Tritt Frankreich aus?

… oder doch eher Italien? Italien diskutiere ich heute Nachmittag. Hier ein kurzer Blick auf den sich abzeichnenden Wahlkampf in Frankreich und die Folgen der dortigen schlechten Wirtschaftspolitik, die im Korsett des Euro immer schlimmere Folgen aufweist:

• “A democracy can endure deflation policies for only so long. The attrition has wasted the French centre-right and the centre-left by turns, and now threatens the Fifth Republic itself. The maturing crisis has echoes of 1936, when the French people tired of ‘deflation decrees’ and turned to the once unthinkable Front Populaire, smashing what remained of the Gold Standard.”
• “Arnaud Montebourg, the enfant terrible of the Socialist movement, has launched his own bid for the Socialist Party (…). The former economy minister says France voted for a left-wing French manifesto four years ago and ended up with a ‚right-wing German policy regime‘. This is objectively true.” – bto: Das stimmt.
• “Mr Montebourg stops short of ‘Frexit’ but calls for the unilateral suspension of EU labour laws. ‘As far as I am concerned, the current treaties have elapsed.‘“
• “The party leadership was warned repeatedly and emphatically that contractionary policies would inevitably lead to another million jobless but the economic was swept aside. ‘They never budged from their Catechism and their false certitudes’, he said.”
• “The Socialists have paid a high price for this blind arrogance. They won just 15pc of voters classified as workers in the most recent local elections. Marine Le Pen’s Front National won 55pc, and is now indisputably the voice of ‘France d’en bas’.” – bto: Das gibt nur einen Vorgeschmack. Genauso wird es in anderen Ländern kommen!
• “Even those of us who always argued that EMU is dysfunctional were shocked by the policy errors five years ago, when a double-barrelled blast monetary and fiscal contraction sent the prostrate eurozone economy crashing back into a double-dip recession.”
• “The result was a lost decade – worse in aggregate than in the 1930s – and levels of labour hysteresis that will lower the eurozone’s growth ‘speed limit’ for years to come.”
• “Needless to say, France has a host of home-grown economic woes that have nothing to do with the EU. The social model is funded by punitive taxes on employing labour, creating one of the worst ‘tax wedges’ in the world. A quarter of French aged 60-64 are in work – compared with 40pc for the OECD average – due to early retirement incentives. The state consumes 56pc of GDP, a Nordic level without Nordic labour flexibility. There are 360 separate taxes, some predating the revolution. Trade unions have a legal lockhold on companies with over 50 employees, yet command 7pc of membership. ‚It is an inferno that sadly lacks the poetry of Dante‘, says Prof Brigitte Granville, a french economist at Queen Mary University London.” – bto: Was für ein schönes Bild!
• “The International Monetary Fund’s health check in June said the ‘real effective exchange rate’ is up to 9pc overvalued. It is roughly 16pc overvalued against Germany.” – bto: Da würde Flassbeck jetzt sagen, wir sollen einfach unsere Löhne um zwanzig Prozent erhöhen. Was natürlich nur temporär helfen würde und dann nicht den Franzosen, sondern unseren eigentlichen Wettbewerbern Japan, China und USA.
• “There is no realistic possibility of genuine fiscal reflation in the eurozone, let alone a Keynesian New Deal. Mr Montebourg is right is concluding that France will remain paralyzed until it takes back its sovereign instruments.”
• “Marine Le Pen is ahead of Sarkozy in the polls, drawing steady support near 30pc with a heady brew of Leftwing economics and Rightwing nationalism – straight out of the 1930s. She promised to ‘end the nightmare of the European Union‘ and this too tells as much about the populist calculus.”
• “François Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Paris and a pillar of the French establishment, published a prophetic book three years ago entitled ‘The End of the European Dream’. He argued that the ‘euro cancer’ must be cut out to save what can be saved of the European project, warning that current course of perpetual crises will end in a ‘nervous breakdown‘. ‘The dream has given way to nightmare. We are not going to avoid it by denying the reality, and God knows denial has been the operating mode of those in charge of EU institutions for a long time.'” – bto: Und wer die Statements der Regierenden und aus Brüssel liest, sieht keine Änderung – im Gegenteil.

bto: Der Druck in der Eurozone und der EU wächst weiter an und ich denke, das politische Szenario des -xit (von wem auch immer) wird immer realistischer.

Oder ist Portugal der Kandidat für den Austritt? Zero Hedge kommentiert:

• “The fate of Portugal rests in the hands of DBRS, the last remaining credit rating agency assigning an investment grade rating to its sovereign debt (Fitch, Moody’s and S&P have all lowered the country’s debt rating to junk).  Due to a requirement that participant countries have an IG rating from at least 1 rating agency, the DBRS rating is literally the only thing allowing Portugal’s bonds to remain eligible for the European Central Bank’s 1.7 trillion euro bond buying program.  DBRS is set to update its Portugal rating on October 21 and investors in Portugal sovereign risk are starting to get a little nervous.”

• “DBRS’s October review will come just a week after Portugal is scheduled to provide the Commission with a list of those new cuts to get its budget deficit back under 3 percent of GDP.”
• “The socialist minority government that came to power in November 2015 has not helped the situation by raising the minimum wage,increasing the number of public holidays and reversing other key reforms, that will make it more difficult for the country to meet its EU fiscal targets.  To be sure, the collapse in oil prices have indirectly taken a toll on Portugal as well with exports to it’s 4th largest trading partner, Angola, falling by 42% in the first half of 2016.”

→ The Telegraph: “French support for the EU project is crumbling on the Left and Right”, 24. August 2016

→ Zero Hedge: “Is Portugal The Next ‚Shoe To Drop‘ In Europe?”, 25. August 2016