Whew! Another Loch Ness Monster

By tomtom

Anglo/French  relations Plummet

While the ‘City’ gears up to fight off challenges to its Global dominance of Worldwide Finance. What did Sarko and his good buddies expect, a kiss on each cheek? These upstarts trying to pretend they were players in the Big Game. But for France, it looks like the Big Game is over, as it reels from the perception that anyone involved in the Euro, other than possibly Holland and Germany, are doomed. The rest? Well they’re heading down the ‘Road to Nowhere’.

  In the end it is the broad socialist sweep of their policies that is doing for France. They missed the bus, for the time when they should have re-organised their subsistence farming is long past. It hangs like an Albatross around the collective Gallic Neck or as recently reported, it’s a new ‘Loch Ness Monster’. Something most people have heard about, but few had caught a glimpse of. Until that is, the Eurocrats unveiled fresh details of their latest ‘Lead Ballon Masterplan’  to save the Euro.

  Way back in the mists of time when the USSR collapsed and Germany was re-united, France sailed blithely on, thinking they were on a roll. They reckoned they had the measure of Perfidious Albion and it was just a matter of time before we came crawling.

  The Germans and French between them shoe-horned BAE Systems out of Airbus, as the Germans moved to restart commercial airline building after various attempts to get things moving forward. They were anxious to be more than just a component builder. So they cosied up to the Anglo/French Airbus consortium for permission to create a production line for construction of Airbus A319s. It was to be the thin end of a wedge, as they reckoned it could be a way of regaining self interest in aircraft construction.

In much the same way Chancellor Kohl stood atop the Berlin wall waving his handfuls of ‘Begrussengeld’, to end his Chancellorship as the man who re-united East & West Germany. That it worked there can be no doubt, though whether the full ramifications of exchanging the Ostmark one for one with the Dmark have yet worked through, are still not fully accounted for.
Germany has huge borrowings, over €2trn at the last count and all this debt needs at some time, to be repaid or refinanced. This at a time when export markets around the globe are set to retract and one of re-united Germany’s main planks of economic activity, engineering exports are key. For the mighty German industrial machine is the engine of their economy. Equivalent it might be said to the importance of the UK’s Financial Services sector in the City of London to our own economy.

It’s not certain what exact parallels there are in the French economy, it could Airbus, though it’s doubtful if it makes any real contribution other than maintaining a degree of employment. No one can say for sure if it makes a profit, probably the main reason BAE systems flogged off its wing building operations in the UK.  So they’re left with cheese, wine and horsemeat as their main exports and there’s not a lot more you can say about that, as British expats desert in droves. In the sure and certain understanding that the party’s over.

Watch this space, I’ll be back!

Tom.