Frankrijk is de uitvinder van Club Med

Wat bezielt de Franse Minister van Financiën, Christine Lagarde, om zo'n economische nonsens te verkopen ? Volgens haar zijn de problemen van de Eurozone ook te wijten aan Duitsland. te competitief, te spaarzaam, te weinig consumptie... De mieren verbrodden het voor de krekels als het ware.

In de FT zegt ze :

Germany’s trade surpluses built on holding down labour costs may be unsustainable for the other countries in the eurozone, France’s finance minister said in an unusually blunt warning to Berlin.

Christine Lagarde said Berlin should consider boosting domestic demand to help deficit countries regain competitiveness and sort out their public finances. Her comments break a long-standing taboo between the French and German governments about macroeconomicimbalances inside the 16-country bloc which have been dramatically exposed by the Greek debt crisis.

“[Could] those with surpluses do a little something? It takes two to tango,” she said in an interview with the Financial Times. “It cannot just be about enforcing deficit principles.”

“Clearly Germany has done an awfully good job in the last 10 years or so, improving competitiveness, putting very high pressure on its labour costs. When you look at unit labour costs to Germany, they have done a tremendous job in that respect. I’m not sure it is a sustainable model for the long term and for the whole of the group. Clearly we need better convergence.”

After Wolfgang Schäuble, her German counterpart, last week proposed a European Monetary Fund associated with much stiffer penalties for breaking the EU’s fiscal rules, Ms Lagarde outlined her own thinking about closer economic policy co-ordination, laying bare the different visions of “economic government” held by Paris and Berlin.

While not ruling out an EMF, she said it was not a priority for the eurozone. The bloc should first focus on ensuring that debt-laden Greece followed through on promised austerity measures and then show “a bit of creativity and innovation” to find scope within the existing EU treaty for beefing up budgetary surveillance and discipline.

Rather than amending a treaty to set up an EMF – “an adventure that could take us another three, four, five years” – the eurozone should adopt its own “soft laws” to strengthen discipline.

Ms Lagarde said much tougher sanctions as proposed by Mr Schäuble were “worth exploring”. But she preferred faster surveillance procedures and less painful but more realistic penalties, pointing out that the existing threat of a fine under the EU’s fiscal rules “is so far away and unlikely that it is not really a deterrent”.

Ms Lagarde made clear the biggest difference between Germany and France – and other eurozone members - is over whether Berlin should boost internal demand to give a lift to its partners’ export industries.

It was a “very sensitive issue”, she acknowledged. “I talk to Wolfgang [Schäuble] on an almost daily basis at the moment. The issue of imbalances is not one we address readily.”

The rest of the eurozone could not expect too much of Germany, Ms Lagarde said. France and other governments had to make efforts to increase the competitiveness of their economies and reform their public sectors to reduce deficits. She paid tribute to Ireland which was “driving hard”.

“You can’t ask one player, as big as it is, to pull the whole group. But clearly there needs to be a sense of common destiny that we have together with our partners.”

Ms Lagarde defended a proposed EU crackdown on credit default swaps on sovereign debt, which some believe has been used to manipulate the price of Greek debt.

She said she had “no evidence” of price manipulation using sovereign CDS but added that the “rapidity of movements is intriguing”. There needed to be a closer watch on a “narrow and shallow market with very few players”, she added.

A complete ban on “naked selling” – trading the CDS without holding the underlying asset – would be an “oversimplication”, she said.

She said Greece’s debt problems underlined the need to step up efforts to overhaul the market in CDS more generally. The standardisation of contracts and the shift from over-the-counter to trades on organised exchanges – as agreed by the G20 group of leading economies – should be completed by the end of next year rather than by the end of 2012.

Nu begrijp ik Mevrouw Lagarde niet. Duitsland heeft met zijn spaarzaamheid de deficit-landen gefinancierd. Duitsland neemt proportioneel meer EU-lasten (financiering van de EU-administratie, of EU-Moloch) op zich. Duitsland staat garant voor de orthodoxie en de normen, zonder dewelke de euro al veel langer een complete janboel zou zijn geweest. Mochten alle landen het Duitse model hebben gevolgd, dan was er in feite geen probleem.

En haar voorstel houdt ook geen steek. De Duitse consument kan geen locomotief zijn van Europa. De Duitse export is dat echter wel. Wat stelt ze voor ? Het Amerikaanse model implementeren ? Een Duitse huizenbubbel creëren ?

Het enige wat je achter deze uitspraken kan vermoeden, is dat Frankrijk zich wil profileren. Frankrijk wil misschien verzoener spelen tussen de Club Med en de harde kernlanden zoals Duitsland en Nederland. Per slot van rekening zijn de Club Med-landen in het diepe zuiden, maar is Frankrijk inderdaad de de eigenaar en uitvinder van het concept. Lagarde wil misschien geen domme uitspraken doen, maar gewoon het concept Club Med blijven claimen.

Ik hou het erbij, dat Frankrijk vandaag het liefst zelf Duitsland zou zijn. Dan zouden ze minder bescheiden zijn, en hoger van de toren blazen. Misschien zou Frankrijk in die situatie zelfs sneller dreigen om uit de euro te stappen, en de sterke Franse franc invoeren.

Is het een idee, of steekt ze op de foto haar middelvinger op?

Zo klonk het op Feiten en Fillet .

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