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Title: German Firm To Buy NYSE
Source:
Orlando Business Journal
URL Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/ ... 2/german-firm-to-buy-nyse.html
Published: Feb 11, 2011
Author: Orlando Business Journal
Post Date: 2011-02-11 13:50:59 by Brian S
Keywords: None
Views: 29128
Comments: 42
Although the deal is still subject to regulatory approval, Deutsche Börse AG is near to closing a $25 billion buyout of the New York Stock Exchange, reports the Wall Street Journal. The product of the merger would be the world's largest stock exchange, and would diminish New York's role in world financial markets.
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 4.
#4. To: Brian S, jwpegler, capitalist eric, go65, lucysmom (#0)
Told you so (Christian democracy and he social market are superior to the Ronald Reaganomics ideology)....... http://www.social-europe.eu/2010/08/angela-merkel-the-world’s-‘most-valuable-leader’/ Angela Merkel: The World’s ‘Most Valuable Leader’ Forget Barack Obama. Forget the Hu Jintao/Wen Jiaboa duo, or David Cameron or Vladimir Putin. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is the world’s most important leader. The latest report showing Germany’s economy growing at a blistering annual rate of nearly 9%, well into recovery from a US-made economic collapse, is just further evidence of the obvious. Despite her carping critics who have bizarrely accused her of dithering, economic malpractice and über-nationalism, Frau Merkel right now is standing head and shoulders above the pack. If we selected a planetary MVL – Most Valuable Leader – she would be it. Following the economic crisis, Chancellor Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed sweeping regulatory changes, including a redesign of the international architecture of financial institutions. Using the subtle, coded language of diplomacy, they warned the new Obama administration not to block their attempts to crack down on hedge funds and derivatives, as well as on the corrupt rating agencies, outrageous bank bonuses and more. Is there any doubt that the foot-dragging US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would have dithered even more had he not been pushed – shoved, more like it – by the Europeans, led by Merkel? Keeping in mind that Merkel is the leader of the conservatives in Germany, her defence of ‘social Germany’ has been no less eloquent and thoughtful than that of her Social Democrat predecessor, Gerhard Schröder. During this economic crisis and even before, she reasserted Germany’s desire to ‘retain essential elements of . . . social protection’ and ‘secure the future of the social market economy.’ She has continued to support works councils and worker-elected boards of directors of Germany’s major corporations, and maintained the ‘culture of consultation’ that has become a hallmark of Germany’s social capitalism. You would never catch any Democrat, even President Obama, making such bold declarations or proposals in support of the social dimensions of the US economy. At times, Merkel sounds like the FDR that many wanted Obama to be. It hasn’t been mere Merkel rhetoric to win votes, either. Rather than twiddling her thumbs while the private sector laid off millions of workers, like the Obama administration has done, Merkel’s government expanded Kurzarbeit, or ‘short-time work’, in which, instead of laying off millions, Germany spread the pain around by having employees work shorter weeks. Most of the workers’ lost wages have been made up from a special fund squirreled away during more prosperous times. In other words, instead of the government paying people not to work, as in US-style layoffs, it paid people to keep working, but at reduced hours. The impact has been darn near miraculous. According to OECD figures, while the unemployment rate in the US has more than doubled to almost 10%, and the unemployment rate for all OECD countries has increased by 3 percentage points, the unemployment rate in Germany has declined by 0.9 percentage points to 7.0% in May 2010. More Germans have money in their pockets, maintaining levels of consumer spending that drive the economy, and communities and households haven’t been decimated by layoffs like they have been in the United States. Businesses’ workforce has been kept intact, ready to strive for increased production now that the economic recovery has begun. Yet when Larry Summers, one of Barack Obama’s closest economic advisers, was asked why the president didn’t pursue short-time work to stem the economic bleeding, he dismissed the idea, saying the White House wanted to create new jobs, not preserve old ones – as if there is a conflict between those two aims. Leading European conservatives like Merkel and French president Sarkozy support the notion that corporations have social obligations. For all intents and purposes, the conservatives of Europe are now social democrats, even if not Social Democrats. The European political parties of the centre-right, and in many ways even the far-right, are to the left of the Democratic Party in the United States. Germany is not the land of Citizens United, that horrible recent US Supreme Court decision that expanded the jurisprudence that says corporations have individual rights like people do, further undermining the social dimension of America’s political economy. Indeed, when Volkswagen, which is the largest carmaker in Europe and is 20 percent owned by the German state government of Lower Saxony (where Volkswagen is based), wanted to abolish Lower Saxony’s blocking minority rights, Merkel sided with the state government, a position that would be anathema to an American conservative, or even most Democrats. Merkel’s economic stewardship has steered Germany further away from the American path of Wall Street’s casino capitalism. In particular, the Germans believe that a manufacturing economy with strong stakeholder rights is the best hope for getting away from a type of capitalism that is over reliant on financial speculation and has led to such catastrophic bubbles. Merkel was once asked by then British Prime Minister Tony Blair what the secret was of her country’s economic success, which includes being the world’s largest exporter and running substantial trade surpluses in recent years. She famously replied, ‘Mr Blair, we still make things’. In Germany, manufacturing still dominates finance because Deutschland capitalism didn’t succumb to the financialisation of the economy that swept the United States and Britain in the 1980s under Reagan and Thatcher. In the US, this led to a tripling in the size of the financial sector as a percentage of both the overall economy and of corporate profits, as well as a loss of millions of manufacturing jobs. Werner Abelshauser, an economic historian at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, says the European way of running the economy ‘is fundamentally about a banking system based on patient capital and firms that emphasise high-quality products and long-term relationships between suppliers and customers’. At this point, the results speak for themselves. The smart policies of the shrewd Frau Merkel’s government have contributed to Germany’s recent economic success, while the timid policies of the Obama administration so far have led to a lacklustre economic recovery.
#5. To: Godwinson (#4)
(Edited)
The capitalist swine hObama got a tub of Heineken and a bag of cookies, out of the deal.
There are a whole lot of people in this country who believe that we have to build things to remain prosperous including Pat Buchanan, Donald Trump, and myself. We still build software. We still build airplanes. Our micro-electronics business has almost completely disappeared overseas with the Japanese innovating and the Taiwanese and Chinese running production. Merkel is the most Conservative Chancellor Germany has had in the post-WWII period. She has pushed through enormous reforms, including slashing the corporate tax rate. Please, don't be stupid and point to her as some sort of socialist icon. She's not. Your buddies on the left in Germany HATE her. Germany still has issues as well, especially their hidebound labor laws that make it difficult for people to leave their jobs and move to new companies. It took my company two years to get rid of an under-performing General Manager and replace him. Insofar as the "financialization" of the economy is concerned, no one did more to turn the economy over to Wall Street than Clinton, whose administration was completely run by Goldman Sacs, under the direction of Bob Rubin.
Uh. We are practicing Obamonics right now. Not Reaganomics.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestThe product of the merger would be the world's largest stock exchange, and would diminish New York's role in world financial markets.
Replies to Comment # 4. 
#6. To: Godwinson (#4)
(Edited)
the Germans believe that a manufacturing economy with strong stakeholder rights is the best hope for getting away from a type of capitalism that is over reliant on financial speculation
#15. To: Godwinson (#4)
End Trace Mode for Comment # 4.
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