The European Commission is famous for its practice to generously subsidise a large number of NGOs, which have been created almost exclusively for this purpose. That is, to swallow money from the European taxpayer and in return offer their tribune to Commissioners and other EU dignitaries to be exposed to media. This is a well-known […]Who really cares for the environment?
November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The European Commission is famous for its practice to generously subsidise a large number of NGOs, which have been created almost exclusively for this purpose. That is, to swallow money from the European taxpayer and in return offer their tribune to Commissioners and other EU dignitaries to be exposed to media. This is a well-known […]Bundestag kick starts the next episode of the Greek tragedy
November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment
It’s quite astonishing to watch the German Parliament, the Bundestag, voting on Friday 30 November, with the overwhelming majority of 473 deputies in 584 present, saying yes to a third in a row aid programme for Greece, while all the major media insist, that the public opinion in this country is against any help Berlin should […]Christmas spending: Who can afford not to cut?
November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment
European Union consumers will be very careful with their Christmas gifts shopping lists this year, says an in-depth analysis of Wall Steer Journal’s Europe Edition, based mainly on data from a relevant survey of Deloitte LLP. With unemployment reaching unheard before levels above 25% in Greece and Spain and skyrocketing in other weak EU economies, the […]EU to negotiate an FTA with Japan
November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment
On 29 November 2012 the European Council decided to give the Commission ‘the green light’, to start trade negotiations with Japan, aiming at the conclusion of a Free Trade Agreement between the two sides. As Sting has already noticed the EU has embarked over the past few years on a huge operation, to conclude FTAs with […]Utmost hypocrisy emitted by EU’s energy regulation
November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The major breakthroughs in the hot sector of energy all over the Old Continent materialised on national level, and on many occasions despite the Brussels directives. For example the North Gas Corridor, supplying Germany with huge quantities of Russian gas and increasing the overall dependency of the European Union on Russian energy resources, was not […]How many more financial crises in the West can the world stand?
November 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment
“After five years of crisis the world economy is weakening again”, states bluntly the very first phrase of the editorial of OECD’s latest economic report, published on 28 November. Actually it couldn’t be differently, because the US economy doesn’t seem to respond well to therapy and Europe is in a much worse state. But let’s […]Free trade agreement between EU and India?
November 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment
After the World Trade Organisation talks over the Doha Round collapsed and the achievement of a major reform of the international trading system became a distant dream, the European Union introduced a package of talks to negotiate Free Trade Agreements (FTA) with its major trading partners in the developing world. A cornerstone in this […]What happens when the Eurogroup decides to help Greece
November 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Once more Eurozone and Greece made it. Using “creative accounting” they agreed that the over indebted country’s loan load will be drastically reduced after one…decade! Says the Eurogroup statement of 27 November 2012 on Greece: …in 2022 the debt to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) ratio will be substantially lower than 110%. But this is just […]Regional policies slowed down by EU bureaucracy
November 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Despite the commonly recognised urgent need for more infrastructure projects aiming at interconnecting transport, energy and telecommunication networks in the 27 EU member states, clumsy inter-institutional cooperation between the main EU bodies, namely the European Commission, The Parliament and the Council, threatens to deprive such projects from already available resources. In this respect it was […]EU: Huge surplus in the trade of services with the rest of the world
November 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment
A regular criticism neo-liberal economist pen down against the European Union is that Europe is not competitive enough. They blame for that the high EU standards of social protection and the strict labour legislation. They fail to see however that the Eurozone and even the entire European Union, is highly competitive in the crucial sector of […]Is a uniform CO2 emission linked car taxation possible in the EU?
November 25, 2012 by 1 Comment
Motor vehicles have being for decades the easy target of many forms of taxation, especially in post WWII Western Europe. Taxes on acquisition, on ownership, on motoring, on licences are but a few. The initial idea behind, in the minds of politicians who supported the imposition of taxes on cars, was that private ownership of […]Markets are more sensitive to Greece’s woes than Merkel
November 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Greece’s three official creditors, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Union are actually two and in last analysis only one, the ECB. In reality all the other sixteen Eurozone governments plus the EU institutions and the IMF, haven’t given away not even one cent to Greece. They have only issued guarantees […]How Greece was destroyed
November 24, 2012 by 1 Comment
Right from the beginning, the scenario of the Greek financial tragedy was criticised as fake. Towards the end of 2009, the newly elected government of George Papandreou, son and grandson of prime ministers, found out that his PASOK socialist party had won the election on populist promises that could not be fulfilled. Papandreou […]EU summit: Are the London Tories planning an exit from the EU?
November 23, 2012 by 1 Comment
It’s not the first time that the European Union leaders are divided between the paymasters and the receivers. However during their last Summit of Thursday and Friday 22 and 23 November the 27 heads of states and governments were divided in more than three groups and left the conference room blaming each other, for the […]The undead banks
November 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment
History has proved that ideology and logic (science) are in direct conflict. If you want to serve them both the outcome is usually a monster or a statement of the obvious. Take for example the soviet science, full of proletarian ideology at its apex during the Stalinist period. Its most cherished achievement was the experiments […]Two women threaten to tear the world apart
November 21, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The women’s lib movement can be very proud nowadays. Suffragettes must be very happy. Their kind in a few decades managed not only to vote but to hold in their hands the fate of the globe. All that because this week became clear that Christine Lagarde, heading the International Monetary Fund and Angela Merkel, leader […]Is there a cure for corruption in Greece?
November 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment
As Henry Kissinger said, corrupt politicians are defamation for the rest 10%. It seems that Greece is a classical paradigm of this. Not to forget that the architect and contractor of the Athens Acropolis died in prison accused of stealing some of the gold used to construct the Goddess’s statute. Today in this country, contrary […]eGovernmnet for more efficiency, equality and democracy
November 20, 2012 by 1 Comment
At the fifth Ministerial eGovernment Conference in Malmö, (Sweden) the 27 EU ministers, responsible for administrative affairs, outlined a joint vision and policy priorities on how to developing smarter online public services for citizens and businesses by 2015. The EU Commission hailed this agreement and commented that eGovernment is a key step towards boosting Europe’s […]The three US financial war fleets
November 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The three American creditworthiness “musketeers”, Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch are the modern times landing crafts that Washington employs whenever the US want to debark on the European financial shores. Over the past years every time that the Eurozone is about to make a crucial decision to solve or at least alleviate the […]Brazil: A strategic partner for the EU
November 18, 2012 by 1 Comment
Brazil is one of the largest democracies of the world, and the offshore oil findings of the past few years, have helped the country become not only self-sufficient in hydrocarbons but also draw millions of its people out of poverty. The country is grouped by OECD to the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), constituting the […]Lagarde’s metamorphoses, not a laughing matter
November 16, 2012 by 2 Comments
International politico-economic relations is a tricky field, with the major players constantly changing stance, according to their short term interests, putting aside whatever honourable principles are left in their decision making procedures. And all that being discussed and decided upon, by a handful of people behind closed doors. If those people were not playing with […]The vehicles of our future
November 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Out of the fourteen altogether topics that the European Union policies and rules cover, the huge automotive sector is affected directly or indirectly by nine of them. Let’s count: Business, Economy-finance-competition, Employment, Energy and natural resources, Environment-consumers-health, External relations and foreign affairs, Regions and local development, Sciences and technology, Transport and travel. The car industry and markets […]On the euro but out of it?
November 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The fact that Greece reached the exit of Eurozone more than once during the past months and a Grexit (exit of Greece from Eurozone) is still not excluded did not stop the European Central Bank from keeping the country on the euro. This time however for decorative reasons. The ECB used the most ancient depiction […]Long live Eurozone’s bank supervisor down with the EU budget supremo
November 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment
EU leaders in their last summit of mid-October appeared ready to make another systemic blunder. After creating a limping Eurozone, with a common currency but not common rules for sovereign debt issues, now they discuss the institutionalisation of a common EU budget and a Brussels “supremo of Finance”. And all that with no political legitimacy. […]
