth model.”

Expressing a more optimistic tone than in recent months, she told the BBC:

“My optimism for Britain has never burned brighter than it does now and that’s why we are going further and faster in removing those things that are blocking investment and blocking businesses from creating the wealth and prosperity in our country.”

“Rachel from accounts”

Reeves also noted that people had “underestimated” her before and she had “spent her life proving people wrong” when asked if she was offended by critics calling her “Rachel from accounts.”

Asked if she thought she would be labelled condescending if she were a man, the chancellor told Sky News:

“Some people don’t want this Government to succeed. Some people don’t want me to succeed. I spend my life proving people wrong, proving that I can do stuff, that I’ve been underestimated.”

Asked if she was hurt by the nickname, she said:

“I’ve probably been called worse things… in the end people are going to judge me on the job that I’m doing now, that I’m doing as Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

Read more HERE

[erebusvincent]

Years ago, America's economy grew neck and neck with that of the European Union (E.U.). Then, about 15 years ago, Europe stopped growing.

Today, the USA is 50 percent richer—even though the E.U. has 100 million more people.

Europe is kind of like a big museum. Tourist money keeps it going, but there's so little growth that, per person, America's poorest state (Mississippi) is now richer than most European countries.

[munaeem]

Understanding Europe’s Aging Population and Its Economic Implications

Europe is grappling with a demographic transformation as its population ages at an unprecedented rate. This shift brings forth critical questions about various socio-economic factors that could shape the continent’s future. Why is Europe’s Population Aging? One of the primary reasons for Europe’s aging population is the significant decline in birth rates across many countries. Women have…

[thewordenreport]

It might surprise you that the GDP per capita in Germany is less than in Mississippi. The E.U. average is also less than the U.S. average. Why? https://thewordenreport-governmentandmarkets.blogspot.com/2025/01/gdp-per-capita-in-eu-and-us-changing.html

[rodaportal]

🌐 Join the conversation on the growing disparity between the cost of living and salaries! 📊 Our latest video explores the economic, social, and individual impacts, offering concrete measures for a more equitable future.

[xtruss]

Europe’s Economy Looks To Be Heading For Trouble! Will Policymakers Still Lift Interest Rates?

— August 31st 2023 | Finance and Economics | Brace For Impact

Containers are Pictured in the Harbour in Frankfurt, Germany. The European Central Bank is in the Background. Image: AP

Europe’s summer was a strange mixture of heavy rainfall and wildfires. The continent’s economy was also plagued by extremes. Inflation remained hot: prices rose by 5.3% in August compared with a year earlier. And officials are increasingly worried by the cloudy growth outlook. A recent drop in the purchasing managers’ index (pmi) suggests the bloc is facing recession.

Ahead of the next meeting of the European Central Bank (ECB) on September 14th, policymakers will be worried by the possible emergence of stagflation (a situation in which low growth is paired with entrenched inflation). Christine Lagarde, the Central Bank’s President, recently reiterated her commitment to bringing down inflation and setting interest rates at “sufficiently restrictive levels for as long as necessary to achieve a timely return of inflation to our 2% medium-term target”. In plain English: the ECB would much prefer a “hard landing”, featuring economic pain, to failing to reduce price rises.

The problem is that the ecb risks crashing the plane. Euro-zone inflation is proving as stubborn as the American variety. In Europe, price rises were sparked by increasing energy costs; in America, they were more demand-driven. But in both places inflation has followed a similar path, with Europe slightly behind. Now the question is whether core inflation, which excludes volatile energy and food prices, will come in to land. So far, it is staying stubbornly high (see chart).

This is in part because Europe has, like America, so far managed to dodge recession. At the end of last year, when many expected a European downturn, monetary tightening had yet to hit the economy and national governments offered generous handouts in order to counteract the energy shock. The service sector showed decent growth, and industrial order books remained full from the post-covid boom.

Gloom is now spreading across the continent. The global economy is weakening, and order books have plenty of blank pages. State support for households is also running out. Retail energy prices remain higher than before last year’s crisis; real incomes have yet to recover. Activity in the service industry contracted in August, according to the PMI Survey. The sector is at its weakest in two and a half years.

Higher interest rates have also started to affect the European economy, as intended by the ecb’s policymakers. Construction, which is traditionally sensitive to interest rates, is feeling the pain. Stingier bank lending is leading to a 0.4 percentage-point reduction in gdp growth each quarter, according to Goldman Sachs, a bank. Corporate insolvencies rose by more than 8% in the year’s second quarter, compared with the first, and have reached their highest since 2015. The impact of tighter monetary policy will peak in the second half of this year, predicts Oliver Rakau of Oxford Economics, a consultancy.

A hard landing is thus almost guaranteed. But the return of inflation to the ecb’s 2% target remains some way off. Two forces are pulling prices in different directions. One is the situation in the labour market. Unemployment remains at a record low. Although firms are hiring fewer workers, there is no imminent danger of mass lay-offs—in part because bosses want to hold on to workers that are increasingly scarce in an ageing continent. As a result, wages across the bloc are rising, even if not by enough to make up for earlier inflation.

The other force, which is pulling down inflation, is weakening demand for wages. During the covid pandemic, price growth took off in advance of wage growth, causing companies’ profits to rise strongly alongside inflation. If companies now find that demand is drying up, it is possible that inflation will fall at the same time as wage growth stays high, bringing profits back down. Indeed, prices on wholesale markets for goods are already falling fast, and import prices are also declining. At some point, these lower prices will be passed on to consumers.

Which of these two forces will win out? At the moment, it looks like the answer will be weak demand, since it has spread to the service sector, too. This suggests that euro-zone inflation might fall in relatively short order. But the ecb appears unconvinced, and seems ready to lift its main rate to 4.5% from 4.25%. Policymakers would be better off holding rates steady, so that they can assess the danger of a crash. ■

— This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline "Brace For Impact"

[thenewdemocratus]

Townhall: Daniel J. Mitchell: Is America Doomed to Become a Failed European-Style Welfare State?

Source:The New Democrat  One thing I tend to agree on with Progressive economists on is that there isn’t any magic number to attach to how big the public sector has to be or how small it has to be that is the signal that government is too big and must be trimmed down. Before the Great Recession, America was doing very well economically for about 25 years, with a few slow-downs in between and…

[yrrtyrrtwhenihrrthrrt]

All these posts I see with the nerve to say, "We'll be alright, we'll be okay, we'll continue to fight, we'll continue to hope," have made me more weary than the plain truth.

It's over. That's it, it's over. Our country has been taken from us.

The genocide will be invigorated, and any hope of U.S. pressure bringing it to an end is gone. I'm so sorry.

Everyone with a uterus will lose any semblance of human rights they once enjoyed. You can say goodbye to being considered a human being, you can say goodbye to any consensus whatsoever that your very life ever mattered.

Every queer and transgender person will face outright persecution and lose the right to so much as exist as themselves, alongside which even cishet people will lose all right to self-expression.

Immigrants will lose whatever fragile hold they had allowing them to pursue life and happiness in this country and will be forced away from their families, jobs, and loved ones if not worse.

Police abuse against people of color and any political dissenters will be invigorated and their immunity from justice will expand.

The prices will continue to rise and the wages will drop or remain stagnant at best.

Disabled Americans, including any American with any pre-existing condition, will lose all access to healthcare as medical costs will skyrocket and our meager insurance will be stripped of us. We will be left in the street to die.

So don't fucking tell me to "hold onto hope" and don't you dare fucking tell me "we will be okay." Who is we? It isn't me, or any of my friends or loved ones. There is not a single person I know that doesn't fall into at least one of the above-mentioned categories. Not one person in this country am I acquainted with who has neither a functioning uterus, nor ANY medical condition whatsoever, nor is an immigrant or from an immigrant family, nor is a person of color, nor is a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Think about it. Do you?

So, in God's name, who the fuck is "gonna be okay"? Anyone lucky enough to survive? Anyone who lucks out and manages to avoid a dangerous pregnancy (which will be soo easy once we lose access to birth control, I'm sure), or manages to stay under the ICE's radar, or manages not to be pulled over by a pig who needs to take out his rage over his wife surviving her last beating, or manages to not get sick or injured ever again? That's somehow not as comforting as people think it is.

And as for the genocide, I'm so sorry. I'm so, so, so sorry that my country has once again failed the people of Palestine. I hope all the people who abstained from voting because Kamala wasn't pro-Palestinian enough feel really good about themselves when they watch countless more children being slaughtered as Israel is bolstered in its capacity to accelerate the genocide beyond any level we've seen thusfar. I'm so, so sorry to my brothers and sisters in Palestine. I'm so sorry that we failed you.

This isn't to say we should stop fighting. But the time for hope and handholding and singing kumbaya is over. Compassion and love have failed, today has proved that. Violence is our only option left.

[relaxedstyles]

If only all interviews were in this style ...

[alpaca-clouds]

How the French Revolution lead to Capitalism

Alright, this is another thing that I was asked about from some Castlevania peeps, as I mentioned this. And I guess, yeah, it is fair that should elaborate on this.

The French Revolution - somewhat inadvertent - gave us capitalism and everything that came with it. Sure, capitalism would not have happened without colonialism and mercantilism already being in place, but that does not make it less true that the French Revolution was very influential in giving us the system we have now.

If school taught you anything about the history of economic systems, it was possibly that the system before capitalism was feudalism. Chances are, everyone skipped over mercantilism.

To quickly go over it again:

Feudalism was more than just an economic system, but basically is a word to describe medieval society overall. Under feudalism pretty much only nobility and the church can own anything - especially land. Everyone else is just leasing it from them and will hence have to pay part of their harvest or whatever they make on that land to the nobility that owns it. Meanwhile the nobility is beholden to whatever king they live under as well, making the money automatically acrew on the top of the pyramid. If harvests were good, this could work fine. But in years of bad harvests the peasants were often fucked.

Mercantilism was the trading system that was brought on by colonialism. To make it short: Mercantilism was a system that sought to exploit the colonies for their raw materials, to then create products from those within any given country to enhance the value. It also sought to mostly export goods and not import them (colonies were after all "part of the country"), so that the country could acrew as much money (as in gold and silver) as possible. While a lot of the companies used for this trading were held by nobility, this is not true of them all. As such the mercantile system allowed for certain merchants to become as rich if not richer than nobles.

Which brings us back to the French Revolution. Again: France had once again a war with the English. After all, chances are that if you pick any time before the French Revolution, England and France were at war. And because of that war, France then went to help the American Revolution. But two wars one after another put France in dept with a lot of people, and Louis XVI could no longer pay this dept back. So he raised taxes. And as nobility and church, who held more than 50% of the wealth of the nation, were not taxed, the peasants were like: "I don't think so, buddy." Partly, too, because the last two years had had really bad harvests and people were already starving. Hence: Revolution.

One of the earliest things the Revolution established, was that "every man is equal and should be treated as such in the eyes of the law" (of course, at this time, with the asterisk of "unless they are a slave"). While women were generally still discriminated in large parts of France, they still also gained a lot more legal protections and rights such as no-fault divorce. (Which Napoleon quickly did away with, and it then took until 1975 in France that no-fault divorce returned into law.)

Now, some of you might point out, that The Wealth of Nations was written before the French Revolution. But to that I say: "Well, Marx wrote Das Kapital in 1867 and last I checked, we still don't have communism."

Smith, when writing, The Wealth of Nation was largely inspired by the fact that he did not like the Mercantile system in place. As someone who read the darn thing (no, I do not recommend it) I also still have to say, that it is not the worst. While Smith assumes some things that by now we know are wrong (like barter), this is far from the Chicago school capitalism of our days. Smith even muses about the question that his proposed system might work better, if there is some safety of housing and food for the laborers.

Though of course we should also keep in mind, that Smith was originally a theologist and boy howdy, does it show. Something that modern economists do not like to admit: When Smith talks about the "invisible hand of the market", he does not mean that the market is somehow all-knowing and perfect. He means literally God! He basically says: "Well, God will keep the market balanced."

But as I said: Smith very much - just like Marx - laid out a criticism of the current system and a theory for how to improve it. He did not manage to get this system pushed through.

Because at this point Edmund Burke entered the picture. He was a British statesman, who most certainly had some thoughts on the French Revolution. I would even argue that some of them were valid, but not all. Two very valid and for the time progressive thoughts he had were, that he opposed slavery and capital punishment. He also criticized the Revolution for the "everyone is equal" bit, while clearly not treating slaves as equal. A much less progressive thought that he had was, that nobility was a good thing, actually, and so was the monarchy, and everyone actually profited from that. He was a very religious man and thought that the system of kings and nobles was indeed intended by God.

However, Burke eventually befriended Adam Smith, and the two of them spend days talking about the economy and God. And through this Burke realized one thing: If the people were no longer willing to just accept the rule of nobles because God said so, they might very well accept it, if it was based on merit.

Now, I do not want to make Burke out as a mustarch twirling villain, because he honestly believed that this was a good thing that would somehow help everyone.

Most of all, he believed in this idea of thr "natural order" of things. (This is a theme that the vampires bring up again and again in Castlevania Nocturne. The idea, that if not by the laws of God, then some still are fated to rule by the law of nature.) And he believed in clear societal hierarchies.

And from this arose the idea of capitalism and the meritocracy. Basically: Yes, we use a free market, and those who have the most money and hence the most influence actually have earned this position through their hard work. They are in this position by their own merit. Please ignore, that former nobility with their generational wealth had a much better starting position in the free market, than your average peasant Joe.

And here is the thing: Burke was at times the paymaster of Britain, so his thought kinda mattered. And while he did not live to see the thoughts he and Smith shared come to fruition, he is one of the big reasons, this system arose.

It was a way to secure nobility's rule over everyone else, even after the death of the old system.

And mind you, this kinda stuff was absolutely also discussed in France. Because once the people managed to get somewhat the same rights for most people, there absolutely was a conversation whether certain things like food and a living space should not also be included in those rights. Especially as during the French Revolution the price of bread and soap (among others) was very, very instabile, making the thought that the state should guarantee it a very natural one.

Some of the people living under the French Revolution - especially those, who also brought forth the anarchist thought - were absolutely proposing something we would today call socialism at the very least. But of course, in the end it was for naught, because the Revolution eventually failed - and once Napoleon was in power, such conversations were quickly stopped.

Of course, it should be noted, that either way: The system we live under during those last 25 years has a lot more in common with feudalism once again, than anything Adam Smith envisioned. And while Smith was also a conservative, he did not approve of feudalism.

[head-post]

BoE cuts key UK interest rate to 4.5%

The Bank of England (BoE) has cut its main interest rate for the third time in six months as the British economy stagnates, according to AP News.

The BoE said on Thursday that the Monetary Policy Committee had cut its main interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 4.50 per cent, the level since mid-2023. The move reflects some concern about the outlook for the British economy.

Official data earlier this month showed an unexpected drop in the inflation rate to 2.5 per cent year-on-year through December, mainly due to easing price pressures in the services sector, which accounts for about 80 per cent of the UK economy.

Another potential reason to lower borrowing rates is the country’s stagnant economic growth.

As inflation has fallen from multi-year highs, central banks, including the US Federal Reserve, have started to cut interest rates. However, economists believe that rates are unlikely to fall to the ultra-low levels that persisted in the years following the 2008-2009 global financial crisis and during the pandemic.

Read more HERE

[ignatiusteto]

i think sacred music in the kryn dynasty would be very cyclical and repetitive in form to symbolize the idea that life is a continuous thing (at least those who are consecuted right right) and is a cycle across lifetimes and yeah

[munaeem]

The Decline of European Stability: An In-Depth Analysis

Europe is now grappling with multiple crises at the same time. An economic downturn looms ahead as the EU’s primary industrial sectors progressively weaken. This will be our focal point shortly. Additionally, political instability is growing. Both the French and German governments face turmoil. They are barely clinging to power amidst waning popularity. Another crisis gripping the EU is of a…

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

EU deforestation law delay brings losses to most vigilant

Companies that have paid to source agricultural produce that complies with the European Union's anti-deforestation law would lose out if the EU decides to delay implementing the legislation by a year, industry groups and traders said.

Deforestation is the second largest source of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change after the burning of fossil fuels, according to the European Commission. The EU had planned to ban the import of commodities from suppliers unable to prove their goods were not linked to deforestation.

The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) would have impacted imports of cocoa, coffee, cattle, soy, oil palm, timber, rubber and related products like chocolate and leather.

It was scheduled to come into effect on Dec. 30, but last week the EU Commission proposed a 12-month delay, under pressure from industries and governments who said it would cause supply chain disruptions, exclude poor, small-scale farmers from the EU market, and drive up the cost of basic foodstuffs because many farmers and suppliers were not ready to comply.

Continue reading.

[thoughtportal]

I cannot recommend this podcast interview with Cory Docotorow enough. It's about so much more than green tech and enshittification. anyone who uses the internet should listen.

[affairsmastery]

As Europe ramps up military spending, Germany’s defense companies are turning to the struggling auto industry for resources and workforce. With carmakers cutting jobs due to declining demand and EV transition struggles, firms like Rheinmetall are repurposing plants to produce defense equipment.

Hensoldt is even hiring auto industry workers to boost radar system production. European leaders are pushing for massive defense investments, with potential funding of up to 800 billion euros. This shift could revive Germany’s sluggish economy, creating jobs and fueling growth in a sector now crucial for Europe’s security.