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Three cheers for Belgium
October 1, 2008
The times are so alarming that sometimes all you can do is laugh. Consider Fortis, the large Belgian-Dutch bank and insurance company, which this week became Europe’s biggest casualty so far of the world financial turmoil.
Only a few months ago it launched a new advertising campaign. It was a nice catchy slogan, too. ”Here today. Where tomorrow?”
Where indeed? As self-fulfilling prophecies go, this was right up there with the Oedipus legend.
Yet the slogan also brings to mind what many Belgians and other people see as the grievous condition of Belgium itself. The Belgian state is here today, as it has been for the past 177 years, but where will it be tomorrow?
The gulf between the prosperous, Dutch-speaking northern region of Flanders and the less prosperous, French-speaking southern region of Wallonia is so wide that, apart from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Belgium must be classified these days as Europe’s most internally divided country.
Belgium has been in almost total political paralysis since a general election in June 2007, with Flemish and Walloon parties unable to agree a deal on more autonomy for the regions. Only a week before Fortis was bailed out, Prime Minister Yves Leterme’s government was brought to its knees when a Flemish nationalist party withdrew its support.
Yet this is by no means the whole story. Perhaps the most important lesson from the Fortis drama is that, when the chips were down, the Belgian government and Belgian regulators were able to co-ordinate a rapid emergency intervention to save the company.
It wasn’t other banks or the private sector that rescued Fortis. It wasn’t Flanders and it wasn’t Wallonia. It was, together with the Netherlands and Luxembourg, the much-maligned Belgian state. Two days later, the Belgian state helped shore up the finances of Dexia, the Franco-Belgian financial services group.
No wonder Leterme was confident enough to appear on Belgian TV on Tuesday evening and say pointedly that, “as a new shareholder” in Fortis, the Belgian government would not be happy if the bank awarded a €4m-5m payoff to Herman Verwilst, the former chief executive.
So, three cheers for Belgium - and a loud raspberry for the people who dreamed up Fortis’s advertising campaign!
Europa as a team ,it works !
Europa ( and the USA) as a pack of ignorant arrogant independent little islands does not work in this new global super-fast interactive market, and the ROOT is still our dependency on foreign oil and gas,our dependency on foreign energy , and all we hear from the politicians and the Hedge Funds/Investment Bankers behind them is: let the markets do their thing…let’s get loose , let’s short stocks…let’s speculate… let’s buy more foreign oil and gas ( so that we can make more money on the trades and futures)…what an insult.
The sub-prime mortgage debacle ( Fortis and others ) can be fixed by re-doing all the mortgages at much lower rates and with a 6-12 month grace period and by taking stock in these financial institutions with preferred stock in exchange for the cash …that’ll cost 300 billion dollars, but then the Hedge Funds/Investment Bankers won’t have enough money to pay back their depositors worldwide , pay themselves multi-billion dollar salaries and clean up their own mess which is the real issue here,some of these Hedge-Funds/Investment Bankers only strategy is to short stocks in the EU and USA, betting against workers and capital to make huge amounts of money ,what a shame ! , so the politicians and their advisers will have to find new ways to extort more money from the taxpayers…..again to the politicians: IT’S ENERGY INDEPENDENCE ,YOU FOOLS !, but they don’t talk about it…that’s how powerful the Oil-Gas Lobby is, and like that we will go down into poverty while the politicians talk nonsense…
one of the first tests is Belgium : if they can move forward as a team ,with Brussels in it, Europa will be on the right track, but if the usual “manipulators ” win and they break-up Belgium, Europa will fail.
Prime Minister Leterme should check out the latest move by Warren Buffett, the richest investor on earth,who just took a 10 % stake ( with options to more) in a car battery manufacturer in China, which also sells electric cars in that market and starting in 2010, in the USA, so if Belgium is smart, they will push together and get the battery-electric car industry, parts, service,repairs,etc., going…AT FULL BLAST !
Posted by: financialtools1@gmail.com | October 1st, 2008 at 8:10 pm | Report this comment