Juncker's 'Typically European' deal has a sop for Greece and one for Germany
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Version 0 of 1. “I don’t think the Greek people have been humiliated, nor that the other Europeans have lost face. It is a typical European arrangement.” So said the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker – the man who was only last week speaking of his “betrayal” by the Greek government – about a deal under which he had the gall to suggest there would be no losers. Mr Juncker should try living in Greece for a few months. What, really, has changed from last week’s referendum? Aside, that is, from some vague promises of economic assistance and debt relief outside a bailout package that in some ways looks worse than what went before. This is the little bit of sugar to make some extremely nasty medicine go down, a sop to allow Alexis Tsipras to go to his parliament and say they’d really be better off accepting the least worst option – at least short term. It isn’t even really a deal (yet), with it having to go through two other parliaments in addition to that of Greece. Although the Germans and the Finns will probably sign. It is a typical European arrangement, because it’s been cobbled together and sealed with the glue of half-truth. Take the €50bn that is supposed to come from the sale of Greek assets. Greece agreed to much the same thing in 2011. Just over €3.2bn has been raised so far. But if the Greek government needed the sop of aid and talk of debt relief to take back to its fractious parliamentarians, the German government, which is one way or another doing much of the underwriting, needed a sop of its own. What won’t change is that a Greek economy crippled by austerity and without any prospect of growing its way out of its problems is going to produce much the same situation again before too long. A dose of genuine debt forgiveness is the only thing that might change that, but it isn’t on the table, not least because of fears that if Greece were allowed to get away with it then other peripheral eurozone economies might ask for the same. The EU really needs something other than a typical European arrangement to drag itself from what looks horribly like becoming a cycle of crisis, brinkmanship and failed deals. But to get there it needs something that so far has been absent: leadership. It’s not going to get that from Mr Juncker. And it’s not going to get it from Angela Merkel either. No, there are no winners here. Better buckle up for the next round. Outside of serious computer gaming circles the name Satoru Iwata probably doesn’t enjoy much recognition, at least not on these shores. But unless you’ve been living under a rock you can’t have missed his company’s creations. The Nintendo chief executive, who has died of cancer aged just 55, has left quite a legacy. While Nintendo has had its ups and downs – and there have been plenty of them both on his watch – he has managed to steer a course that has kept the company relevant in a sector that has eaten rivals like a half-starved Pac-Man. Take Sega. It once produced the console all the cool kids wanted, but had to pull out of hardware when Sony’s PlayStation 2 ended its console dream(cast). It’s true that Nintendo has not been enjoying the best of times recently. It is grappling with the same problem that faces the sector’s other big guns Sony and Microsoft: the rising popularity of cheap, often highly addictive, games that can be played on a mobile phone. One of the late chief executive’s last big decisions was to abandon Nintendo’s console-only strategy, which, fuelled by its winning in-house content, playable only on Nintendo devices, it had clung to for years. In the long term this may serve to keep Nintendo playing, and secure Mr Iwata’s legacy. If, that is, his successors prove nimble enough to play a tough new game. Your car insurer is getting revved up to sting you, and the pain will be considerable. Confused.com has just confirmed what the industry’s executives have been salivating about for a while now. The motor insurance market is getting harder, for which read: premiums are going up. The average rise during the second quarter of the year was £21, and that’s before the impact of the Chancellor’s decision to hike insurance premium tax from 6 per cent to 9.5 per cent. That will only start feeding through to bills from November, when it may serve as a double whammy. One that will hit the older generation hardest. Confused.com’s premium index suggests that older drivers are seeing the biggest rises in premium costs. Younger drivers have been paying less. There’s a certain poetic justice there. The young have suffered the most from the Chancellor’s era of austerity and are continuing to do so. Their grandparents, with the state pension protected by the inexcusable triple lock of rising by either 2.5 per cent a year or in line with average earnings or inflation, whichever is higher, have had it much easier. But it’s all relative. Because premiums for younger drivers are so much higher, they’ll still pay more through the levy even though those premiums are falling. They really need to follow their grandparents into the polling booth. |