90 Billion Euros wiped off market value in a few minutes!

1 posted on 07/19/2002 12:53:56 AM PDT by BlackJack

I don't think the EU has even had a chance to print 90 billion Euros yet.

2 posted on 07/19/2002 1:01:13 AM PDT by The KG9 Kid

3 posted on 07/19/2002 1:29:02 AM PDT by BlackJack

"It's worrying that companies are not managing to transfer the seemingly good macroeconomic data into good profit growth, which indicates some sort of structural problem," said Sharon Coombs, European strategist for HSBC.

"Structural problem" = labor markets all over Europe still largely frozen solid. Due to their socialistic heritage, Europeans simply don't stand for the kind of corporate restructurings that are commonplace in America, with thousands of workers being laid off or transferred. (A minister in Italy was recently murdered by the Red Brigades for his attempts to thaw the labor market there.)They are still unable to see the big picture: that if companies cannot freely hire and fire they can't maintain healthy productivity growth. It's actually considerable credit to European business people that they have managed as much growth as they have.

The situation needs a leader with the bravery and determination that Maggie Thatcher displayed which she took on nationalized industries and entrenched labor in Britain, but I don't think there is anyone like that on the horizon.

4 posted on 07/19/2002 2:03:40 AM PDT by Stultis

Socialism doesn't work?

Awww....who'd a thunk it?

If anyone can give me some good detailed reference about socialism in New Zealand and Sweden, I'd appreciate it.

In Dick Morris' book Power Plays, he explained how Mitterand called in Jacques Chirac (French conservative) to deconstruct France's failing nationalization of industries....and won a temporary victory over him in the next election.

5 posted on 07/19/2002 2:27:16 AM PDT by patriciaruth

Somehow the Democrats will use this as ammo against the Republicans (you read it here first!!!).

6 posted on 07/19/2002 2:30:24 AM PDT by The Raven

To: patriciaruth

As I understand with the current economic status in Sweden, the economy, if compared to the economy of every state in the United States, would still be more comperable with a 3rd world Latin American economy rather than one of the states it could be compared to.

My buddy just brough over a Swedish Au Pair to live here over the summer. She's working about as cheap as a good Latina Nanny, and we're in South Florida. I would have simply recommended the Latina nanny personally, but his wife gets really jealous and didn't want hubby to run off with the nanny.

7 posted on 07/19/2002 2:45:12 AM PDT by Caipirabob

Although I don't have any firsthand knowledge of European work ethic, it's my understanding that they simply don't put in the quality hours there. Their productivity simply doesn't match that of the US. And when it comes to the WTO, they are forever trying to level the playing field in the US through that organization rather than directly address the workers and productivity.

8 posted on 07/19/2002 3:20:34 AM PDT by DoughtyOne

To: patriciaruth

Rome, July 19 (Bloomberg) -- Italian consumer confidence dropped to the lowest level in more than three years in July as stock markets slumped, threatening Europe's economic recovery.

An index based on a monthly survey of 2,000 households by the state-funded Isae institute fell to 113.4, from 117.0 last month. The survey, conducted in the first two weeks of July, is the first monthly measure of consumer optimism in Europe.

``Millions of ordinary savers have lost a significant portion of their investment,'' said Sergio Bille, head of Confcommercio, Italy's biggest industry group, representing more than 850,000 retail, tourism and services companies. ``This has provoked a real crisis of confidence.''

Declining share prices and job losses at companies including Fiat SpA are crimping consumer spending, which accounts for about 60 percent of Europe's fourth-largest economy. The Dow Jones Stoxx 50 Index fell 3.5 percent today, extending a decline that's erased around 1 trillion euros ($1.02 trillion) in market value this year.

A 20 percent drop in stock indexes may slice a fifth of a percentage point off economic growth, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates. Italian clothing retailer Stefanel SpA, which has about 1,000 shops around the world, said last week its fiscal first- quarter loss widened as demand dropped.

``It's been a very bad year,'' said Anna Garcea, 40, owner of Contemporanea, a home furnishings store in central Rome. ``I have friends who invested in stocks and they lost a ton of money.''

9 posted on 07/19/2002 3:24:12 AM PDT by BlackJack

And in the US, dow futures are down 55 at 7:15 am. Expect an interesting market open

10 posted on 07/19/2002 4:18:23 AM PDT by SauronOfMordor

Overnight, overseas mkts down significantly. Japan down 2.8%, France down 3.6%, Britain down 3.3%

11 posted on 07/19/2002 4:23:11 AM PDT by SauronOfMordor

I don't know where you get your information, but Sweden isn't a third world country by any measure. Their politics have been screwed up, but their standard of living is still very comperable to most first world nations. Go there, if you don't believe me.

12 posted on 07/19/2002 4:40:26 AM PDT by andy_card

I work with someone from Germany. He works his butt off and is unquestionably one of the most productive workers I've ever been around. It's pretty clear to me that IF Europe has economic problems, it's the result of a rigid social order and does not reflect on the workers.

13 posted on 07/19/2002 4:41:59 AM PDT by self_evident

To: self_evident

I tried to make a purchase from Switzerland once. It happened to be July or August. I was informed that the during this month everyone was gone on vacation, business closed. I have also heard of shorter work weeks, siestas (Spain and Italy mostly) and other things that made me feel like they took the family a whole lot more seriously and work a little less so than we do. If you're saying that isn't true that's fine by me. I'll have to admit that was my perception.

14 posted on 07/19/2002 4:52:07 AM PDT by DoughtyOne

Although I don't have any firsthand knowledge of European work ethic, it's my understanding that they simply don't put in the quality hours there.

You’re right, but you’ll have to except the Swiss. Their work ethic is more like the Japanese than the Germans, French, or Italians.

15 posted on 07/19/2002 4:59:53 AM PDT by bimbo

To: andy_card; Yakboy

Sweden: Poorer Than You Think

Ludwig von Mises Institute | 5/16/2002 | William L. Anderson

Posted on 05/17/2002 8:19 PM Eastern by rohry

[Posted May 16, 2002]

One of the enduring myths of the "Third Way" welfare state is that a nation as a whole can have a high standard of living--even if no one really has to work--as long as government transfers massive amounts of wealth from those who are well off to those who are less well off. For the past four decades, we have been inundated with news stories, books, and public commentary, all of which have exhorted us to be like Sweden.

The Swedes, we have been told, enjoy free medical care, generous welfare benefits, time off from work, and subsidies for just about everything. When one counters that Swedes pay enormously high taxes, the standard reply is, "That is true, but look at what they receive for their payments."

According to a recent study, however, the cat is out of the bag. Relative to household in the United States, Swedish family income is considerably less. In fact, the study concludes, average income in Sweden is less than average income for black Americans, which comprise the lowest-income socioeconomic group in this country.

The research came from the Swedish Institute of Trade, which, according to Reuters, "compared official U.S. and Swedish statistics on household income as well as gross domestic product, private consumption and retail spending per capita between 1980 and 1999."

The study used "fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data," and found that "the median household income in Sweden at the end of the 1990s was the equivalent of $26,800, compared with a median of $39,400 for U.S. households." Furthermore, the study points out that Swedish productivity has fallen rapidly relative to per capital productivity in the USA.

In defense of the Swedes, let me first say that simple comparisons of income can be deceiving. While I have never been to Sweden (even though I have relatives there), I would think that even the poorest sections of Stockholm and other Swedish cities are more livable and attractive than what one finds in many U.S. cities. Even with the high taxes, I think I would rather live in downtown Stockholm than in downtown Detroit or Newark.

However, the study alerts us to something that is much more important, and that is that the European welfare states are not making their citizens wealthier. Over time, the cracks in these relatively wealthy nations are growing larger, and if the disease is not arrested, much of Europe will tumble off into real poverty in the not-so-distant future. Europeans--and, most likely, Americans--seem destined to learn the hard way that large, seemingly intractable welfare systems have their way of destroying the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs.

While people can debate the present condition of Swedes in Stockholm versus blacks in Harlem, there is a deep issue here that people seem to forget when it comes to welfare states: they are destructive at their roots. Advocates of welfarism concentrate only upon distribution while vilifying production. Such a state of affairs cannot go on forever as governments are forced to cannibalize their own capital structure over time in order to make the system to continue to work.

The premises of the welfare state are as follows: (1) free markets, if not regulated by the state, lead to continuing inequality, as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, while more and more people become poorer; (2) the only way to combat this problem is for the state to take a large portion of earnings from the wealthy and distribute it among others; and (3) such distribution actually enables the economy to grow, since growing concentration means that fewer people will have the ability to consume the products that are created within a private-market system.

Karl Marx developed the first premise into his theories, calling this the "internal contradiction" of capitalism. However, the statement contains its own internal contradictions, as it creates an impossible scenario.

As Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard have pointed out, in a private-market society, individuals cannot gain wealth unless they produce goods that are demanded by large numbers of people. For example, it was Henry Ford who became rich producing cars, not the producers of early luxury automobiles that were accessible only to the wealthiest people in American society. Ford developed a method in which he could create cars that most people could afford, yet keep his costs low enough to where he could still make a profit. The most successful producers in our economy have been those people who make goods accessible to people across all socioeconomic levels.

Wal-Mart, which is another example, became the largest corporation in this country--and one of the most successful--by creating a retail system that would enable large numbers of people to conveniently do their shopping. In fact, Wal-Mart began its route to success by building discount stores in rural areas and small towns that were shunned by larger department stores and enterprises like the now-bankrupt Kmart.

Therefore, it seems that if producers are becoming wealthier, it can only occur if consumers are purchasing on a large scale what the the producers are producing. The first statement justifying the welfare state does not have a good causal mechanism, for it does not explain how this transfer of wealth from poor to rich takes place, especially since it makes the implicit assumption that the voluntary purchase of goods is actually a wealth transfer. Such a statement turns the age-old theory of exchange--that economic exchanges create mutual beneficiaries--upon its head.

If anything, wealth transfers inhibit economic growth, not increase it. For one, it violently penalizes entrepreneurs for being successful. By accusing those who create wealth of actually being the ones who destroy wealth, welfarists do violence to language itself. If enough people are punished for creating wealth, less wealth will be created in the future. The more government impedes the creation and distribution of wealth, the less that will be created, which means that those people who are on the margins--that is, those who are less productive--are the first to be hurt. Thus, the welfare state actually makes the poor worse off in the long run.

This notion that the welfare state actually "helps" an economy is also bogus. As I stated earlier, consumption of goods must first take place before producers can reap the rewards from creating them. Furthermore, welfare regimes that attack business enterprises by confiscating their profits also impede future capital formation.

This became quite apparent to me in 1982 when I went to Central Europe, including what was then East Berlin, the capital of the former communist East Germany. While East Berlin was likened to being the "Paris" of the then-communist world, it was more like a huge time warp in which one was placed back in 1948. The entire city was shabby, and what new construction there was had the appearance and attractiveness of a typical American public housing project.

While the western portion of Germany was better kept and more modern than its eastern counterpart, it was still like traveling back to the 1960s. West Germany had a well-developed welfare state by then, having shunned its earlier model as an engine of free enterprise. A close friend who is a dentist brought this point home to me.

Like other medical care, dentistry in Germany is run on socialist principles. That means that individuals do not pay directly for dental (or medical) care, which is provided by the state. My friends, who were vacationing in Germany, visited a number of dental offices and found that the facilities looked like dentist offices in the United States four decades ago. In other words, the German dentists are still depending upon old capital.

One of the worst aspects of socialism, economically speaking, is that it has the perverse tendency to turn new capital from an asset--as is the case in a free-market economy--into a liability. German dentists have no incentive to purchase more modern equipment, since it is expensive and patients have nowhere else to go. In fact, wherever socialist medicine has been practiced for a long time, one can readily see deterioration of capital stock.

For many years, Sweden, like its European counterparts, has been eating its capital stock instead of replenishing it. Some high-profile Swedish companies like Volvo have been able to remain well capitalized, but even those companies are now finding it more attractive to locate in other nations, where their profits are not so readily confiscated.

The Swedes and other northern Europeans are somewhat lucky in that they have had a relatively high standard of living. People in southern European nations like Italy and Spain--where high taxes and vast regulatory agencies abound--find themselves to be much poorer and with no prospects of real improvement.

Unfortunately, many Europeans (like our Canadian neighbors) believe that a vast welfare apparatus makes them morally superior to nations that do not have the same scope of benefits. (While one can point out that the United States has a huge welfare bureaucracy itself, it does not offer the same "generous," long-term benefits of the European states.) While they prattle on about their moral superiority and their egalitarianism, however, something else is happening. They are slowly becoming poorer and poorer, and the welfare state cannot save them. It can only accelerate their downward slide.

William Anderson, an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, teaches economics at Frostburg State University. Send him MAIL. See his Mises.org

16 posted on 07/19/2002 5:02:51 AM PDT by Maceman

Thanks. Nice article.

17 posted on 07/19/2002 5:07:39 AM PDT by DoughtyOne

To: andy_card; Yakboy

Study discovers Swedes are less well-off than the poorest Americans

Reuters via Haaretz | 5/4/2002 | Reuters

Posted on 05/04/2002 7:41 PM Eastern by l33t

STOCKHOLM - Swedes, usually perceived in Europe as a comfortable, middle class lot, are poorer than African Americans, the most economically-deprived group in the United States, a Swedish study showed yesterday.

The study by a retail trade lobby, published in the liberal Dagens Nyheter newspaper 19 weeks before the next general election, echoed the center-right opposition's criticism of the weak state of Sweden's economy, following decades of almost uninterrupted Social Democratic rule.

The Swedish Research Institute of Trade (HUI) said it had compared official U.S. and Swedish statistics on household income, as well as gross domestic product, private consumption and retail spending per capita between 1980 and 1999.

Using fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data, the median household income in Sweden at the end of the 1990s was the equivalent of $26,800, compared with a median of $39,400 for U.S. households, HUI's study showed.

"Weak growth means that Sweden has lost greatly in prosperity compared with the United States," HUI's president, Fredrik Bergstrom, and chief economist, Robert Gidehag, said.

International Monetary Fund data from 2001 show that U.S. GDP per capita in dollar terms was 56 percent higher than in Sweden, while in 1980, Swedish GDP per capita was 20 percent higher.

"Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household," the HUI economists said.

If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest, measured by household gross income before taxes, Bergstrom and Gidehag said.

They said they had chosen that measure for their comparison to get around the differences in taxation and welfare structures. Capital gains such as income from securities were not included.

The median income of African American households was about 70 percent of the median for all U.S. households, while Swedish households earned 68 percent of the overall U.S. median level.

This means that Swedes stood "below groups, which, in the Swedish debate, are usually regarded as poor and losers in the American economy," Bergstrom and Gidehag said.

Between 1980 and 1999, the gross income of Sweden's poorest households increased by just over 6 percent, while the poorest in the United States enjoyed a three times higher increase, HUI said.

If the trend persists, "things that are commonplace in the United States will be regarded as the utmost luxury in Sweden," the authors said. "We are not quite there yet, but the trend is clear."

According to HUI figures, during the period 1998-1999, U.S. GDP per capita was 40 percent higher than in Sweden, while U.S. private consumption and retail sales per capita exceeded Swedish levels by more than 80 percent.

The HUI economists attributed the much bigger difference in consumption and sales mainly to the fact that U.S. households pay themselves for education and health care, services that are tax-financed and come for free or at low user charges in Sweden.

According to recent opinion polls Sweden's Social Democrats are comfortably ahead of the center-right opposition in the run-up to the September 15 elections.

18 posted on 07/19/2002 5:09:26 AM PDT by Maceman

The big boys have gone to playing games with each other now and the little fish will be the ones sacrificed!
The World Bank is on the move,survival of the fittest.

19 posted on 07/19/2002 5:10:28 AM PDT by gunnedah

You got that exactly right! Since 1970, Europe (sans Ireland) has not created a SINGLE NET NEW JOB! In the same period, the U. S. economy created over 25 million net new jobs, 14 million in Reagan's 8 years.

20 posted on 07/19/2002 5:37:20 AM PDT by LS

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