The Fed seems unable to do much about the U.S. financial crisis, while the European Central Bank has just swamped the market by pumping $500 billion in low-interest funding into liquidity and forced lending rates down from their highs.

The contrast seems sharp between the Europeans, who give every sign of knowing what they are doing and have the confidence to make it happen, and the lackluster Fed, which seems always to be doing too little too late.

European charter flights are pouring shoppers into New York, hunting for pre-Christmas bargains with their valuable euros. Some of them are buying more than jeans and iPods, as American companies look cheap.

On the face if it, these are good times to be a European, after years of soggily low growth and American sneers about "Old Europe" being from Venus while macho Americans are from Mars.

In fact, the picture is considerably more mixed. Unemployment may be dropping in France and Germany, but is still sharply higher than in the United States. Europe, which has now outstripped the United States as China's trading partner, now has its own problems of a massive trade deficit with the Chinese.

The booming German car manufacturers are up in arms against an EU plan to impose tough new emissions controls that would penalize their high-powered and high-performance cars. (The French, by contrast, think their smaller-engine cars would do just fine.)

And Europe's banks are not immune from the U.S.-bred subprime mortgage problem. Switzerland's Union Banque Suisse had to write off $10 billion last month. Germany's publicly owned land banks are in trouble. The German state of Saxony had to give a guarantee of $2.3 billion to its Sachsen bank last week. And Jurgen Ruttgers, the governor of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and Roland Koch, Governor of Hesse, reached a mutual bailout agreement for their two state banks, two of Germany's largest.

And the Europeans are increasingly worried by the impact of the cheap dollar undercutting their export-led recovery. Despite a healthily full order book, Airbus just sold off six of its factories because of the squeeze on its revenues from the rising euro, while its archrival Boeing sells in cheap dollars.

And if the Americans are downcast by the polls that show two-thirds of them think the country is on the wrong track, they might take a look at the latest Eurobarometer poll released this week, a regular sampling of 30,000 Europeans conducted for the European Union's Commission.

It found only 34 percent of Britons, 37 percent of Latvians and 38 percent of Austrians who thought their country's membership in the EU to be a "good thing." Only 37 percent of British and Cypriot citizens as well as 42 percent of Hungarians and Austrians think their country has benefited overall from EU membership.

One reason for this may be the way the EU works, as evidenced by this week's disastrous compromise agreement on fishing quotas. It is an established fact that fish stocks in Europe are dying out. But this week's agreement increased by 11 percent the number of cod that can be caught in the North Sea. If a camel may be described as a horse designed by a committee, the eradication of North Sea cod may be described as a fish conservation measure as conducted by the EU.

It could get worse -- the EU is about to take on the future of its wine industry, which regularly produces about 15 percent more wine than anyone wants to drink. Since most of that excess wine (which gets turned into industrial alcohol) is produced to earn EU subsidies, as agreed by successive generations of EU politicians, the EU's likely solution promises to be both interesting and politically suicidal.

According to Eurobarometer, Europeans are not happy. They are worried by fears of unemployment (27 percent), of inflation (26 percent) and then in order by crime, healthcare, the economic outlook and immigration.

And the presence of the rather more pro-American leaders of President Nicolas Sarkozy in France and Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany is not doing much to ease trans-Atlantic tensions. The European Parliament is preparing legislation that would slap heavy tariffs on imports from the United States as a protest against the Bush administration's stance on global warming.

"We cannot let the U.S. continue to block multilateral agreements, as it tried with Kyoto, or weaken them, as it did in Bali," declared Ulrich Kelber, deputy parliamentary leader of the Social Democrats and an environmental activist who is spearheading the campaign to put special charges on energy-intensive U.S. products.

"The U.S. is a major part of the problem. Levying special taxes or sanctions on energy-intensive U.S. products, such as steel and aluminum, which are exported to Europe, could be the first step," Kelber said.

Kelber may be playing to the gallery, but he is playing with fire at a time when Europeans are increasingly nervous about their economic prospects, and a trans-Atlantic trade war is the last thing anybody needs.

Some may take comfort from the fact Belgium finally got a government, after more than 150 days without one, a stand-in and temporary government proposed by the king after the politicians failed repeatedly to agree. But given the recent performance of most European governments and the lack of popularity of the EU, Europeans might be forgiven for thinking that a few more experiences of life without government would not go at all amiss.

Community
Email This Article
Comment On This Article

Related Links
Global Trade News

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News