- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2024 23:02
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
Full FT interview with Macron for those who are interested:
quote:FT Interview: Emmanuel Macron says it is time to think the unthinkable
France’s president believes the coronavirus pandemic will transform capitalism — but leaders need to act with humility
“We are all embarking on the unthinkable,” says Emmanuel Macron, leaning forward at his desk in the Elysée Palace in Paris after an aide has cleaned the surface and the arms of his chair with a disinfectant wipe.
Until now, Mr Macron has always had a big plan for the future.
After winning power in a surprise election victory in 2017, the hyperactive French president announced a blizzard of ambitious proposals for reforming the EU that perplexed his more cautious European partners. When he chaired the G7 group of big economies last year, he tried to reconcile the US and Iran and make peace between Russia and Ukraine. His government has legislated furiously to modernise France.
The coronavirus pandemic, however, has left even Mr Macron groping for solutions to a global health crisis that has killed almost 140,000 people, and wondering how to save the French and world economies from a depression comparable to the crash of 1929.
“We all face the profound need to invent something new, because that is all we can do,” he says.
Let’s not be so naive as to say it’s been much better at handling this. There are clearly things that have happened that we don’t know about
He still has plans, of course. He wants the EU to launch an emergency investment fund of hundreds of billions of euros through which the reluctant northern members would have to support Italy and Spain, where many thousands have died from Covid-19. And he wants richer nations to help Africa with an immediate moratorium on bilateral and multilateral debt payments.
But perhaps for the first time, an uncharacteristically hesitant Mr Macron seems unsure whether or when his proposals will bear fruit. “I don’t know if we are at the beginning or the middle of this crisis — no one knows,” he says. “There is lots of uncertainty and that should make us very humble.”
It is a sign of “social distancing” and travel disruption in extraordinary pandemic times that the normally busy Elysée now has only a skeleton staff on site and that the FT’s editor attends the interview via video link. The usually tactile Mr Macron — of whom it was once said that “he could seduce a chair” — is forced to greet his guests from afar in the ornate salon doré, the golden room looking out over the palace lawns towards the Champs-Elysées.
This room was first used as the French president’s office by General Charles de Gaulle. In two speeches to the nation a month ago, Mr Macron deliberately adopted the tone of his presidential role model, declaring all-out war on the virus, imposing some of the strictest controls in Europe on people’s freedom of movement to slow the spread of the disease and declaring that his government would save jobs and companies “whatever the cost”. Behind his desk is a framed example of a $500 Anglo-French first world war bond from 1915.
Yet in recent weeks the bellicose rhetoric has given way to a more reflective view of how to handle the pandemic, accompanied by admissions of logistical failures that have left French doctors, nurses and essential workers desperately short of protective masks and of tests to measure the spread of the virus.
Unlike other world leaders, from Donald Trump in the US to Xi Jinping in China, who are trying to return their countries to where they were before the pandemic, the 42-year-old Mr Macron says he sees the crisis as an existential event for humanity that will change the nature of globalisation and the structure of international capitalism.
As a liberal European leader in a world of strident nationalists, Mr Macron says he hopes the trauma of the pandemic will bring countries together in multilateral action to help the weakest through the crisis. And he wants to use a cataclysm that has prompted governments to prioritise human lives over economic growth as an opening to tackle environmental disasters and social inequalities that he says were already threatening the stability of the world order.
But he does not hide his concern that the opposite could happen, and that border closures, economic disruption and loss of confidence in democracy will strengthen the hand of authoritarians and populists who have tried to exploit the crisis, from Hungary to Brazil.
“I think it’s a profound anthropological shock,” he says. “We have stopped half the planet to save lives, there are no precedents for that in our history.”
“But it will change the nature of globalisation, with which we have lived for the past 40 years . . . We had the impression there were no more borders. It was all about faster and faster circulation and accumulation,” he says. “There were real successes. It got rid of totalitarians, there was the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago and with ups and downs it brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But particularly in recent years it increased inequalities in developed countries. And it was clear that this kind of globalisation was reaching the end of its cycle, it was undermining democracy.”
Mr Macron bristled when asked if erratic efforts to curb the Covid-19 pandemic had not exposed the weaknesses of western democracies and highlighted the advantages of authoritarian governments such as China.
There is no comparison, he says, between countries where information flows freely and citizens can criticise their governments and those where the truth was suppressed. “Given these differences, the choices made and what China is today, which I respect, let’s not be so naive as to say it’s been much better at handling this,” he says. “We don’t know. There are clearly things that have happened that we don’t know about.”
The French president insists that abandoning freedoms to tackle the disease would pose a threat to western democracies. “Some countries are making that choice in Europe,” he says in an apparent allusion to Hungary and Viktor Orban’s decision to rule by decree. “We can’t accept that. You can’t abandon your fundamental DNA on the grounds that there is a health crisis.”
Mr Macron is especially concerned about the EU and the euro. Banging the desk repeatedly with his hands to emphasise his points, he says both the union and the single currency will be threatened if the richer members, such as Germany and the Netherlands, do not show more solidarity with the pandemic-stricken nations of southern Europe.
That solidarity should come in the form of financial aid funded by mutualised debt — anathema to Dutch and German policymakers, who reject the idea of their taxpayers repaying loans to Greeks or Italians.
“It’s obvious because people will say ‘What is this great journey that you [the EU] are offering? These people won’t protect you in a crisis, nor in its aftermath, they have no solidarity with you,’” he says, paraphrasing populist arguments politicians will use about the EU and northern European countries. “‘When immigrants arrive in your country, they tell you to keep them. When you have an epidemic, they tell you to deal with it. Oh, they’re really nice. They’re in favour of Europe when it means exporting to you the goods they produce. They’re for Europe when it means having your labour come over and produce the car parts we no longer make at home. But they’re not for Europe when it means sharing the burden.’”
For Mr Macron, the richer EU members have a special responsibility in the way they deal with this crisis. “We are at a moment of truth, which is to decide whether the European Union is a political project or just a market project. I think it’s a political project . . . We need financial transfers and solidarity, if only so that Europe holds on,” he says.
In any case, Mr Macron argues, the current economic crisis triggered by Covid-19 is so grave that many EU and eurozone members are already in effect flouting injunctions in European treaties against state aid for companies.
The ability of governments to open the fiscal and monetary taps to stave off mass bankruptcies and save jobs will be pertinent for Mr Macron’s own uncertain political future in France.
With the national economy forecast to shrink by 8 per cent this year and millions of temporarily laid-off workers still being paid thanks only to a €24bn official “partial unemployment” scheme, the government is expecting a 2020 budget deficit of 9 per cent of gross domestic product, the highest since the second world war.
Although often feted abroad for his energetic liberal internationalism, Mr Macron has recently been treated by domestic opponents from the far-left to the far-right — including the anti-establishment gilets jaunes demonstrators — as a president of the rich, a former Rothschild investment banker who wants to impose free-market capitalism on his reluctant citizens.
In reality, Mr Macron had already begun to slow his reform drive before the pandemic in the face of stiff opposition from a resurgent left and from the vestiges of the gilets jaunes movement. After a busy two years liberalising the labour market, reducing the tax burden on workers and entrepreneurs and trying to simplify the country’s expensive pensions systems, he backtracked last year on cutting the size of the civil service and then last month suspended reforms entirely for the duration of the coronavirus crisis.
He has tried to adopt environmental causes and soften his image to woo the left and the Greens ahead of a 2022 election that he hopes will be another second-round election run-off against Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme right Rassemblement National party.
Covid-19 might offer an opportunity to make the case that he is trying to humanise capitalism. That includes, in his view, putting an end to a “hyper-financialised” world, greater efforts to save the planet from the ravages of global warming and strengthening French and European “economic sovereignty” by investing at home in industrial sectors such as electric vehicle batteries, and now medical equipment and drugs, in which the EU has become overdependent on China.
There is a realisation, Mr Macron says, that if people could do the unthinkable to their economies to slow a pandemic, they could do the same to arrest catastrophic climate change. People have come to understand “that no one hesitates to make very profound, brutal choices when it’s a matter of saving lives. It’s the same for climate risk,” he says. “Great pandemics of respiratory distress syndromes like those we are living through now used to seem very far away, because they always stopped in Asia. Well, climate risk seems very far away because it affects Africa and the Pacific. But when it reaches you, it’s wake-up time.”
Mr Macron likened the fear of suffocating that comes with Covid-19 to the effects of air pollution. “When we get out of this crisis people will no longer accept breathing dirty air,” he says. “People will say . . . ‘I do not agree with the choices of societies where I’ll breathe such air, where my baby will have bronchitis because of it. And remember you stopped everything for this Covid thing but now you want to make me breathe bad air!’”
Like some of his predecessors — and unlike some of his counterparts in other western democracies — Mr Macron is overtly intellectual, always brimming with ideas and projects that sometimes grate with his more sober European counterparts.
Among the books piled haphazardly — or perhaps artfully — behind his desk are works by the late Socialist president François Mitterrand and Pope Francis, the letters exchanged by Flaubert and Turgenev, and a few copies of Mr Macron’s autobiography, Revolution: Reconciling France, prepared for the 2017 election campaign.
Yet when asked what he has learnt about leadership, he candidly admits that it is too early to tell where this global crisis will lead. Mr Macron says he has deep convictions about his country, about Europe and the world, and about liberty and democracy, but in the end the qualities that are needed in the face of the implacable march of events are humility and determination.
“I never imagined anything because I’ve always put myself in the hands of fate,” he says. “You have to be available for your destiny . . . so that’s where I find myself, ready to fight and promote what I believe in while remaining available to try and comprehend what seemed unthinkable.”
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2020 10:17
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
the EU is dead on its feet already, the left needs to get on the rising wave of euroskeptic sentiment or get crushed by it
I sympathise a lot with all the anti-EU things said itt, and agree with most of them, but this is always a fundamental problem to me. As reasonably good leftists we (I think?) agree that you cannot have socialism in one country, it is either international or it gets crushed, whether inside or outside the European Union.
Once you "ride the wave of Euroscepticism" and you get elected, supposing that you do and that fash don't beat you to it, how do you re-create the international side you need? You can't dissolve the EU and then say "we're building a new one, but this one will be better - with blackjack, and hookers." To me, a nationalist left project is always in much greater danger of falling to the New Right, because they'll promise roughly the same but also offer hatred of others, something EU has had a long appetite for that vastly precedes the establishment of any European institutions or structures.
To me the fundamental problem is that the supranationalist form of the EU, which does to some extent recognize and respect national wishes, cultures and boundaries is reasonably well suited for a socialist internationalist project. The working of it is, on the other hand, directly opposed to the establishment of socialism on the European stage. I don't know if it's possible to get the cross-border, pan-European wave of socialism you'd need to overthrow the dikes built into the system, but nationalist leftism doesn't have a huge appeal to me.
I really don't know how you get out of that particular set of linked problems.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2020 10:23
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
FT today; the ECB really is trying to pull out all the stops to do what they can so long as the word 'eurobond' is banned by the Northern rear end in a top hat Alliance.
quote: ECB pushes for eurozone bad bank to clean up soured loans
Brussels opposes idea despite fears the pandemic will trigger new NPL surge
European Central Bank officials have held high-level talks with counterparts in Brussels about creating a eurozone bad bank to remove billions of euros in toxic debts from lenders’ balance sheets.
The plan to deal with debts left over from the 2008 financial crisis is being pushed by senior ECB officials, who worry the coronavirus pandemic will trigger another surge in non-performing loans (NPLs) that risks clogging up banks’ lending capacity at a critical time.
But the idea faces stiff opposition within the European Commission, where officials are reluctant to waive EU rules requiring state aid for banks to be provided only after a resolution process imposes losses on their shareholders and bondholders.
“The lesson from the crisis is that only with a bad bank can you quickly get rid of the NPLs,” Yannis Stournaras, governor of the Bank of Greece and member of the ECB governing council, told the Financial Times. “It could be a European one or a national one. But it needs to happen quickly.”
Greek banks have by far the highest level of soured loans on their balance sheets of any eurozone country, making up 35 per cent of their total loan books — a legacy of the 2010-15 debt crisis that pushed the country to the brink of exiting the eurozone.
They have cut their bad loans by about 40 per cent in four years, under heavy pressure from the ECB. But plans by Greece’s big four lenders to sell more than €32bn of NPLs — almost half the total in the country — are likely to be disrupted by the coronavirus crisis, and Mr Stournaras said the best way to quickly fix their balance sheets is now via a bad bank.
ECB officials have also held talks with the commission’s department for financial stability and capital markets.
Senior EU officials have pushed back on the idea, arguing there are better ways to tackle toxic loans, but declined to give further details.
The high-level talks were in their infancy and had been premature, said people with direct knowledge of them. “We put a stop to them from the EU side,” said a person briefed on the discussions. “Nothing is moving.”
However, people following the discussions inside the commission did not rule out their resuming at a later stage of the pandemic.
Andrea Enria, chair of the ECB’s supervisory board, proposed the idea of an EU bad bank in early 2017 when he was still head of the European Banking Authority. His idea was blocked by Brussels’ officials citing state-aid rules — but he is now trying to get the plan off the ground again, said people briefed on the matter. The ECB declined to comment.
Total NPLs in the biggest 121 eurozone banks almost halved in four years to €506bn, or 3.2 per cent of their loan books, by the end of last year. But Greek, Cypriot, Portuguese and Italian banks still have NPL ratios above 6 per cent.
In March, the commission adopted a temporary relaxation of state-aid rules and has since waved through billions of euros in emergency government relief measures. Brussels is also finalising plans alongside member states to allow countries to inject equity directly into struggling businesses, though in return they will be restricted from paying dividends or bonuses while in receipt of state aid.
Proponents of the bad bank idea hope to make it acceptable under state-aid rules by proposing that the toxic loans would have to be sold into the market after a fixed time period, with the power to recoup any losses from the lenders themselves.
Spain, Ireland and Germany all set up state-backed bad banks after the 2008 financial crisis to deal with sudden increases in toxic bank debt.
But since then, the EU has introduced the bank recovery and resolution directive, which restricts governments from setting up bad banks except as part of an official resolution process.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2020 11:23
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
Surprise surprise, the Italians aren't super keen on using the ESM because of the austerity strings attached by the Frugal Fuckers:
quote:Giuseppe Conte prepares for toxic choice on eurozone rescue fund
Pressured by the right, Italy’s PM has prevaricated over triggering the European Stability Mechanism
Italy’s prime minister faces an invidious decision over whether to tap Europe’s bailout fund as he balances increasingly toxic domestic politics against the possibility of teeing up extra firepower to tackle the country’s mountainous borrowing requirements.
Ahead of a crucial EU leaders’ summit on Thursday, Giuseppe Conte has sent mixed messages over whether Italy will draw on precautionary credit lines from the €500bn European Stability Mechanism. His prevarication reflects divisions within his fragile governing coalition and a recognition that sustained campaigning by Eurosceptic Italian politicians has stained the ESM’s reputation among his electorate.
EU leaders are expected to sign off on the use of the ESM at a video conference summit on Thursday, as part of a €500bn package of emergency coronavirus-fighting measures. Resistance from Germany, the Netherlands and other northern member states will probably prevent Mr Conte and his allies from winning the prospect of mutualised debt issuance — dubbed “coronabonds” by some.
This leaves the Italian premier facing an unenviable political situation at home. Debate in Italy about the merits of using the ESM has become deeply intertwined with the country’s complex domestic politics, with Mr Conte’s opponents arguing the mechanism would compromise Italian sovereignty, even if the money came with the lightest of conditions.
Matteo Salvini’s populist League has repeatedly attacked Mr Conte for even considering use of the ESM, accusing him of betraying his own country and the futures of its youth. Mr Conte himself, under repeated heavy shelling from the country’s political right, has flip-flopped on the issue, saying at different points he would be open to accessing the ESM and at others that he would never do so.
His situation is made trickier by the composition of his own coalition government, and his unorthodox status as a leader without his own political party or lawmakers that are loyal to him.
His political future remains uneasily dependent on the ongoing support of the Five Star Movement, which itself is conducting a process to pick a new party leader as well as an internal debate about its future direction that is dividing between those who want to be closer to the pro-European Democratic party and those who view it as an enemy.
The PD supports Italy accessing the ESM as part of a compromise to find a pan-European solution. Yet a large number of Five Star Movement lawmakers deeply resent the ESM as much as Mr Salvini’s League, and are wary of being tainted by any decision Mr Conte might make to use it.
“I can understand Conte’s ambivalence towards the ESM,” said Erik Jones, professor of European studies and international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna. “He may feel that the only way to hold the Five Star Movement together is to keep pushing back on the ESM.”
At first glance the ESM’s offering is of modest budgetary benefit given Italy’s mounting debt burdens. The plan is each country may draw the equivalent of up to 2 per cent of its gross domestic product, which in Italy’s case would amount to about €37bn. The sum is relatively small, set against UniCredit analysts’ borrowing estimates for Italy of between €120bn and €160bn this year alone.
The ESM’s credit lines come with substantially lower interest costs than Italy can access by itself in the open markets, but UniCredit strategist Chiara Cremonesi estimates the annual saving at just over €700m before any fees. The difference could be lower factoring in the fact the ECB is purchasing large numbers of Italian bonds, she said, which diverts some interest payments on the debt back into the public sector.
Michele Geraci, a former under-secretary for economic development for the League, said the ESM did not provide enough of a safety net for Italy and the ECB should be willing to support Italian bonds without it. “Conte appears to think that possibly signing up to the ESM, but not actually then using it would be a neutral insurance policy for Italy, but he is wrong,” Mr Geraci said.
But analysts say arguments for going to the ESM do not stop at its precautionary credit lines alone. Accessing the lines is one of the preconditions for unlocking the ECB’s outright monetary transactions (OMTs) — unlimited purchases of shorter-term debt — which were born with former bank president Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes” speech at the height of the sovereign debt crisis in 2012.
Referring to OMTs in an interview with Corriere della Sera on Monday, Klaus Regling, the managing director of the ESM, said there may not be a need for such purchases at the moment, but “things may change.” Markets, he added, “are very volatile at this stage”.
Some analysts argued the ECB’s decision to purchase almost €900bn of extra bonds this year had made the OMT look redundant. Minutes to the ECB’s latest policy meeting recorded that the OMT was designed to address “unfounded fears” of a eurozone break-up — a very different situation from today’s symmetrical, pandemic-induced shock.
Italy can still comfortably access markets to finance its deficits. But given the scale of the economic slump in the country, and the vast quantities of debt it will have to issue, not everyone is willing to rule out a dramatic turn for the worse in the bond markets somewhere down the road. It remains to be seen whether Mr Conte decides to pay the high political price necessary to reduce that risk.
The Eurozone might kill off ANOTHER Italian government. Can't wait for another 'corona technocracy' to be installed that will be the deathblow to Italy's remaining faith in the Eurozone/EU.
This insane resistance to Euro/Coronabonds is gonna loving kill the Euro at some points.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2020 10:45
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
EU is gonna not do 'rona or Eurobonds, but try to plug the hole with ECB Magic + the European budget. This is about that second part and last night's Eurosummit:
quote:EU national leaders on Thursday directed the European Commission to draw up plans for a new long-term financial blueprint for the bloc that would also drive an economic recovery from the coronavirus. One could say EU leaders avoided giving the Commission any guidance on the recovery fund — not on its concrete size, not on how it’s going to be funded exactly, not on how and in which form it will disburse money. But look more closely and you’ll see that big things happened on Thursday, for single members of the European Council and the EU itself. Here are Playbook’s nine takeaways.
1. Now that went fast and smoothly. EU leaders were in a nonaggressive mode, and certainly not in the mood to pull an all-nighter — as they have done so very often during former crises. That’s because the European Central Bank had taken the most pressing urgency out of the meeting: The ECB bought them time on Wednesday, taking some potential stress off banks.
2. It’s going to be really bad. In a bombshell revelation, ECB President Christine Lagarde told leaders the bank’s most severe scenario in its own economic forecasts is the eurozone economy shrinking by 15 percent, four EU officials on the videoconference told POLITICO. If that worst case comes to pass, it would be twice as bad as the International Monetary Fund’s recent forecast of a 7.5 percent contraction in the currency area. (In 2009, the first full year that the financial crisis to hit, we had a contraction of 4.5 percent.)
3. Big problem, big solution. We’re going to see the biggest Multiannual Financial Framework ever. “Thanks to the legal guarantee by member states, the Commission will be able to raise funds that will then be channeled through the European budget into the member states,” von der Leyen told reporters. “Our current estimates of the needs lead us to think that an Own Resources ceiling of around 2 percent of GNI for two or three years instead of the current 1.2 percent will be required.”
4. What is 2 percent of a potentially much, much lower economic output worth? A lot — politically.
5. Grants or loans? It’s a far-reaching question on principle whether money handed out has to be repaid, even at some point in the far future. The EU has to “find the right balance between grants and loans,” von der Leyen said — thus saying there will be grants, or free money for the Commission to distribute. Note that the aforementioned clumsy leak from the Commission’s services foresaw, just one day earlier, loans only, no grants at all.
6. Mo’ money, mo’ power. For the Commission and its president, there were (many) worse days during the crisis than Thursday. Putting the EU budget at the center of the EU’s crisis response means adopting solutions that are very different from the last economic and financial crisis — it means relying on what they call community method, ordinary legislation, or involvement of the European Parliament, not intergovernmental solutions.
7. Giuseppe Conte’s moment. The Italian prime minster managed to negotiate a line into European Council President Charles Michel’s summary of the meeting. Officials said the recovery fund is now called “needed and urgent” thanks to Conte. He put himself, along with French President Emmanuel Macron, at the forefront of the grants faction: Grants “are essential to preserve the single market, a level playing field, and to ensure a symmetric response to a symmetric shock,” said Conte during the “closed-door” virtual meeting, officials on the call told Playbook. Long story short: Conte has something to sell at home.
8. Revenge is so sweet. A growing number of EU governments say there won’t be any emergency cash for businesses registered in tax havens. It has been almost impossible to build consensus for tough action on tax justice at an EU level, but the pandemic is now giving some finance ministers an opportunity to earmark money for companies that have not fled to a fiscal paradise. Some members of that club — say Rome — are thinking loudly about whether to add — say, the Netherlands — to their own lists of tax havens alongside Panama and the Cayman Islands.
9. One more corona winner: Jeppe Tranholm Mikkelsen will stay on as secretary-general of the Council. Several diplomats said the decision was taken Thursday and is awaiting formal confirmation in a written procedure.
(yes I know, Politico has a garbage writing style)
Also the 2% won't happen - the Germans and Dutch will block that too and it'll all be negotiated down to 1.5%.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2020 07:53
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
Hahaha yup. Proven right by the FT in under 30 minutes:
quote:Agreeing a reconfiguration of the MFF that includes the recovery fund will be difficult given the significant political differences among member states. There were particularly acute divisions during the summit over the form any aid emerging from the fund should take.
France, Italy and Spain led demands for grants to stricken economies, whereas Ms Merkel insisted that any funding borrowed on the markets must ultimately be paid back. There were “limits” on what kind of aid could be offered, she told leaders, adding that grants “do not belong in the category of what I can agree”.
However, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, told reporters that there needed to be “real budgetary transfers”, adding that if regions were allowed to fall the whole of Europe would fall as well.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2020 08:28
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
Because it's occasionally nice to post Good News:
quote:French court upholds order limiting Amazon deliveries amid coronavirus risk
Online shopping giant says it is ‘perplexed’ by the outcome.
PARIS — A French court upheld a ruling Friday restricting Amazon deliveries to essential products only until a risk assessment is carried out, but reduced fines for breaches and extended the list of products that can be delivered.
"The court of appeal confirms [the April 14 ruling] that requires Amazon France Logistique to carry out, in association with representatives of workers, an evaluation of professional risks linked to the COVID-19 epidemic in all its warehouses," the Versailles court of appeal said in a statement.
Amazon has temporarily closed its warehouses in France in response to the original ruling, arguing the order was too ambiguous.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company remains “perplexed” by the result of the appeal. “We are working rapidly to evaluate the implications for our sites, as well as for our French employees, French customers and for the French SMEs who rely on Amazon to grow their businesses.”
The case pits the e-commerce giant against French unions SUD Solidaires. In mid-April, a lower court found that Amazon “disregarded its obligation of safety and prevention of health [risks] toward its employees" and ordered the company to restrict deliveries to essential items such as food and medical supplies until a risk assessment was completed.
The Friday ruling confirms the findings of the lower court and orders Amazon to restrict its activity in the next 48 hours until a risk assessment of health and safety measures is carried out.
However, the court of appeal extended the list of allowed items to include, among other things, high tech and IT goods. The court also significantly reduced the fines in case of non compliance from €1 million to €100,000 per unauthorized item "received, prepared and/or shipped."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2020 19:49
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
Am I the only one who's actually noticeably lost weight with isolation?
Same here, much healthier lifestyle, more exercise, all food is homecooked.
Also in other news, Wolfgang Schauble would like to start tossing people in the volcano to satisfy the Economy God:
quote:BERLIN. Over the weekend, Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) advocated for a more even calculus between public health and the economic and social consequences of a prolonged shutdown, fearing an overload of state capacities. He also disagreed with subordinating all other concerns to the goal of saving lives, claiming "this in its absolutism is not correct," as the German constitution's right to human dignity "does not exclude the possibility that we must die."
"We must not leave decisions to the virologists alone, but must also weigh up the enormous economic, social, psychological and other implications. To simply shut everything down for two years would have terrible consequences,"
Now where have we heard that before from the same guy? Hmmmmm
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2020 07:49
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
We'll see how it shakes out in practice and how tough the targets are really going to be, but this is pretty heartening imho. Good to see that the Germans are on board with not loving over the climate for the 'rona recovery period. I mean, the EU Green Deal isn't exactly great, but still leagues ahead of a lot of other places.
Also remember that the FT is the favourite place for the EU and its senior officials to leak and place ideas; if it's about the EU and it's in the FT, pay attention.
quote:EU grapples with melding pandemic recovery and climate agenda
Leaders say vast rebuilding funds are chance to create greener economy but some insist fighting virus is priority
Angela Merkel has thrown her weight behind calls to toughen EU climate targets, as Brussels grapples with how far to use trillions of euros in coronavirus recovery funds to create a greener economy.
Joining a growing number of leaders who vow the pandemic will not derail the bloc’s green goals, the German chancellor said on Tuesday: “If we look at the severe harm that has been caused by the coronavirus crisis to our economies . . . we have to encourage each other not to forget climate protection and not to reduce [it] to save money, but to enhance it.”
After the pandemic, there would be “a difficult debate about the allocation of funds”, she told a virtual climate summit. “But it is important that recovery programmes keep an eye on the climate. We must not sideline climate but invest in climate technologies.”
Coronavirus lockdowns have pushed the European economy to the brink of recession and delayed key climate meetings, including the COP26 summit originally set to be held in the Scottish city of Glasgow in November.
But the European Commission has said it will stick with ambitious environment goals set out in its Green Deal last December, including making the bloc climate-neutral by achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
quote:We will throw an enormous amount of money at our industries . . . The money is there and the need to modernise is there — let’s use it
Senior EU official
Brussels is discussing plans to give trillions of euros in financial support to economies struck by the crisis, using the EU’s seven-year budget and special recovery instruments.
EU officials are hopeful that the unprecedented recovery effort will be an opportunity to accelerate the transition to climate neutrality.
“It is a dereliction to think the Green Deal can’t be a growth strategy to get us out of this crisis,” Frans Timmermans, EU executive president in charge of the Green Deal, told MEPs last week. “Every euro will be needed to take us into the new economy. Things will not go back to how they were.”
Germany was one of the holdouts against the 2050 target in discussions last year but has now emerged as one of its key supporters. On Tuesday Ms Merkel reiterated her support for the bloc to adopt a new target of a 50-55 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared with 1990 levels. The current goal is 40 per cent.
Some 17 of the EU’s 27 member states — including Germany, France, and Denmark — are pressing Brussels to pursue the Green Deal, which involves a radical overhaul of almost every area of policymaking, from transport and farming to energy.
“It is extremely important that we stay on track with the EU climate law, and [have] an updated climate target for carbon dioxide reduction in 2030,” Danish climate minister Dan Jorgensen told the FT.
“There are voices arguing that because we are in such a big crisis now, green investment is nice to have but not a need to have,” he said “I see it the other way around.”
In a position paper sent to EU governments last week, the Dutch government urged the commission to “withstand the temptation of short-term solutions” to the pandemic that “risk locking the EU into a fossil fuel economy for decades to come”.
But the economic recession triggered by the pandemic has emboldened EU countries that have resisted accelerating the pace of emissions cuts, including coal-dependent states such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Last month Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš said the EU should forget about the Green Deal and focus on Covid-19.
A senior Czech official on Tuesday said the Green Deal could not be the only way of stimulating the economy in the wake of the pandemic.
A spokesman for Poland’s climate ministry said on Tuesday that Warsaw supported the EU’s goal of shifting the economy away from dependence on fossil fuels but that some measures might have to be delayed as a result of the pandemic.
“The priority at the moment is fighting coronavirus,” the spokesman said. “Certain things that were meant to be done this year will be delayed by coronavirus. But [the Polish government] is not negatively disposed to the idea of a Green Deal itself.”
Mr Timmermans has said the commission will propose a plan to tighten Europe’s 2030 emissions target by September despite the COP26 postponement.
The pandemic has also forced Brussels to delay some environmental projects, including a review of its biodiversity strategy and an initiative to promote sustainable agriculture.
Brussels will on Wednesday publish a revised timetable for initiatives delayed due to the coronavirus. Among them will be work on developing sustainable aviation fuels and measures to encourage adaptation to climate change.
A senior EU official said the wave of recovery funding provided an opportunity to unleash investment in green technology.
“We will throw an enormous amount of money at our industries,” said the official. “If there is a moment where caution is no longer needed then it is now. The money is there and the need to modernise is there — let’s use it.”
(from the FT this morning)
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2020 08:57
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
So... where do you friends see the EU in 5 years?
Still scraping along the pavement like the zombie entity it is. Unless the Italians finally give the middle finger to the Euro, then it's all bets off.
In my country the EU has never been about solidarity. Obviously internal discourse varies between countries, and perhaps even regions within them, so I wouldn't presume it's general but I have never heard a politician argue we should join or remain in the EU for altruism or solidarity. It has always been a matter of "This will be good for us - internal market, trade and jobs" while the skeptics pushed "This will be bad for us - foreigners, bureaucracy and sovereignty,". The point is, it has always been about what benefits US - never if it benefits someone else.
Yeah, there's a deeply fundamental difference between the merchants' attitude of some countries to the EU (trade, jerbs, export) and the 'dreamer' class (integration, shared sovereignty, cultural stuff etc), which is always most on display during EU crises and never, ever gets resolved. It just gets pushed onto the moldy pile of "tomorrow's homework".
Junior G-man fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Jul 20, 2020
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2020 11:10
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
Current state of play on the budget negotiations from FT, definitely the best source for high level EU stuff.
First note: LMAO 390bn in grants, so already nearly halved from the opening gambit of 750bn and thus not nearly as relevant, and that's before you add up all the financial chicanery they'll do to make the actual 30-odd bn turn into thirty times that. Good job you mediocre scumfuckers.
quote:
EU leaders in push to unlock deal on coronavirus recovery fund
Euro hits four-month high as members to discuss €390bn in grants when marathon talks reconvene in Brussels on Monday
EU leaders will try to strike a deal on Europe's financial response to the coronavirus pandemic on Monday following a fraught weekend of talks in which they argued over the size of a recovery fund for the bloc.
Overnight negotiations broke up at 6am on Monday morning after Charles Michel, president of the European Council, floated a new figure of €390bn in grants for stricken countries. This was lower than proposals going into the summit but higher than earlier demands from an alliance of so-called “frugal” nations including the Netherlands.
Diplomats said the new grants figure represented a breakthrough in marathon four-day talks that have been beset by divisions. Leaving the summit, Austria's chancellor Sebastian Kurz, one of the advocates for a smaller fund, said he was “very happy” with the result after a day of “tough negotiations”.
The euro hit a four-month high against the dollar after EU leaders appeared to edge closer to an agreement. The euro strengthened by 0.3 per cent to $1.146, its highest level against the dollar since early March. Against sterling, the euro jumped 0.53 per cent to 91.36p. European equities indices were unmoved, however. The Euro Stoxx index opened 0.1 per cent lower.
The talks will resume at 4pm Brussels time. If a deal is struck on the size of the recovery fund, the focus will shift to a governance mechanism for its disbursement — another divisive topic.
Governments will also need to resolve a disagreement on whether to tie distribution of aid to respect for the rule of law after resistance from Poland and Hungary.
Leaders have been negotiating since Friday morning as they seek a co-ordinated EU response to the worst economic crisis since the bloc’s inception. Not only are they attempting to unlock a deal authorising the European Commission to borrow unprecedented sums to seed the recovery fund but they are also attempting to settle the EU’s upcoming €1tn seven-year budget.
The main sticking point over the weekend has been the level of non-repayable grants that the recovery fund will be permitted to give hard-pressed member states.
Earlier on Sunday, the leaders of Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden said they wanted to scale back proposed grants to €350bn, coupled with another €350bn of loans, in a total recovery package worth €700bn.
The offer, which was conditional on rebates to their EU budget contributions, was backed by Finland but received a frosty response from nations that have been hardest hit by the pandemic. During the summit dinner, French president Emmanuel Macron railed against the frugal countries and compared their strategy to Britain's ill-fated demands for a smaller EU budget under former prime minister David Cameron.
Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte said failure to strike a deal would lead to the “destruction of Europe’s single market”, according to diplomats.
The offer from frugal leaders represented a change from their pre-summit position that no grants should be distributed under the recovery fund. But it was still a substantial cut from draft proposals going into the summit. France, Germany, Spain and Italy had pushed to keep the grants ringfenced at no less than €400bn — a figure that was itself shy of the €500bn originally advocated by Berlin and Paris in May.
Mr Michel is expected to table a fresh negotiating blueprint on Monday, including the new €390bn figure alongside proposals for budget rebates for the frugal states and Germany. Leaving the summit on Monday morning, Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte said the talks were “back on track”. “We are still working. We have made progress but are not there yet,” Mr Rutte told journalists on his way back to his hotel.
Leaders will also need to agree on how to police the recovery fund after Mr Rutte insisted on the right to veto grant payments if countries failed to stick to their reform promises. The issue sparked fierce resistance from Italy over the weekend. Diplomats said the dispute over governance would likely be solved once the level of grants was agreed.
Hungarian premier Viktor Orban over the weekend also presented another roadblock by threatening to veto a compromise that tied distribution of aid to respect for the rule of law. Budapest demanded that any potential sanctions to suspend cash payments would need the unanimous support of all governments.
Speaking to journalists on Sunday, Mr Orban accused Mr Rutte of hating him and Hungary.
Mr Orban’s stance was backed by Poland, which joined Hungary in rejecting a draft plan that would require a qualified majority of member states to back potential cash sanctions.
One diplomat said Hungary and Poland’s position was designed to extract more money as part of a final compromise.
Non-frugal leaders emphasised their desire to reach a deal but warned that it could not come at the expense of whittling down Europe’s economic response to Covid-19.
A deal “will not be built on sacrificing Europe’s ambition”, Mr Macron said on Sunday morning. “Not out of principle, but because we are facing an unprecedented health, economic and social crisis, because our countries need it and because the unity of Europe needs it.”
Mr Macron’s stance was echoed by other leaders including Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who said: “We simply cannot afford to either appear divided or weak.”
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2020 11:29
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
I wonder why the countries who are struggling right now should bother to maintain this charade in the future? The last ten years have produced too many grievances.
Hence Italy, it's the giant coughing canary in the smelly coal mine. The mix of neoliberalism, that Italian North-South thing, a massively aged population, giant debt Hindenburg, refugees, and a slagheap of melted political parties can blow at any time, leading to God only knows.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2020 11:45
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
Interesting analysis by Sandbu in the FT - I think his positivity over federalism in the long run (whatever you think about that personally) is probably correct, but it's still decades off and at the current state I don't know whether the EU has that time before poo poo goes bang.
quote:
EU crosses the Rubicon with its emergency recovery fund
European federalists have more reason than frugal northerners to be pleased
Now the dust has settled, let us acknowledge how remarkable it is that European leaders required only four days and nights to agree an unprecedented common economic programme. They overcame resistance from the small but rich “frugal” countries and permanently shifted the politics of the EU’s future economic decisions. Many reactions to the European Council’s decision on a recovery fund and a long-term budget focus on the ways it fell short. But too often, they look at the wrong thing.
The common EU response was never going to carry the bulk of the fiscal effort to pull the bloc’s economies out of their Covid-19 slump. For that, it is neither sufficient nor necessary. The output loss and required fiscal response are much bigger than the recovery fund, so, as usual, national budgets will do the lion’s share. But they will have no difficulty doing so, since the European Central Bank is ensuring very favourable financing conditions and the EU has set up big crisis lending programmes for governments.
The agreement struck on Tuesday is nevertheless a big deal, even economically. It roughly doubles the regular EU budget’s size for the next three years. Some recipients stand to receive significant transfers. Italy can hope for a total award of perhaps 5 per cent of its annual national income, smaller and poorer countries quite a bit more. Loans of a similar magnitude, if not larger, will come on top.
But the real importance of the deal is how it reshapes the EU’s political economy.
First and most obviously, the bloc has crossed the Rubicon of debt-financed deficit spending at union level. As the frugals knew and feared, what can be done once can be done again. Less remarked upon but equally important, a market and a “yield curve” for all maturities of EU debt will be established because the leaders agreed a very long repayment schedule for the common loans that will extend to 2058.
When people ask whether this was Europe’s “Hamilton moment”, they are referring to the first US Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and the decision to mutualise the states’ debts. The EU has not done that. But a more sophisticated reading is that by creating a market in US debt, Hamilton assured the new federal government permanent access to affordable market credit. In this sense, Tuesday’s deal is Hamiltonian indeed.
Second, while leaders dodged the question of how to raise money to service the common debt, they committed themselves to increase the EU’s revenues. Now they must find new common tax bases, albeit modest ones. They only agreed on a plastic tax, but committed to considering proposals for carbon border fees and expanded carbon taxation in Europe. Whatever solutions they choose, they have boarded the train towards more common taxation and cannot get off and turn back.
Third, the governance mechanisms for the new spending contain more than meets the eye. The leaders compromised between the Dutch demand for a national veto and the purely administrative controls sought by the European Commission. There is a requirement for leaders to endorse countries’ spending plans (but by qualified majority, not unanimity) and a national right to delay, but not stop, a commission decision to grant money. This reintroduces a role for cross-border politics in what the EU has fruitlessly tried to codify in rigid rules. But they have avoided the political hold-ups and policy extortion that made rescue loans so toxic during the eurozone debt crisis. If managed well, the new governance structure could be the embryo of truly pan-European economic policymaking.
The agreement also subjects transfers to a “regime of conditionality” with respect to the rule of law — code for northern states not wanting to give money to illiberal rulers such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Poland’s Law and Justice party. Many have dismissed this provision as too vague. But it will be the first time leaders empower the commission to come up with sanctions for rule of law breaches that they will pass by qualified majority. Anti-democratic misbehaviour of the Hungarian and Polish kind will become more central to the politics of the European Council, which will have a nimbler tool to deal with it.
The flip side of these changes is that what was not changed will become more entrenched, in particular the normal budget’s size and structure. EU money will continue to be spent mainly on agricultural subsidies and “cohesion fund” aid to poor regions.
It is puzzling that the frugals, who care the most about this, did not pick their battles accordingly. Instead they fought successfully to trim the recovery grants and their own budget contributions, choosing short-term savings over long-term reprioritisation. Yet they have not stopped the move towards more common fiscal policy. Their victory is mostly Pyrrhic. European federalists have the most reason to be pleased.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 23, 2020 09:12
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2024 23:02
|
|
- Junior G-man
- Sep 15, 2004
-
Wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
|
LMFAO they made Dombrovskis the new Trade Commissioner, so that the Irish lose that portfolio but gain ... financial services. Which is not at all like putting the fox into the henhouse.
quote:European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis will be the EU’s new trade commissioner and Mairead McGuinness will be the new Irish commissioner with responsibility for financial services, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced today.
Dombrovsksis, who has served as acting trade commissioner since the resignation of Phil Hogan last month, will relinquish some of the current responsibilities in his broad economic portfolio, putting McGuinness, a veteran member of the European Parliament, in charge of financial services and financial stability.
The selection of Dombrovsksis, a former Latvian prime minister, puts responsibility for EU trade policy in the hands of one of the Commission’s most seasoned and well-respected officials, and it keeps the trade portfolio under the control of the center-right European People’s Party — von der Leyen’s own political family.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2020 09:26
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2020 11:04
