Europe is less hard-working, less ambitious, more regulated and more risk-sensitive than the United States, Nicolai Tangen, chief executive of the Norwegian Oil Fund, tells the Financial Times. “Americans simply work harder,” he concludes.
One imagines Norwegians as peaceful people who think about whales and winning at Eurovision. But you walk through the buildings of downtown Oslo and what you discover is an abrupt, vertical capitalism. A country of soldiers and bankers. Or from bankers trained as soldiers. Like Tangen himself, who before becoming a fund manager in London studied interrogation techniques in the Norwegian intelligence service.
The Norwegians have built a welfare state thanks to Atlantic oil, but they want to be on the side of history. On the side of the one who wins it. And the Oil Fund, the fourth largest investment fund in the world, invests less and less in European companies and more and more in American companies, because that is how they see the future.
European financial elites have a chronic fascination with the United States. By its businessmen, direct and informal like cowboys. Due to the less protected labor market. Because of low taxes. On the other hand, life expectancy in Europe is five or six years higher; so is the quality of life. Europeans have more vacation days, work one hour less a day and enjoy a more effective social network.
In recent years the US has distanced itself from Europe. In 2013, European GDP was equivalent to 90% of that of the US. In 2022 it was already 23% lower. Demographics explain that jump. Immigration has rejuvenated the workforce on the other side of the Atlantic. Europe, on the other hand, is suspicious of immigrants and grows older.
Since the pandemic, the recovery in Europe has been halting. In the United States it has been intense and all its differential levers have been activated: abundant and cheap energy and open field for new technologies. The White House has also collaborated. It has subsidized the installation of solar panel and semiconductor factories.
In the United States, full employment has triggered wage increases. In the lowest and highest segments. With stratospheric salaries in technological employment, where $400,000 per year are not uncommon. Of course, inflation is unforgiving and life is very expensive. A loaf of bread, $6 in California. A preschool visit to the pediatrician, $360. A daycare in New York, $3,300.
Europe lived its best moment between 1985 and 2005. It was the reference model. But in 2005, what Timothy Garton Ash describes in his latest book as a downward turn began: financial crisis, Russian occupation of Crimea, Charlie Hebdo attacks, populism in Hungary and Poland, Brexit, Trump... The historian looks back , to the good times, and evokes Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday. The Austrian wrote it in 1941 convinced that the Europe he longed for (the one before 1914) was no longer going to return.
Garton Ash's fatalism seems forced. Or maybe not? The war in Ukraine has left Europe without its usual supplier of raw materials, Russia. It has transformed China from a cheap supplier to a systemic competitor in vital industries. Europe is beginning to wonder if the quality of life it has enjoyed may not have had something to do with all that and with the American protective umbrella. For the first time Europe feels that it can be left alone. What will happen if the Americans leave? Who will stop Putin?
Emmanuel Macron is the most skilled at conveying that change of mood. In August 2022, the president spoke of the “end of abundance.” A week ago, at the Sorbonne, he said: “We must understand that Europe is mortal, it can die.” And he added: “The rules of the game have changed.”
The EU has commissioned Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta (what will the Italians have?) to elucidate what the new rules of the game are and how lost trust is restored. Mario Draghi's response is the most surprising, due to the self-criticism it implies for someone who has been a Goldman Sachs banker.
Three basic ideas, three raw gems, from Draghi's reflection. First, globalization has brought imbalances that European governments have been slow to recognize. In particular, the EU's erroneous response to the 2011 euro crisis, in which it sought short-term competitiveness with a reduction in wage costs and austerity that weakened internal demand and our social model.
Second. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have created an environment of geopolitical rivalries in which not everyone follows the same rules of the game and where exports are no longer a guarantee of success. In fact, China and the United States use industrial policy to redirect investment into their own economies. Europe has not even considered it.
And third. In the midst of a fierce race for leadership in new technologies, Europe does not have a strategy to compete in it, neither in telecommunications or defense. Nor does it have the necessary resources for the energy transition assured (they are in the hands of China). Europe must now begin to act as an economic nation, not as a more or less asymmetric federation of different economies.
Draghi does not talk about working more, as the Norwegian banker asks. But that's not going to make the path any easier.
I would like to meet Emmanuel Macron's ghost writer, the man who writes his speeches. It's true. The French president is so theatrical and bombastic that when he announces the "End of Abundance", it is hard not to remember that he has been an investment banker at Rothschild and suspect that he may be talking about his personal wealth. Because in reality the abundance, the golden age he talks about, for most people, ended with the Great Recession of 2008 and was made of piles of debt.
But no. Forget Macron's fortune and look inside the head of the person who wrote his televised speech on August 23. Find out to what extent the employee hunted down the four ideas outlined by the president and how well they fit on paper. How he knew how to capture the spirit of the times in which European leaders live, the atmosphere of the end of an era in which they move. This end that the scribe summarized in three commandments: "End of Abundance", that is, end of raw materials, water, technology, bank liquidity; "End of Carelessness", the war, the climate; "End of Evidence", that is to say, of democracy, human rights...
It is impossible not to think of these words this week, when Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, died. We must remember the horizons that this man opened up during the second half of the 80s, how he got us to forget about the threat of the nuclear Apocalypse and how he knew how to return democracy to millions of Central Europeans, the "kidnapped West" from which Milan Kundera spoke.
We must remember the euphoria and arrogance of the great American power when it finally felt alone in command. Because what went wrong to end up where we are? How to define the succession of lived events: war on terror, Great Recession of 2008, Trump, Brexit, climate crisis, pandemic and, finally, war in Ukraine.
war Six months after the invasion of Ukraine, we know that Russia has intelligence services adept at poisoning opponents, but so ill-informed that they believed Ukrainians would throw themselves into the arms of the Russians as liberators. We have also discovered that Vladimir Putin is a man who doesn't give a shit. That he has experience in the war of attrition, that he is ready to ruin the neighbor by cutting off his gas and that in the worst case, he can play with the nuclear weapon.
Europe was refounded in 1992 with an optimistic political formula. Insufficient, but hopeful, in a context in which one wanted to believe that the old empires would disarm. He believed the mantra that borders were out of fashion so much that he ended up giving the gas key to Russia. A terrible idea.
Gorbachev's death now makes it easier for us to review the events that happened from the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification to the wild years of Boris Yeltsin in Russia. This review boils down to two ideas. One: Gorbachev was a blessing to humanity, a pacifist, the politician of "the European common house". But he was a failure as a statesman, an accident of the bureaucracy that made him an empathetic individual, but who was moving forward without a specific direction. With another comrade secretary, the USSR would have survived, just like China with Deng Xiaoping. In this way we would have spared ourselves the war in Ukraine.
Idea number two. The West was cruel and vindictive towards Russia. He let it bleed out in the 1990s. He lied, or did not tell the whole truth with the expansion of NATO to the East. The Americans were so blinded by success that they repeated the mistake of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany: they did not welcome Russia to the winning side and did not smooth the catastrophic transition to capitalism.
These are respectable ideas. Blaming Gorbachev for having condemned the Soviet Union to its dissolution is very similar to what Putin thinks. It is not taking into account the right of peoples and citizens to express themselves freely (even if there are those who think that before democracy there is food). The second idea is plausible. But every country has its leaders who have touched it. Yeltsin did not seem like a deluded man. About the shock therapy that did so much harm in Russia, it is true, it was the big mistake. But during the golden age of neoliberalism, the ones who dictated the rules were the banks that did the business. Not governments.
All this is part of the past. The problem of the present is the winter (in the real and metaphorical sense) that is presented to Europe. Monetary authorities failed to see in time the enormous liquidity released during the recovery phase of the pandemic and underestimated the extent of the disruption to supply chains. That's why we have the highest inflation in forty years. Because of this and because we are running out of energy. Correcting this inflation – raising rates, reducing credit – will be painful. But it will be more to resist a prohibitive electricity. The question is not whether we will experience a recession, but how deep it will be.
How will all this affect our beliefs about Ukraine? Will Europe maintain its support for the Ukrainians, or will it start nagging Zelenski to give up the pact? Now is when we could end up as an important Catalan politician ended up: it is possible that in the coming months the Europeans will not be enshrined.
I would like to meet Emmanuel Macron's ghost writer, the man who writes his speeches. It's true. The French president is so theatrical and bombastic that when he announces the "End of Abundance", it is hard not to remember that he has been an investment banker at Rothschild and suspect that he may be talking about his personal wealth. Because in reality the abundance, the golden age he talks about, for most people, ended with the Great Recession of 2008 and was made of piles of debt.
But no. Forget Macron's fortune and look inside the head of the person who wrote his televised speech on August 23. Find out to what extent the employee hunted down the four ideas outlined by the president and how well they fit on paper. How he knew how to capture the spirit of the times in which European leaders live, the atmosphere of the end of an era in which they move. This end that the scribe summarized in three commandments: "End of Abundance", that is, end of raw materials, water, technology, bank liquidity; "End of Carelessness", the war, the climate; "End of Evidence", that is to say, of democracy, human rights...
It is impossible not to think of these words this week, when Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, died. We must remember the horizons that this man opened up during the second half of the 80s, how he got us to forget about the threat of the nuclear Apocalypse and how he knew how to return democracy to millions of Central Europeans, the "kidnapped West" from which Milan Kundera spoke.
We must remember the euphoria and arrogance of the great American power when it finally felt alone in command. Because what went wrong to end up where we are? How to define the succession of lived events: war on terror, Great Recession of 2008, Trump, Brexit, climate crisis, pandemic and, finally, war in Ukraine.
war Six months after the invasion of Ukraine, we know that Russia has intelligence services adept at poisoning opponents, but so ill-informed that they believed Ukrainians would throw themselves into the arms of the Russians as liberators. We have also discovered that Vladimir Putin is a man who doesn't give a shit. That he has experience in the war of attrition, that he is ready to ruin the neighbor by cutting off his gas and that in the worst case, he can play with the nuclear weapon.
Europe was refounded in 1992 with an optimistic political formula. Insufficient, but hopeful, in a context in which one wanted to believe that the old empires would disarm. He believed the mantra that borders were out of fashion so much that he ended up giving the gas key to Russia. A terrible idea.
Gorbachev's death now makes it easier for us to review the events that happened from the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification to the wild years of Boris Yeltsin in Russia. This review boils down to two ideas. One: Gorbachev was a blessing to humanity, a pacifist, the politician of "the European common house". But he was a failure as a statesman, an accident of the bureaucracy that made him an empathetic individual, but who was moving forward without a specific direction. With another comrade secretary, the USSR would have survived, just like China with Deng Xiaoping. In this way we would have spared ourselves the war in Ukraine.
Idea number two. The West was cruel and vindictive towards Russia. He let it bleed out in the 1990s. He lied, or did not tell the whole truth with the expansion of NATO to the East. The Americans were so blinded by success that they repeated the mistake of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany: they did not welcome Russia to the winning side and did not smooth the catastrophic transition to capitalism.
These are respectable ideas. Blaming Gorbachev for having condemned the Soviet Union to its dissolution is very similar to what Putin thinks. It is not taking into account the right of peoples and citizens to express themselves freely (even if there are those who think that before democracy there is food). The second idea is plausible. But every country has its leaders who have touched it. Yeltsin did not seem like a deluded man. About the shock therapy that did so much harm in Russia, it is true, it was the big mistake. But during the golden age of neoliberalism, the ones who dictated the rules were the banks that did the business. Not governments.
All this is part of the past. The problem of the present is the winter (in the real and metaphorical sense) that is presented to Europe. Monetary authorities failed to see in time the enormous liquidity released during the recovery phase of the pandemic and underestimated the extent of the disruption to supply chains. That's why we have the highest inflation in forty years. Because of this and because we are running out of energy. Correcting this inflation – raising rates, reducing credit – will be painful. But it will be more to resist a prohibitive electricity. The question is not whether we will experience a recession, but how deep it will be.
How will all this affect our beliefs about Ukraine? Will Europe maintain its support for the Ukrainians, or will it start nagging Zelenski to give up the pact? Now is when we could end up as an important Catalan politician ended up: it is possible that in the coming months the Europeans will not be enshrined.
I would like to meet Emmanuel Macron's ghost writer, the man who writes his speeches. It's true. The French president is so theatrical and bombastic that when he announces the "End of Abundance", it is hard not to remember that he has been an investment banker at Rothschild and suspect that he may be talking about his personal wealth. Because in reality the abundance, the golden age he talks about, for most people, ended with the Great Recession of 2008 and was made of piles of debt.
But no. Forget Macron's fortune and look inside the head of the person who wrote his televised speech on August 23. Find out to what extent the employee hunted down the four ideas outlined by the president and how well they fit on paper. How he knew how to capture the spirit of the times in which European leaders live, the atmosphere of the end of an era in which they move. This end that the scribe summarized in three commandments: "End of Abundance", that is, end of raw materials, water, technology, bank liquidity; "End of Carelessness", the war, the climate; "End of Evidence", that is to say, of democracy, human rights...
It is impossible not to think of these words this week, when Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, died. We must remember the horizons that this man opened up during the second half of the 80s, how he got us to forget about the threat of the nuclear Apocalypse and how he knew how to return democracy to millions of Central Europeans, the "kidnapped West" from which Milan Kundera spoke.
We must remember the euphoria and arrogance of the great American power when it finally felt alone in command. Because what went wrong to end up where we are? How to define the succession of lived events: war on terror, Great Recession of 2008, Trump, Brexit, climate crisis, pandemic and, finally, war in Ukraine.
war Six months after the invasion of Ukraine, we know that Russia has intelligence services adept at poisoning opponents, but so ill-informed that they believed Ukrainians would throw themselves into the arms of the Russians as liberators. We have also discovered that Vladimir Putin is a man who doesn't give a shit. That he has experience in the war of attrition, that he is ready to ruin the neighbor by cutting off his gas and that in the worst case, he can play with the nuclear weapon.
Europe was refounded in 1992 with an optimistic political formula. Insufficient, but hopeful, in a context in which one wanted to believe that the old empires would disarm. He believed the mantra that borders were out of fashion so much that he ended up giving the gas key to Russia. A terrible idea.
Gorbachev's death now makes it easier for us to review the events that happened from the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification to the wild years of Boris Yeltsin in Russia. This review boils down to two ideas. One: Gorbachev was a blessing to humanity, a pacifist, the politician of "the European common house". But he was a failure as a statesman, an accident of the bureaucracy that made him an empathetic individual, but who was moving forward without a specific direction. With another comrade secretary, the USSR would have survived, just like China with Deng Xiaoping. In this way we would have spared ourselves the war in Ukraine.
Idea number two. The West was cruel and vindictive towards Russia. He let it bleed out in the 1990s. He lied, or did not tell the whole truth with the expansion of NATO to the East. The Americans were so blinded by success that they repeated the mistake of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany: they did not welcome Russia to the winning side and did not smooth the catastrophic transition to capitalism.
These are respectable ideas. Blaming Gorbachev for having condemned the Soviet Union to its dissolution is very similar to what Putin thinks. It is not taking into account the right of peoples and citizens to express themselves freely (even if there are those who think that before democracy there is food). The second idea is plausible. But every country has its leaders who have touched it. Yeltsin did not seem like a deluded man. About the shock therapy that did so much harm in Russia, it is true, it was the big mistake. But during the golden age of neoliberalism, the ones who dictated the rules were the banks that did the business. Not governments.
All this is part of the past. The problem of the present is the winter (in the real and metaphorical sense) that is presented to Europe. Monetary authorities failed to see in time the enormous liquidity released during the recovery phase of the pandemic and underestimated the extent of the disruption to supply chains. That's why we have the highest inflation in forty years. Because of this and because we are running out of energy. Correcting this inflation – raising rates, reducing credit – will be painful. But it will be more to resist a prohibitive electricity. The question is not whether we will experience a recession, but how deep it will be.
How will all this affect our beliefs about Ukraine? Will Europe maintain its support for the Ukrainians, or will it start nagging Zelenski to give up the pact? Now is when we could end up as an important Catalan politician ended up: it is possible that in the coming months the Europeans will not be enshrined.
