I am very happy to be back here at AFOE, if not only, for a brief one-stop guest post about the economics of the German VAT hike and more specifically how market commentators and analists might just be reading the German economy somewhat falsely at the moment in the sense that they are not taking [...]

When scientific paradigms collide everyone should duck, at least that is the best advice I can offer at the present moment. The provisional German retail sales for January are now in, and they don’t make especially pleasant reading:
“European retail sales dropped for the first time in 10 months in January as spending in Germany [...]

No, this is not a Litvinenko post…or at least not primarily. Recently, the Georgian ex-KGB said it had caught a Russian smuggling highly-enriched uranium into Georgia, who was nailed in a sting operation where Georgian agents posed as representatives of an Islamist terrorist group that wanted to buy fissile material. He handed over a sample, [...]

If not for his late and somewhat befuddled response to catastrophic floods in eastern Germany back in August 2002, Edmund Stoiber might well have been Chancellor today. The floods and some convenient anti-Americanism tipped the scales for Gerhard Schroeder, leading to his replacement by Angela Merkel. Yesterday, Stoiber announced that he would step down as [...]

Remember that book by Matthias Matussek we fisked some time ago? Well, a telling quote from it was that Weltverbesserungsmassnahmen - measures to improve the world - were supposedly a very German notion. I’m not sure about this - I suspect they are more a (very broadly) left-wing notion, although one that must include the [...]

Who knew Chirac was so personally popular in the Lebanon? More popular than he is in France?
Marc Lynch carries the results of a poll of Lebanese public opinion with some fascinating results. Apparently, a majority of Lebanese admire El Presidente, although not a majority of Shia. They rather like Hugo Chavez! In fact, they admire [...]

Given our slightly jaundiced piece on things Anglo-German, it may be just as well that work and other nuisances kept us from joining in, but the good folks at Atlantic Review held a “blog carnival” yesterday on German-American relations.
The introduction in English is here (just ignore the juxtaposition of a tagline featuring the words “truth, [...]

Matthias Matussek, once London correspondent of Der Spiegel and now its culture editor, not to mention brother of top diplomat Thomas Matussek, has a book out. Wir Deutschen: warum die anderen uns gern haben können is meant to be a call for a renewed German patriotism and pride in culture. This would usually suggest a [...]

That’s the question on the cover of this week’s European edition of Newsweek, and it’s a good one.
The rift isn’t formal yet, as the EU will likely opt for only a face-saving partial suspension of negotiations after a deadlock on Cyprus failed to be resolved last week. But it takes no special reading between the [...]

Getting away from the eternal baboon threat displays and absurd disinformation for a moment, what do we know about EU and US defence? The lazy/cowardly/decadent/anti-imperialist Euros refuse to do anything, spend any money, or fight, and the US is permanently and increasingly stronger, right? Let’s see what the professionals think. The latest issue of Parameters, [...]