Yes, those guys there in uniform on one of the floats towards the end waving to the crowds were police officers – you noticed them?

Keep in mind, though, that this short clip was the teaser – so to speak – for the live broadcast of this year’s/today’s Canal Parade planned by the Dutch media organization AVRO, i.e. it shows a parade from some past year. For this year, some of you out there might be pleased to hear that festivities have been repeatedly interrupted by heavy downpours, accompanied occasionally by thunder and lightning! Make of that what you will.

Prague takes its turn at this sort of thing next weekend – meaning a Gay Pride festival, and actually for the very first time. Should be interesting! I mean, how will society there react to events like this? No canals there though – just a river, and it’s too wide for any such aquatic parade.

                          

For four months Belgium has been without a government, its public debt is approaching 100% of GDP and the spread of Belgian 10-year bonds over the German benchmark is today three times as high as at the beginning of this year. Is Belgium the next country with a sovereign debt crisis?

As if the EU needed another such problem! Nonetheless, with the political system there seemingly unable to form a government, with a national split-up now a real possibility – the option is now being discussed in Walloon (French) circles as well as Flemish ones – who’s going to take care of payments on its ever-expanding sovereign debt?

The analysis, by Susanne Mundschenk and Raphael Cottin for EuroIntelligence, is a couple weeks old but still definitely worth a (belated) mention, as is the accompanying 10-page PDF document that goes into even more detail. All are in English.

                          

These tours are run by Lobby Control (site only in German), a lobbyist-tracking NGO which, as the site’s headline reads, is “Active for Transparency and Democracy.” According to the Die Zeit piece, Berlin has it’s own “Iron Triangle” of lobbyists, actually a sort of Iron Trapezoid, running from the Reichstag to the Friedrichstrasse S-bahn station to the Gendarmenmarkt to Potsdamerplatz (respectively the NW, NE, SE and SW corners). Through it runs majestically the famous avenue Unter den Linden, unfortunately now known among many capital cynics as Unter den Lobbyisten – “among the lobbyists.” For €10 per person (cheap!), one of Lobby Control’s guides will take a group on a roughly 2 1/2 hour tour through this territoriy, stopping at 15 different locations to give a brief presentation (probably only in German) about each: trade association offices, PR agencies, and think-tanks, of course, but also such places as eateries and beer-halls where the heavy political back-slapping really goes on – such as the Ständige Vertretung restaurant on the River Spree, where the tour starts out.

Ironically, that restaurant’s name means “permanent representation,” but one has to assume it was originally inspired by the Big Power confrontations and negotiations that occurred in Berlin while the Cold War was raging rather than by any German politics. For as you might recall, it was that Cold War that made it quite impossible for Berlin to resume its role as the German capital until 1999 – which means that the lobbyists there are also a comparatively recent phenomenon. As the Die Zeit article notes – actually quoting the owner of Ständige Vertretung, who made the move himself to Berlin in 1999 – Bonn was a much more laid-back lobbying environment, mainly made up of trade associations (Verbände) happy mainly just to provide lawmakers with industry information.

That’s hardly the case any more in Berlin, of course. The city has lost whatever political innocence it may once have had; it is clearly “where it’s at” when it comes not only to German political power but – as we have seen played out with the Greek debt crisis – even European economic and financial power. And although there are reportedly only around 5,000 lobbyists actually at work there (as opposed to the 20,000 to be found in Brussels) Lobby Control assures us that plenty of business now takes place behind closed doors, out of sight of the German public. The associated scandals (or at least scandalous behavior) have already started coming to light, most especially lucrative “revolving door” arrangements whereby high political officials leave office to take up well-paid business or lobbying positions about which only the naive will wonder what they did to qualify for them. The prime example here is former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s move to Chairman of the Board of the German-Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline consortium, but there was also one Matthias Wissman, former Traffic Minister who left government to become head of the auto industry association.

The Lobby Control guides are Lobby Control people first, so they remain up-to-date on all the latest scandals and can weave the new stories effortlessly into the tour’s itinerary and their stop-by-stop spiel. Yes, this is truly a tourist excursion of a very different sort: for one thing, actual lobbyists have themselves been known to take the tour to benefit from the knowledge gained thereby. For another, the special nature also derives from a combination of the facts that 1) Tour participants rarely if ever actually gain access to the offices that house the relevant firms they are visiting, of course, but usually just stare at them from the outside as if they were caged zoo animals, and 2) The denizens of those offices don’t much like even that, so that there are sometimes hostile receptions, with security functionaries showing up to try to get the group to move on immediately from the office-atrium they are transiting, for example. There have even reportedly been attempts by such security personnel to dictate what can and cannot be spoken about by the tourguide at a particular stop; one assumes these are former German Democratic Republic functionaries.

Anyway, sounds very interesting, although unfortunately the tour seems to be conducted only in German. Those who are interested anyway (here is the page, scroll to the bottom for details) should be aware that the tours are conducted on only a twice-a-month schedule, and they always sell out.

                          

Doncel takes as his motif the phrase llueve sobre mojado, or “it never rains but it pours.” Perhaps President Van Rompuy should consider learning Spanish (or maybe pay more attention to his Spanish-speaking aids), although what is now ailing Spain now is quite reportable in numerical terms as well. Like the Spanish stock market index down by 7.5% over only two days. Or the “risk premium” for Spanish government bonds – that is, the difference between the interest-yield they must carry and that of German Bundesbonds, considered the safest Eurobonds possible – multiplying by four in just over a month, to almost two full percentage points (0.6% German; 2.58% Spanish).

In fact, today shapes up to be a particularly “rainy” day for Spanish finances, in that it is the day the government is scheduled to return to the private credit markets to sell more debt, in the range of €2-3 billion. In March it was able to raise €4.5 billion in five-year bonds for 2.84%, while today it is likely to have to pay in excess of 3.5%. (Of course, Greece already was facing a market demanding yields of over 10%, except that the EU’s bailout package means it can stop dealing with private financial markets for a few years – supposedly.)

The Portuguese government had to do the same thing yesterday, borrowing €500 million with 6-month notes at a yield four times what it paid just last March. But at least Portugal did that just in the nick of time to avoid even worse terms, just before the rating agency Moody’s gave public notice that it was considering lowering that country’s rating even further. Apparently it’s throughout the entire Iberian Peninsula that it never rains, but it pours . . .

“The debt market is dried-up, it is broken. Lack of confidence has given way to panic and decisions being taken now have no logic,” that is how one Spanish analyst for Citibank characterizes the present situation. All the while, Doncel notes, isn’t it funny how everything is developing in the Germans’ favor, from the fall in the value of the euro to the fall in the interest rate that that government has to pay to borrow money. While those things may be true, that sort of attitude that everything is happening deliberately, engineered by the Germans, can only be destructive when Eurozone nations have to find some way to work together to resolve the crisis.

Also not helpful: an opinion column whose link is on the very same page as Doncel’s article, written by one Xavier Vidal-Folch and entitled Shark thirsting for blood. I’ll just deal with it briefly here; let me give you the first paragraph (’cause I know you’re mega-curious from that sensational title!):

Like a shark, the financial market seeks out blood. It has almost gobbled up Greece. But it does not let loose its prey, as would seem logical, while it thrusts its teeth in others that are bigger. Only because, with the surgery in Athens completed with pain and with death, there still remain, dispersed, trails of red drops.

Pretty breathless stuff: “The Market is coming to get us!” And again, provided to us by El País. Perhaps they really are starting to panic in Spain.

                          

Still, it produced a surprising conclusion. Conventional wisdom has people smoking more the more they are under stress, but this study turns that on its head. How can that be? Silly, do keep in mind the wave of anti-smoking restrictions imposed in most EU countries from around 2005 on: these people are simply not allowed to smoke there in the office where they are struggling to meet deadline, and they don’t have time to get away somewhere where they may. So maybe they make up for it later, when the crisis is over? There’s no evidence for that.

Smokers should at least be relieved that this study stops well short of recommending any heightening of the stress-quotient among one’s employees as a means to get them to cut down on their tobacco consumption. Perhaps the thought in the back of their minds of the various diseases to which they are making themselves susceptible by their behavior – I won’t bother to list them here – has always been stressful enough.

                          

Actually, there were some other highlights as well, which Bernhard let everyone in on by means of an interview with the Dutch paper De Volkskrant, conducted a few years before his death but authorized for release only afterwards – basically, two illegitimate daughters, one of which everyone already knew about, but one of which they didn’t. Another “highlight” Bernhard discussed in that interview (which, believe me, everyone had known about for a long, long time) was the scandal that broke out in 1976 about payments he had received in the late sixties/early seventies from Lockheed in order to push the purchase by the Dutch government of their military airplanes. This affair came very close to causing a grave constitutional crisis, with Queen Juliana threatening to abdicate if her husband were punished too much for his indiscretions, and Princess Beatrix also pledging in that case to refuse the throne. In fact, a recent, and excellent, history I read about the Netherlands in the 20th century claims that Bernhard was in fact also bribed, for the same nefarious purpose, by the Northrup Corporation, and that the Dutch cabinet of 1976 knew about that as well but never disclosed this for fear that public outrage would become so insistent on punishing the Prince that the above-mentioned abdication crisis would then in fact ensue. (In the end it was avoided via some wrist-slapping measures taken against the Prince, like taking away his military offices and forbidding him from wearing the uniform.)

A naughty guy, then, you could say. (Well, he also founded the World Wildlife Fund as well as Rotary International.) And also, it seems, a card-carrying Nazi. That is the latest Bernhard revelation, soon to be officially disclosed when the new book Bernhard: Een verborgen geschiedenis (“Bernhard: A hidden history” – pictured above) is presented next Monday by its author, Annejet van der Zijl. (Who has an excellent website, with even an English section. Strangely, though, this book-presentation will actually take place at one of the Dutch royal palaces, Paleis Soestdijk. Do they know what’s in the book?)

For now, the Flemish paper De Standaard has the story covered. Basically, in the course of her research Ms. Van der Zijl tracked down at Berlin’s Humboldt University Bernhard’s old membership-card for the Deutsche Studentenschaft. This itself was definitely a Nazi-sponsored organization, but of more interest were the other memberships claimed for Bernhard on that card, which included the NSDAP – that’s the Nazi Party, folks – and even the SA, or Sturmabteilung, who were the Nazi bully-boys who went around beating up people on German streets.

Yes, he’s dead now, so why don’t we all just leave him alone? That’s a reasonable proposition, except that, as the Standaard article notes, throughout his life Bernhard steadfastly denied that he had ever been a Nazi Party member, or that he even had any sympathies for that movement – even in that Volkskrant interview that he knew would be published only after his death. And there may very well be further revelations to come: I myself have run across allegations of some serious intelligence-leaks during World War II (i.e. to the Germans) that may have had the Prince behind them. I won’t get specific in this public forum because I’m not at all sure that they can be substantiated. But this latest revelation certainly does not make them any less likely.

*Although, if for some reason you just don’t care for “Bernhard,” he had a wide array of other official first names: “Bernhard Leopold Frederik Everhard Julius Coert Karel Godfried Pieter.” Take your pick!

IMPORTANT UPDATE: I have now stumbled upon the fact that the Flemish paper De Standaard does not believe in “permalinks” but rather eliminates articles from its website after the passage of some (as yet undetermined) interval. Very disappointing! And not only because readers of this weblog thereby lose the possibility of clicking through to check out the original article, in the original Dutch. (Of course, since I’m writing for an audience that I assume does not understand any language other than English, I always try to pass along a healthy bit of what any given article says, but still . . .) No, this is also disappointing because De Standaard had been delivering so many interesting articles, especially lately.

My inclination is to write nonetheless about any noteworthy article that I come upon, even if it’s from De Standaard and therefore is sure to disappear shortly. Or does this violate some bloggers’ commandment? Could someone let me know?

FURTHER UPDATE: Never mind, the De Standaard permalinks are back. Sorry, I don’t know what happened, I just know that for a while they were dead.

                          

This choice of topic is not accidental, although its further elaboration in the Danish press is serendipitous. And to a great extent I am offering my find here in gratitude for some great introductory curling material already enjoyed. I’m referring specifically to Letterman, Wednesday night, February 17, and his material could also be of help in providing some background for those of you who may have no idea what this Olympic sport of “curling” is all about.

In curling, they get a 40 lb. granite stone and send it down the ice and then they sweep the debris from in front of it. It’s all the fun of shuffleboard, plus household chores.

This is Letterman, remember, so there is also a Top Ten List, “Top Ten Surprising Facts About Curling.” Some selections:

10. Every year it’s watched by dozens of people.
9. Consistently ranked the world’s no. 1 broom-related sport.
8. It’s a lot like hockey, minus the speed and excitement.
. . .
5. Longest match ever: unknown, because no one ever stays till the end.

Perhaps we have a clue there, in #5, why the Danish women’s curling team felt the need to call in a sports psychologist, namely to help them work on their drive and determination to see matches through all the way to the end. But no, the article itself quickly gives a couple much more powerful reasons:

1. These ladies have been carrying a very heavy weight of expectations on their womenly shoulders. As the article puts it, “The Danish curling-women were named ahead of the Olympic Games as Denmark’s one great medal-hope.”
2. They have failed miserably! So far the ladies have played six curling-matches (which apparently pit a team against just one other opponent), and won only one of them.

So yes, one can understand how they could use someone’s shoulder to cry on, to get over the disappointment and even humiliation so they can approach their remaining games with a good, stiff upper-lip even as they know that their chances for any sort of winner’s medal are now purely theoretical.

But there’s more! The article gives the ladies’ trainer, Kjell-Arne Olsson (a man’s name, I believe), as he reveals to the Ritzau news agency his view of what went wrong. Basically, the Danish lady-curlers always did alright in the first half of a match, but started “missing some decisive stones” in the second half, so that the opponent could usually come back to win. And you also have here a somewhat tougher assessment from the marvelously-named Freddy Frederiksen, the “elite coordinator” of the two Danish curling-teams (men’s and women’s, natch) there in Vancouver: “We played some very tight games. . . . It’s the tight competition that means we can’t go any further. They [the ladies] played toe-to-toe with their opponents, but unfortunately were just not good enough.” C’mon gentlemen, all that should provide you with more-than-enough of what you need. “Danish curling rocks!” anyone? Dave? Craig? Coco?

On the other hand, from the photo at the top of the article – go ahead, go there now, guys – it does seem that this sport attracts more than its quota of genuine Danish babes. They don’t look like any losers to me; they can come cry on my shoulder anytime! (Maybe I need to look into joining my local curling club.) But that’s if the picture is genuine, of course; you never know, Jyllands-Posten might just have bought it instead from the “women’s curling section” of an on-line photo store like iStockphoto.

* I know, I shut off the comments on this site. But stay tuned! I’m just about to start parallel-posting entries to this blog on the EuroSavant Facebook fan page, so you’ll then be able to post your comments, and your curling-jokes, on that fan page’s wall!

                          

This matters because Copé is head of the group of parliamentarians in the French National Assembly that belong to the UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) which is also President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party – and because it would seem that the European political scene could use a break from this sort of measure in the wake of the referendum in Switzerland last November that forbade the building of minarets there. Strangely, in his interview Copé also mentions that his proposed law would incorporate “a period for dialogue of six months between the date of application of the law and the date of promulgation to permit a phase for discussion and mediation with the concerned persons.” That seems a strange way to proceed – legislate first, discuss later – and is unlikely to salve the feelings of the Muslim inhabitants of the country against whom this law clearly is aimed.

                          

She is Carmen Kool, out of Amsterdam, and in addition to her name (if it actually is real, of course), I really like her attitude, especially for a 23-year-old. She was already clearly unrepentant in a slightly earlier piece from the AD (entitled Miss Netherlands with bare bottom) that first brought her exhibitionist transgression to light and speculated that she “was gambling with her crown.” “I think that the [Miss World] organization won’t be happy with my photo-shoot for Playboy. Unfortunately. I myself have nothing against nakedness. What’s more: I like to be a bit of a rebel.” She added, “I am Miss Netherlands. My countrymen have a right to it,” where by “it” she seems to be referring, again, to her naked photo-shoot. Again, a rather refreshing, even somewhat surprising attitude.

The axe did inevitably fall on her title shortly afterwards, and that follow-up piece announcing the sad news recounts a bit of a she said/he said dispute between Kool and a spokesman from the Miss World Netherlands organization about whether the latter sufficiently supported her in getting further opportunities for acting, TV commercials, and the like – in short, in getting further exposure, which she implies is why she felt she finally had to turn to the world-famous masters at providing exposure, as it were. Of course, the Algemeen Dagblad itself had now rendered its own assistance in that regard: you can click either of those two article links above to marvel at a photo which provides a coy sampling of her considerable charms (as well as an object lesson in how what is deemed proper for a European news publication often would not pass muster in the US).

As for Playboy.nl, for now it has only this entry in what it calls its “Playblog” announcing the coup, together with a shrunken rendition of the cover of that current issue on Netherlands newsstands now. (The Naakt! you see there of course means “Naked!”, as in “Hey wow! Look who we got!”) More revealing images tend to migrate to the website after subsequent issues, and subsequent centerfolds, follow, but I’ll have to leave it over to my dear readers to keep checking back on that Playboy.nl site to see when that happens, if desired. Alerting you to that here (if I even ever find out myself) is really not the purpose of this weblog. For that matter, perhaps this very subject is not really its purpose, although it does involve the “European non-English-language press.” In the end, I think I’m supposed to determine what that purpose is, but I nonetheless welcome any more e-mail contributions of opinion you might care to send!

                          

The question naturally arises: Surely there must be companies, somewhere, which are still doing well for themselves despite the tough times. Who are they? Perhaps more importantly – because of the clues that may be extractable for the rest of us – how are they managing to pull that off? As chief editor and team leader, Biseau enlists his colleagues at Libération to put together an article-collection addressing these questions, under the master-title of Seven aspects of getting around the crisis.

Libération, to be sure, is hardly a business newspaper (it’s rather general-interest), and France does have its own set of magazines devoted to business affairs, although you (like me) may never have heard of most of them: Le Nouvel Economiste or Challenges, for example. Still, Biseau’s team does manage produce interesting analyses of some approaches to achieving business success even within a credit crisis. As one would expect, there are a couple traces here of left-wing attitudes which one can hardly overlook, yet, as we’ll soon see, some of his writers are also willing to hold their noses and describe some methods for earning good money in tough times straight out of the hard-bitten capitalist school.

As you would expect from the title, this article is formed around a master-list of seven ideas or business approaches, each demonstrated by the brief description of a typical company that exemplifies it. The web-structure reflects this as well: that title-page is but the home-page, providing Biseau’s brief introduction, that then links over there on the right, under sur le sujet, to the separate pages. Let me give a summary of their content; here’s how to be a business-winner against a bad economic tide:

• Simply innovate: The French video-game maker Ubisoft has so far managed to avoid the sales-slowdown that has afflicted most of its competitors by adopting a number of against-the-grain policies (e.g. targeting “casual” video-game players).
  
• Profit from the dark side (what some would call “upon being issued with lemons, proceeding to make lemonade”): More and more women are out of work? Why that’s great! That just means more door-to-door saleswoman candidates for the French sexy-undergarment firm Charlott’lingerie.
  
• The low-cost approach: RyanAir. Of course. What more do you need to know, especially if you live anywhere in Europe and like to fly cheaply?
  
• Be on the cutting-edge (I know: this seems very similar to point #1 above, “Innovate”): Here Libération journalist Laure Noualhat discusses the French mattress- and sheets-seller Ardelaine. This firm is a bit difficult even just to sum up within a bullet-point list; let me come back to it below.
  
• Go green (of course!): The French firm Sunnco – despite exhibiting an appalling lack of imagination when it came to coming up with the company name – is doing good business these days, and they don’t even make the photo-voltaic solar panels themselves: they simply buy them and then install them for customers (mainly large business or public-property installations)!
  
• Tie up your customers in long-term contracts, so that no matter what (other than by declaring bankruptcy) they have to keep paying you: These days, at least within Western Civilization, a mobile telephone is a necessity, and the French telecoms firm Orange is glad to provide network service for them, usually under the condition that you contract with them to do so over at least a year.
  
• And finally, pay even more attention to product-quality: This is claimed by journalist Pierre-Henri Allain to be the approach employed by Armor Lux, an interesting firm based in Brittany which makes sportswear and uniforms.

This is a fairly comprehensive list, one must admit, because it does include some approaches you can tell that the Libération writers are not so thrilled about. That clearly includes the “tie them down with a subscription” strategy exemplified by Orange – although the writer of that article (identified only as “C.Ma.”) hints broadly that that company was picked over all the other mobile-telephone providers and other public utilities because of an additional bit of daring, and exclusive, innovation, namely offering the iPhone in France, which has gained Orange a “stratospheric return-on-investment” (although French courts have recently ruled against the legality of this iPhone monopoly). Catherine Maussion, author of the “low-cost” article on RyanAir, also clearly (if not explicitly) makes known her distaste for that particular approach by taking the obvious route: she includes at the end an enumeration of what are to many the silly additional charges RyanAir tries to tack on to its base low fairs, e.g. plus €5 for payment by credit card, plus €3 for priority boarding – as well as the idea that RyanAir chief Michael O’Leary also floated recently (no one is sure whether he is really serious) of also charging for use of the on-board toilets!

The Cooperative Approach

There was probably never any real chance that, in a country that still tries to disparage the entire concept of “fast food” (even as, of course, its citizens continue to flock to its various emporia), there could be much fondness for any “low cost” approach to business anyway. Rather, one can tell that it is precisely a company like Ardelaine that embodies the preferred French antidote to the bad economic times, at least as expressed in Libération. In the first place, it’s a “Scop,” which is the French abbreviation for a co-op: its employees own it, and they split up profits among themselves each year after figuring out how many there have been (if any). No stock-market listing; no bonuses; no stock options. Instead, what you have is a firm specialized in producing and selling clothes, mattresses, sheets, and the like – all made out of wool, with no chemical treatment involved.

What’s more, Ardelaine has always been like this ever since its founding in 1982, i.e. including through the go-go years, so that it has taken these economic troubles to reveal the fundamental soundness of its sober approach to business. Why, the collective leadership even rejected a few years ago a contract from Japan which potentially could have raised the company’s turnover by a full 25%, to €2 million yearly, precisely because they did not want to make themselves vulnerable to the whims of a single customer that way. Moderate, sensible growth above all! It’s easy to see why this particular company would set the pulses racing of journalists from a newspaper like Libération.

Oooh-la-la Marketing

On the other hand, Ardelaine’s tale did not really have that sort of effect on this blogger. I was much more interested in the company put forth as representative of the “make lemonade when life gives you lemons” approach, namely Charlott’lingerie. Just imagine: the French have taken the Fuller brush man door-to-door sales approach and have adapted it to pushing feminine undies! Oooh-la-la! Yes, it’s all very seductive, but it also turns out that the underlying business principle is sound, especially lately. That’s because, as Julia Pascual’s article relates, Charlott’lingerie has been besieged in recent months by women (5,000 of them since the beginning of the year) seeking to become door-to-door lingerie sales-people, attracted by the sales commissions to be earned as well as the flexibility such employment affords them to spend as much or as little time engaged in it as they choose – e.g. as one way to supplement a regular day-job salary that just won’t cover expenses sufficiently anymore. The company has been able to grow its sales-force by some 30% over that period, while at the same time the very concept of purchasing something sold door-to-door has gained considerable ground in France, mainly because of the cheaper prices (no bricks-and-mortar overhead, etc.) that that makes possible. In view of the fact that all its sales-people are paid only on commission, more sellers in a far-from-saturated market must mean more potential customers tracked down and pitched to, and so basically more sales. (There has also been a slight drop in the average-sale-per-saleswoman, but that has been more than offset by the increased combined volume of product moved by the growing sales-force.)

So you can be sure that Charlott’lingerie is one company which will tend (perversely) to hope that these bad times continue to last for some time, all while it expects to surpass in 2009 a yearly total of 2 million pieces sold, with an average margin of 20%. But again, these are not the sorts of numbers from Mlle. Pascual’s article that catch my own eye; I’m rather interested in the statistic that a full 99% of the Charlott’lingerie sales-force is female! If it’s such a good business idea for hard times – and, indeed, it does seem to be – then the next obvious step would seem to be to tap into the French male cohort to expand that sales-force. I really don’t see why that has not happened already; it must be one of those mysterious wrinkles of French culture why the fringe benefits associated with this sort of money-making for male salesmen aren’t readily apparent. No, silly, I don’t mean here the chance they would have first to try on the lingerie themselves at home in some sort of personal quality-control check – I’m rather talking about how presumably it’s the women customers who are buying this sort of product for the men in their lives in the first place, and who therefore might often be interested in donning the merchandise themselves for a try-before-you-buy evaluation before the eyes of a suitable male stand-in . . .