Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced that his country would hold a referendum about adopting the euro sometime this year. Although most Danes are currently in favour of the euro, the prime minister wants to secure support from all the major political parties before the referendum takes place.
While Denmark’s reaction to the economic crisis is to move closer to the EU, in the Czech Republic, some ODS senators on Thursday revived the brilliant idea to not accept the Lisbon Treaty.
The Czech crown has begun a sharp decline, but our experts are happy even about this. Surely all entrepreneurs and investors will immediately notice, it will revive our exports, and, what’s more, the weak crown will save us from the threat of deflation. Well, everyone is the master of his own fate.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast that Germany next year would experience a 2.5% economic decline and stagnation in 2010, in other words, zero growth. Most of our experts consider the crisis measures to stimulate the German economy to be a horrible waste of money, while the IMF considers it insufficient. The German government stimuli, that is, measures besides the automatic stabilisers (increased spending, automatically set by laws when the unemployment rate begins to rise), make up 1.2% of the GDP. According to the IMF, it should be 2% of the GDP. We will see what those “IMF lefties” (as our experts would call them) will have to say about the Czech Republic, especially since our government hasn’t made any decisions yet about the planned crisis measures.
Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek convinced his European colleagues in Brussels to pledge to quickly restore order to their finances once the crisis is over. But when you look at the unfavourable statistics of the Czech economy, you might start to worry that the outcome might end up being the opposite of what our experts predict and that the Czech Republic might become an example of what not to do when it comes to public finances.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi sometimes has good ideas. For instance, next week he is organising an “automobile summit”. He claims that the main idea behind it is to ensure that “states don’t help out their automobile industries in a way that might end up harming producers in other countries”. Berlusconi also has other ideas. He told the Italians that the best defence against the crisis is to “not change your lifestyle”. By this he probably meant that people should continue buying nice things and good food. What will our experts say to that?
