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Something that always bothered me about the Motte is that while massive cultural/political events are going on in Europe, one needs to dive deep into the roundup thread to find any discussion of it at all. Meanwhile the latest trans-people-in-school or outrageous-nytimes-oped controversy (which nobody will remember in a week) will have 500 comment threads dedicated to extreme nitpicking.
Anyway sorry for the rant. It looks like the far-right (of the quite openly far-right, even post-fascist variety) has just won the Italian elections and will very likely going to provide the prime minister to a cabinet that will include a 85 year old Berlusconi among others. Italy is the 3rd most populous and wealthy country in the EU. It also acts as a perennial threat to the stability of the Brussels-led order and the euro, since an Italian default or currency exit would almost definitely trigger the collapse of the euro with who knows what consequences. The EU looks determined to fight. Meloni herself does not sound like the type of politician who will accept to be crushed as easily as her predecessors. Here is a French interview with a 19 years old activist Meloni. She still sounds like a true believer to me. To get the gist of just how radical (from the EU-norm) she is willing to be with regard to cultural issues, I recommend this speech from 3 years ago (with English subs).
What are your expectations? Are we coming near a grand showdown? How is this going to interact with the looming threat of grid collapse in Europe? Russia sanctions and the European willingness to keep Ukrainian army in the field? NATO expansions? Is her family and God rhetoric just fluff or do you expect some real moves in this regard? When the ECB will have to start increasing interest rates substantially and Italy has to choose between bankruptcy or euro-exit, how will this go under this government?
P.S. Italy was one of the most anal countries with regard to vaccine oppression and corona measures in Europe. Does anyone know what the position of the Fratelli was back then? And how they talk about these things now?
This website has a predominantly US readership, I think .
In other news, the Euro and Pound are in freefall , the former down 5% and the later down an astonishing 10% over the past month. This show how bad things are over there even compared to here. Inflation higher ,too. It's a mess over there due to a combination of poor policy, risk aversion (flight to safety trade), and other factors, and will probably get worse. Western Europe pretty much missed out on the entire 90s and 2000s tech boom and you can see it the huge difference between the returns of the US vs. UK stock market starting in the early 2000s which has continued since . There is nothing to be optimistic about over there .
Yeah the Euro going under .96 is bad on its own but it's really just a sign of how weak and overhyped the EU has been for a while now.
The Fed can afford aggressive hikes to contain inflation though it remains to be seen if they will succeed without triggering a great depression. Meanwhile the ECB knows that if they get as aggressive, the weight of southern europe's debts will just collapse them. So they don't and the Euro loses against the dollar, and a weak currency is only good if you're a big net exporter, which the EU with its -250B trade balance most definitely isn't.
I don't see a way out of this that doesn't seriously shrink the pie, and economic strife means political strife. And it's not like there's a way out with our shitty demography and lack of innovation.
Just checked this, the chart is catastrophic! They used to enjoy a trade surplus too.
https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/balance-of-trade
The US is much worse though. It will be extremely damaging when the house of cards collapses and foreigners are no longer prepared to export valuable goods in exchange for bits of paper printed by the Fed.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/balance-of-trade
I think people rightly think by the time "piece of paper printed by the FED" loses its value, we are probably in so much deep shit globally (nuclear exchange? global shipping collapse? Solar flare? Free for all world war?) that finance is the least of our problems.
That doesn't even apply to the EU. Euro can lose its value and fundamentally not much would need to change in the world.
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