While Czech media are still dealing with the rescue package, it has become quite windy outside. The direct and indirect impacts of what is now going on in central and eastern European markets will be incomparably stronger than the rescue plan introduced by the government and its anti-crisis council NERV. The proposals that the cabinet is presenting to the lower house look like a little beetle on a dusty road where a tractor or a steamroller is going to pass soon.
Given the fact that the turbulence in central and eastern Europe has even spread to US stock exchanges (it occupies the front pages in the world media), heavyweights such as Bob Zoelick, head of the World Bank who called on the European Union to rescue central and eastern Europe (CEE), have stepped in.
At the same time, a coordination plan is being prepared by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and unusual activity is coming from the Austrian government whose banks have lent out 75% of the country’s GDP “to the east”. How much can a rescue package for central and eastern Europe cost? There are rumours that EUR 200 billion could be needed for debt refinancing and a further CZK 150 billion for the recapitalisation of banks. And that does not include Russia because only 20% of the Russian banking sector is controlled foreign capital.
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The Czechs are angry. How unfair! All the negative effects mentioned in connection with the “damned CEE” do not concern us at all. We’re not in eastern Europe? Prague lies west of Vienna! We are part of the OECD, the EU, Schengen, NATO and who knows what else.
Nobody provided mortgages in Swiss francs here, our trade balance is healthy and debt is negligible. Let all the media, analysts, rating agencies, speculators, investors and capitalists of all types start distinguishing at last. We are different! So let somebody notice that at last! Be fair!
The problem is that when the parent firms of our banks run into trouble, we’ll be in trouble too. And our currency has run into trouble already.
Commentator Lenka Zlámalová hopes and believes that London will notice that we are different.
Let’s remember that concerns that an independent currency can become the victim of a regional volatility were the main economic arguments of those advocating an early euro adoption who feared that the crown and therefore the whole economy might become a subject to an attack from speculators.
It’s worth noticing that during these turbulent days, the Polish government of Donald Tusk has announced that it wants to promptly enter the pre-euro exchange rate mechanism ERM-II. Slawomir Skrzypek, governor of the Polish central bank, is against. But he is appointed by President Kaczynski (if perhaps you see any Czech parallel here it’s certainly a coincidence).
But we have made one mistake: It’s the Czech pride and tendency to master others. And when markets do not start distinguishing that, we’ll pay the price soon.
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Václav Klaus believes that the approval of the Lisbon Treaty is a “tragic error”. Given what turbulent waters Klaus’s europhobia has thrown us into, it rather seems that appointing Klaus as president was a “tragic error”.
It was the error of the ODS, which had arranged his appointment. Now Klaus is causing harm to the party whenever he can. And it was an error for the whole Czech coalition government. Topolánek has perhaps just started catching his breath, but maybe it will be of little use. Because in a democracy, almost no government can survive the sort of currency depreciation we are facing now.
Today I’m arguing against my former colleagues. Petr Kamberský is concerned about the Lisbon Treaty just like Klaus is.
Just one point on this. In those 25 countries that have approved the treaty, are their citizens all uneducated fools who all follow their leader like a herd of stupid sheep? And the treaty was approved by small, mid-sized as well as large countries, those with traditional socialistic inclination (like Scandinavia) but also countries that are rather conservative (such as Germany and Austria) and liberal (which, for example, the Netherlands still is). Is the Czech Republic perhaps a kind of a tax haven? Our system is more complicated and nontransparent than people in normal countries can even dream of.
What luck that Europe has those smart and educated Czechs who never let themselves be taken in and who, as the chosen European nation, are always prepared to guard and protect the freedoms that those nations, full of naive politically correct thickheads led by even a more thick-headed elite, allow to be stolen so easily!
