Editor's Note: The following text is from GlobalPost, which provides excellent coverage of world news – important, moving and just odd.
By Amy Silverstein, GlobalPost
A German waitress felt a little nervous about bringing a tray of beer to the table where German Chancellor Angela Merkel was sitting. So the waitress asked her colleague, Martin, to serve Merkel's table instead.
Martin, 21, held the tray of beer with his left hand while serving Merkel with his right hand. But he didn't keep his balance. The five glasses of beer slid off of his tray and landed directly on the back of the most powerful person in Germany. A YouTube video of the accident began going viral last night.
Editor's Note: The following is reprinted with the permission of the Council on Foreign Relations.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel formally opened the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday, calling on Europe to become "more European" (DeutscheWelle) in order to address the ongoing eurozone sovereign debt crisis. Merkel urged her European counterparts to move forward with a so-called fiscal compact agreed upon late last year. However, she resisted calls for Germany to provide more financial aid to prop up the eurozone's weaker states, reiterating her belief in strict austerity and debt reduction as the best way to resolve the crisis.
Editor's Note: The following text is from GlobalPost, which provides excellent coverage of world news – important, moving and just odd.
By Siobhan Dowling, GlobalPost
BERLIN, Germany – Unemployment is rising in most European Union countries, as the effects of crippling sovereign debt crisis, and the austerity measures prescribed to tackle it, take their toll.
Yet the bloc's biggest and richest member has seemed almost immune to the effects of the crisis, particularly when it comes to its labor market. While dole queues lengthen in Spain, France and Greece, in Germany they are rapidly dwindling.
In fact Germany has seen the number out of work decrease to its lowest level since 1991. It's a remarkable turnaround. FULL POST
Editor's Note: Sebastian Mallaby is the Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
By Sebastian Mallaby, CFR.org
Financial markets are behaving as though the euro crisis is on its way to resolution. Following Sunday's announcement of Italy's new budget and Monday's joint declaration from Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, government bond markets have rallied in Italy, Spain, and Portugal.
Global stock markets initially jumped, following the previous week's strong performance. Expectations are running high that the EU summit, due to begin Thursday and run into Friday, will douse the fire that has been spreading across Europe since the first Greek bailout in May 2010. FULL POST
Editor's Note: Matthias Matthijs is Assistant Professor at the School of International Service of American University and a Lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Mark Blyth is Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University.
By Matthias Matthijs and Mark Blyth, Foreign Affairs
"Never did a ship founder with a captain and a crew more ignorant of the reasons for its misfortune or more impotent to do anything about it." This was Eric Hobsbawm's damning judgment of the policy elite's response to the Great Depression. As these leaders reached for the old truisms of balancing budgets, lowering tariffs, and restoring the gold standard, they merely worsened the crisis. The same judgment may soon be passed on Germany for its role in the ongoing European sovereign debt saga.
After watching the economies of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal founder, the world has now turned its attention to Italy, home to the world's eighth-largest national economy and third-largest sovereign bond market. The diagnosis is sadly redolent: Europe should deflate its way to growth by sticking with a gold standard of sorts: the hard-money German-dominated euro. Meanwhile, under enormous international pressure, the Greeks replaced socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou with Lucas Papademos, a former official of the European Central Bank, and the Italians placed economist and former European Commissioner Mario Monti, hailed "super Mario," in the stead of Silvio Berlusconi.Yet despite the EU's coup d'état, the yield on ten year Italian debt went back above seven percent within twenty-four hours of Monti showing up for work. FULL POST
Editor's Note: Joseph Nye, a former US assistant secretary of defense, is a professor at Harvard and the author of The Future of Power. For more from Nye, visit Project Syndicate or follow it on Facebook and Twitter.
By Joseph Nye, Project Syndicate
As Europe struggles to save the euro, the chorus of complaints about weak leadership in the world’s major economies grows louder. Many have singled out German Chancellor Angela Merkel for failing to promote a vision of Europe similar to that of her predecessor and mentor, Helmut Kohl. Are the critics right?
Part of what effective leaders do is communicate a vision that gives meaning to policies and inspires others to support these policies (and those who propose them). It is one of the ways in which leaders help to create shared objectives and energize common action. Usually, such a vision provides a scenario for the future that is meant to encourage change, though it may also portray the status quo – or the past – as attractive, thereby encouraging resistance to change. FULL POST
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
It is ironic that Greece - a tiny economy that is a mere 2.2% of the Eurozone and not even among the top 25 economies in the world - has produced so much turmoil. But there has always been a fundamental flaw in the design of the Eurozone. Europe created a single currency without adequate fiscal policy coordination. Very competitive economies like Germany were joined together with uncompetitive economies like Greece.
Nevertheless, I remain cautiously optimistic. This is because, despite what many critics say, Germany is playing its cards right. Many argue that Germany should come up with a dramatic solution to the debt problem. Chancellor Angela Merkel is not leading, critics charge. I disagree. Germany has a good reason for being sluggish. It is trying to force countries like Greece to enact meaningful reforms.
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Editor’s Note: Rob Atkinson is president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, an economic and technology policy think tank based in Washington.
By Robert D. Atkinson – Special to CNN
Too many American policy elites - pundits, economists and policymakers – tragically accept the ongoing catastrophic decline of American manufacturing as inevitable. As some 5.5 million jobs and 54,000 factories have disappeared over the last decade, many U.S. elites have noted that intense competition from low-wage countries has caused other industrialized countries to experience similar declines. This view is wrong.
In fact, the United States’ precipitous drop in manufacturing is actually atypical. Indeed, the manufacturing employment, output and market share of many other comparable countries has actually been stable in recent years. Between 1997 and 2010, U.S. manufacturing job growth was the worst among a group of ten OECD countries while Germany’s was the best. FULL POST
Editor's Note: The following article comes from Worldcrunch, an innovative, new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. This article was originally published in Die Welt.
By Ansgar Graw, Worldcrunch
An advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama has been quoted as saying that if, when trying to understand the problems of the economy, one had to pick just one economist: it would be John Maynard Keynes. Though Keynes died more than a half century ago, his theories about recession and depression remain fundamental to the understanding of modern macro-economics.
The advisor is right on. Barack Obama, in true Keynesian fashion, keeps initiating stimulus packages to boost the weak American economy - and he keeps encouraging the Europeans, particularly the Germans, to do the same in order to save the euro.
But the reference to Keynes does not stop at the Democratic president’s entourage: the British economist was actually a model for Nicholas Greg Mankiw, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush from 2003 to 2005.
As the United States gears up for the next presidential elections in 2012, hostility between Republicans and Democrats may be reaching a new post-War peak. Republicans systematically and passionately oppose Obama’s economic policies, and view Keynes himself as a kind of ghost of Karl Marx. FULL POST
Editor's Note: The following is reprinted with the permission of the Council on Foreign Relations.
A majority of German lawmakers voted to approve an EU plan (DeutscheWelle) to increase the lending capacity of the eurozone's temporary bailout mechanism, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), while expanding its powers to buy up government bonds on the secondary market. It was a political coup for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has faced significant dissent within her center-right coalition government over whether to provide a new bailout to indebted Greece.
The Finnish parliament (Guardian)–a hotbed of euro skepticism–also approved the measure. Austria's parliament agreed to support EFSF expansion and is expected to ratify the agreement (WSJ) tomorrow. Six other European countries must still approve the measure before it can take effect. Slovakia, which will vote on the plan in mid- to late October, is considered the biggest obstacle (Bloomberg) to its enactment, though lawmakers indicated a compromise may be in sight.
Eurozone leaders hope that ratification of the expanded rescue mechanism will pave the way for a second Greek bailout that was agreed upon by EU leaders in July. FULL POST
An opossum that gained worldwide fame for its comedic cross-eyed looks has been put to sleep after its health deteriorated, Leipzig Zoo said Wednesday.
The female opossum, called Heidi, became a German media sensation after her picture was published in late 2010 and had more than 330,000 fans on Facebook. FULL POST
Editor's Note: The following is reprinted with the permission of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou and German Chancellor Angela Merkel met in Berlin to discuss Greece's burgeoning sovereign debt crisis and its implications for the rest of the eurozone. Papandreou made a bid to German lawmakers (DeutscheWelle) to pass an EU plan to expand the temporary eurozone bailout mechanism, the European Financial Stability Fund, and provide Greece with a second financial rescue package. The German parliament is set to vote on the measure on Thursday.
Later today, Merkel and Papandreou will discuss Greece's progress in meeting its austerity commitments. The Greek parliament is expected to pass a new property tax (FT) that could reduce the budget deficit by around €2 billion this year. Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said he planned to have fresh austerity measures approved by parliament by the end of October. FULL POST
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