The Polish letters: a long digression from the Euro discussion

Morning!

Back in the saddle here in B-city, and boy, is it cold or what?

By all means, I hope you actually got to sleep a bit over the weekend, the ECB certainly needs all its brightest minds alert and ready! But right off the bat, you bring up a crucial point: the French did fail to run monetary policy their way… But I think that was mainly because they never knew what monetary policy was in the first place!! The Bundesbank always did it for them... Now there lies the tragedy of the world right now: we (the world) no longer have a real Bundesbank, but a powerless rump and a bunch of bozos on both sides of the Atlantic worrying about expectations, output gaps, sticky prices and money-less monetary policy…

I am sorry that your foray into Verblendung (isn't Deutsch beautiful? We don't have such a precise word for that kind of "blindness" in Spanish, or in English for that matter) was so disappointing, that will teach me to be more prudent in the future when endorsing stuff, at my age I should have known that already. Further to your discussion, I should say that most movies draw endings from a well established set of clichés, so being surprised about a movie ending should not be a deliberate purpose of the wise movie viewer. I think the last time I have been mildly surprised by a movie ending was "The Sixth Sense" and even for that one, you could tell Willis was toast a good 30 minutes before the credits. So in my view, movies are pretty similar to life: you should enjoy the trip, not the destination. On that score, I would say Verblendung has got a lock on the upper half of the distribution… On a related point, I have recently seen some quite ingenious pornos, with totally unpredictable endings (for the genre). I hesitate to recommend you specific titles, after my botched attempt with Verblendung.

On Argentina and its education system, age comes into play again: this was then (when I was a boy), now the education system has been rubished by teachers' unions, so I don't even know whether they still have history anymore, except, perhaps, of the history of soccer. Beckenbauer (google him) will fill the role that Bismarck once had, and Maradona (ditto) is probably the new Argie "liberator" (in place of some José de San Martín, don't bother to google him). In any case, the Argie educational system was originally set up in the late 19th century by two presidents, Domingo Sarmiento (1868-1874) and Julio Roca (1880-1886, and again 1898-1904). It was quite a work, bringing down illiteracy from 90% to less than 10% in about 50 years…

So I shouldn't trust The Economist? Shouldn't I believe 100% their self-serving coverage? Oh my God!!! This thing you are telling me is terrible!!! I have lost the compass of my life!!! Somehow, in the future, I will have to read their notes with skepticism, treading carefully among the pile of angle and rubbish to try and sift through a few facts… and please don't swallow the crap!!! Specially not wholly!!! Thank you K., you just saved my life and career, although it will be tough for me to adjust to this new reality...


At some point next week I will go over the relevance of the Euro currency for the European project: I think they are very different things, and to me it is obvious that the Euro has become detrimental to the larger and more important European project. But that is what happens when you let the French inferiority complex run amok. Is it too intrusive of me, lowly South American, to say that the Euro contraption (i.e. the attempted neutering of the Bundesbank) was the price that Mitterrand and Delors exacted on Germany to approve the reunification? If so, la France has very well deserved the things that are coming its way…