ELSTAT: you know, it’s surprising this acronym is not better-known within the context of the economic crisis that has been raging since (roughly) 2008. And I mean in a negative sense, the way names such as Lehmann Bros., Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland, Northern Rock, etc. now call up unpleasant associations among most economic observers.

For ELSTAT is the abbreviation (from the Greek) for the “Hellenic Statistical Authority,” the Greek government’s official statistical agency. If you are of the view that Greece never belonged in the Eurozone in the first place – and many are, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy – then ELSTAT is your villain, as it was the false statistics it submitted in the 2000-2002 time-frame which led Greece to be admitted into the club when it was not ready, and may never have been. Similarly, ELSTAT was involved back in late 2009 when Georgios Papandreou won the national elections and became Greek prime minister, only to announce shortly thereafter that his country’s fiscal situation was way worse than he, the EU, and the general public had been led to believe (by ELSTAT) – and that was what kicked off the long-running Greek sovereign debt imbroglio which even last Monday’s deal with the “troika” (EU, ECB and IMF) has surely not definitively solved.

Anyway, there’s a new ELSTAT scandal now, and Dirk Elsner over at @blicklog tips us off:

Staatsanwaltschaft erhebt Vorwurf, dass Griechenlands Staatsdefizit 2009 auf EU-Druck zu hoch angesetzt wurde http://t.co/dG4DPUPY

February 23, 2012 1:13 pm via HootBarReplyRetweetFavorite

@blicklog

Dirk Elsner

There’s also an article to the same effect in the Czech press, spotted by @Zpravy:

tiscali.cz: Řecký parlament bude šetřit údajné “nafukování” údajů o deficitu: http://t.co/NgrpIbe0

February 23, 2012 1:10 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

What is going on? Well, once again ELSTAT’s numbers are said to be in error, and that for a political purpose. This time, however, you can say that the alleged fraud is in the opposite direction: numbers not falsified to fool outsiders, but rather to fool the Greeks themselves! The Athens public prosecutor now asserts that the Greek budget figures were actually exaggerated back at the end of 2009 – just after Papandreou had taken office – and this at the request of the EU. Specifically, the EU wanted to see a budget deficit figure of 15.4% – and duly got it – rather than the 12% which was reality. Why? For ammunition to use to browbeat the Greeks into the tough austerity measures they passed/started to pass then.

A Greek parliamentary committee is going to look into this. For now, the suspicion remains that ELSTAT is an agency not to be trusted by anyone, whether on the home or the visiting team. There is also sure to be an additional, unpleasant political effect if the Greek electorate starts to feel it was misled into adopting the painful budget/pension/wage cuts the government undertook to mollify the EU and to deal with its fiscal situation.

Tired of hearing about all the French strikes (even if you haven’t been living/traveling there and so had to deal with them directly)? Finding it hard not to snort when you recall that the main point at issue is a raising of the official retirement age from 60 to 62? Consider it rather too convenient that that month-long wave of street-demonstrations has now dovetailed nicely with the week of Autumn vacation for French students?

Well then, you’re not alone, for much of the Fifth Republic’s recent behavior is attracting unfavorable notice among its neighbors, including that big one across the Eastern frontier marking the area of so many of the 19th and 20th centuries’ great battles. The lede paragraph of a recent article in the German newsmagazine Focus (Always annoyed with the French) sums things up well:

They strike like there’s no tomorrow, provoke Siemens with unfair attacks and undercut the German European Central Bank candidate behind his back. Is France doing away with herself?

Well, it sums things up well with a little unpacking:

• Provoke Siemens: The French government reacted rather badly to news of a few weeks ago that Eurostar, which runs high-speed trains from Paris and from Brussels to London, had decided to buy new equipment from the German firm Siemens rather than – as usual – the French firm Alstom. Of course, public procurement contracts such as this within the EU are supposed to be awarded based purely on cost/quality considerations, not nationality – but the French Transport Minister, Dominique Bussereau, did conveniently mention that the Siemens trains were not long enough and posed other safety risks, as he made his announcement that he was using his authority to invalidate the sale.
  
• Undercut the German ECB candidate: Everybody knows (doesn’t everybody?) that the successor next year to Jean-Claude Trichet at the head of the ECB is supposed to be Axel Weber, currently president of the German Central Bank, the Bundesbank. Actually, regardless of whether that really is the consensus among EU officials and European politicians who decide these things, it’s particularly important these days to elevate the Bundesbank president to ECB president, for political reasons: the Germans have been those mostly called-upon to come up with the money to bail out Greece and the whole Eurozone monetary system, and the same would be true if help were to be needed for Portugal, Ireland, and the rest. They know that, they’re getting tired of it, so it’s a very good idea at least to put one of their own in a banking/monetary decision-making position as vital as that of ECB president. Then again, nowadays French authorities profess to know nothing about any “consensus”; they have started pushing for the current head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), to succeed Trichet. This might also have something to do with the fact that, if DSK is not immobilized in a new job at the ECB, he may well challenge Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency in 2012.
  
• Oh, and there’s one remaining bit: Focus writer Uli Dönch finishes that lede-paragraph I’ve quoted with the question Schafft Frankreich sich selbst ab? and that’s a clever allusion to Deutschland schafft sich ab, which is the title of a current raging best-seller in Germany (written by a former member of the Board of the Bundesbank, Thilo Sarrazin) which posits that Germany is weakening itself fatally through a combination of its low birth-rate and readiness to accept non-Western immigrants (with their high birth-rates).

There you have it: this Uli Dönch hepcat manages to compress just about all he has to remark on into his one, short leading paragraph. I mean, is this journalism or is it poetry? All that remain to be considered are some speculations as to why unsere Lieblingsnachbarn – that is, “our favorite neighbors,” expressed with an ironic tone – would be acting this way.

This comes at the end, in a section headlined “Arrogance or Inferiority Complex?” Here Herr Dönch drops the ball, yielding to rhetoric better-suited to the dueling of rival fans on football commentary websites. It can’t be arrogance, he proclaims, because the times are long gone when France was “the clearly dominating Power on the European mainland. But now? La Grande Nation? Like how. La Grande Illusion! Only: who’s going to tell them?”

The leading Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad had an interesting item over the press conference given by Minister of Finance (and Cabinet chairmen in the absence of Dutch premier Jan Peter Balkenende, who is visiting China) Wouter Bos, which we can see in the article’s headline: Bos alludes to extension of French EU chairmanship.

From the very beginning of the European Union (i.e. from 1958; it was then known as the European Economic Community) the member-states have taken turns, at six-month intervals, at assuming the “EU presidency,” although the role is more-accurately described as the presidency/chairmanship of the Council of the European Union, which is the legislative forum for the member-states and usually the most-powerful of the EU’s component institutions. Naturally, the queue of countries waiting to serve their turn as president includes all EU member-states, and it was in the first half of this year that the first country from the great 10-country EU enlargement of May, 2004, had its turn as president, namely Slovenia.

The thing is, the second half of 2008 has proved to be far-from-normal times. First there was the diplomatic crisis over the conflict between Russia and Georgia, and now we have the international system of finance seriously in need of some restructuring. France is now EU President, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy has by all accounts done a credible job in responding to the worldwide financial panic. (His intervention in the Russian-Georgian conflict to secure the cease-fire was subject to rather more mixed reviews.) The comfort the EU has had with Sarkozy as point-man on that crisis may have much to do with the French president’s own personal qualities, but it also stems from France’s status as one of the EU’s major powers and its deep and capable governmental machinery. What if one or more of these grave problems had arisen during the Slovenian presidency: could President Danilo Turk and the Slovenian government have effectively handled the task of leading the EU response? (more…)

Over there in the US you’re still dealing with your Credit Crisis and all related issues – like which august financial institution will topple next, and will the Fed be able to patch together some solution that keeps the markets from panicking yet one more time. Over here in Europe, though, things are rather different, as we’re reminded by Financial Times Deutschland reporter Mark Schrörs writing from Frankfurt (High Wage Settlements Brake the ECB). (more…)

Recently this site has picked up some new fans, showing a particular interest in things French and offering kind words of encouragement (on their “Links” page). This reminded me that it had been a while since I had turned to the French press to see what was going on there.

(Same with the Czech press, it looks like. Hey, if you feel I’m neglecting something I claim to cover, just let me know and I’ll get right on it. This does work – it’s worked in the past.)

That turned out to be good timing, because this week there was something going on in Paris that attracted wide attention from French newspapers but little outside the country, namely the Forum Social Européen (FSE), or “European Social Forum.” Then again, there’s the problem that, even after reading about it from the various on-line journals, I’m still rather at a loss about what to make of it, or even to give a twenty-words-or-less summary description. (You can take your own look if you want, at the Forum’s own English-language website.) “An anti-globalization summit of left-wing political and non-governmental organizations” is what you could call it, a successor to the “World Social Forum” of January, 2001, which convened in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and was meant to be the explicit counterpart to the “World Economic Forum” meetings in Davos, Switzerland, of the rich-and-famous which occur regularly during that time of year. (The first European Social Forum happened in November of last year, in Florence, Italy.) (more…)