Sameh El-Shahat’s Blog

The Financial fallout has provided an excellent opportunity for little countries in Europe to show the big players, humbled by the global recession, who’s boss.

This is a salutary tale of how and why you should think carefully before badly treating a small country, however harmless it may seem. Not so long ago, 65million years to be exact, the dinosaurs thought they had the Earth to themselves and  thought nothing of riding roughshod over little creatures called mammals that were all to intents and purposes insignificant. Then came the Asteroid (the precursor to the sub-prime crisis) and wiped out the big dinosaurs leaving the meek to inherit the earth. History could be repeating itself.

Here are two sobering tales from our times:

How Switzerland Turned on Germany To Teach The Americans A Lesson

This is a truly bad time for Germany. In classical Götterdämmerung style, it is being assailed by its friends and allies for money.

Only yesterday, I wrote about how its Euro-area partners are trying to fleece it, so that they may carrying on living way beyond their means. To fill up its rainy day chest, beleaguered Germany is being forced to turn on small tax haven Liechtenstein to claw back some of the money stashed away there by its rich barons.

Don't Mess With UBS!

And now, in a typical kick’em-while-they’re-down fashion, Switzerland has entered the fray as the latest country asking Germany to bail it out, and it is doing so in a very imaginative fashion. We’ve been dumping on the Swiss for a while now about their banking secrecy laws, so it seems that they are fighting back to secure a future in a rather bleak financial future.

The Swiss are neither in the Euro nor in the EU. They also have no natural resources to speak of, aside Milka cows, fresh air and great scenery. For their fabled chocolate, they have to depend on some pretty dodgy African countries for supply, and for their legendary timepieces, they need a constant supply of people with at least two free wrists to wear them, if the business is to remain sustainable.  So they had to be resourceful. First, they invented secret numbered bank accounts where, behind the façade of respectable cute family-owned banks that looked like something out of Legoland, anyone could hide their money and have access to it with no questions asked. But then the Americans and the Germans turned on them to try to get them to divulge the assets of their nationals. And so, in an attempt to show they are still in control, the Swiss have unveiled their new and deadly weapon.

Swiss Chocolate may be innocent for children,but the Swiss secret service has been using it as their weapon of choice for seduction and espionage for centuries. Ever wondered how a country could live off chocolate?

The Swiss Gigolo.

The Swiss Treasury, together with their fabled Nestle-fed Secret Services have sent their best agent first to seduce and then blackmail Germany’s richest woman who is heiress to the BMW fortune. The Swiss Secret services must have planned this operation very carefully, and they counted on certain German national proclivities. For example, they Swiss are obsessive about time-keeping, and so are the Germans. And so it was most natural that Ms Susanne Klatten, a member of the reclusive Quandt dynasty, and a major shareholder of BMW, would fall for suitor whose charm lay, largely, in being punctual and arriving on time for their secretive trysts. If there is one thing the Germans love, it is punctuality. A punctual yet unimaginative lover from the clock making Germanic  races could easily trump a constanly late but more ardent latin lover. If there are two things the Germans and the Swiss adore in a partner, they would be constancy and punctuality. The Swiss then asked their chocolatiers to produce to the most aphrodisiacal confectionaries for their man to ensure that his prey would offer no resistance.

He is considered "good-looking" by German matrons, and she's a good catch if you're a nerdy looking Swiss spy on the make. But he always "came on time", and that's what really made her fall for him. She became his "Swiss Made"

Having sold her some cockamamie story about running over some US mafia kid and the mafia dad asking for EURO10 million to care for his daughter. He would put up EUR3m and she the remaining EUR7m, which she did. Then he asked for her to leave her husband and place EUR290m into a trust fund for their future lives together. When she refused, he threatened to show intimate videos of them making love (punctually, of course). She reported him to the police, he was arrested and just sentenced to six years imprisonment by a Munich court.

It turned out that Ms Klatten was nothing more than the fourth wealthy woman he had seduced then conned and duped into coughing up the cash. He had been practicing for his big hit. While this may seem like a failed mission by the Swiss secret service, it is in fact a very successful mission. The Swiss wanted the Germans to know that they can strike at the heart of the industrio-financial complex. BMW had been penetrated (excuse the pun). What of Mercedes?

Unbeknownst to a German car manufacturer with a similar logo, this the coat of arms of the Swiss secret service. It stands for Blackmailing Married Women

This was also a shot across the American bow. UBS, the Swiss bank has been forced to hand over a few hundred client account details under duress by the US with the threat of criminal action. The Americans want details of 52,000 more clients who, they say, are flouting America’s stringent tax laws. For the Swiss, banking is their means of survival and they will defend it at any cost. Is it any coincidence that the Sgarbi case has been made public now? No, they Swiss are simply warning the Americans. Every American leader of industry, major banker, or politician, must now be wondering if his wife is currently being seduced by a suave, charming, and very punctual Swiss agent masquerading as an “attentive” lover, as Ms Klatten touchingly described Mr Sgarbi. Every package of Swiss chocolate entering the US can now justifiably be considered a tool of industrial espionage, aimed at giving the Swiss an unassailable advantage over the Americans.

How The Central Europeans Finally Got To Screw Austria

Up until less than a century ago, Austria had reigned supreme for over a thousand years over large swathes of Central Europe. The Holy Roman Empire, in the hands of the Hapsburg dynasty, kept a tight rein over the whole area. From 962 to 1806 (when it was dissolved by Napoleon). Then it was revived again briefly and managed to keep going till WWI when it was finally laid to rest.

So it was quite big, as you can imagine.

The Holy Roman Empire would eventually become a Wholly Austrian Mess

The Austrians, in typical Imperial fashion, lorded it over the Central Europeans and treated them like they were some oafish backward louts. They did have a favourite in Hungary, but generally treated the whole area with the disdain reserved for exotic diseases. They waited and bided their time, these Central Europeans, and they knew that eventually, they would have the last laugh.

The WWII came and went, and they all fell under the Soviet Yoke and got even more abused. Then the Iron Curtain fell and they were free again for a while, and then they saw their opportunity. Austria was so near, and yet so far.

In 2004, a whole bunch of them joined the EU where Austria had found refuge. A rump state and a far smaller one, but still a haughty one, all the same. Their revenge would be sweet.

http://www.eurointelligence.com/Article3.1018+M545e0be824a.0.html

They all then secretly agreed to start building shakiest and most advanced banking system that money could buy, and they made sure that they didn’t use their own money. In effect, the Central Europeans got Western Europeans, with Austrians at their forefront, to buy them a banking system from scratch. Then, in a concerted action that History will remember as the true end of the Hapsburgs, they encouraged their citizens to borrow their mortgages in Euros and Swiss francs, where the rates were lower than local currency banana republic rates. The Central Europeans then went on the kind of profligate shopping spree that one only does with other people’s credit cards! When the financial downturn came, all the local currencies collapsed, and all the mortgage repayments became huge as the local currency value of the foreign currency loans shot up sky high.

When people talk of the banking system of Hungary being screwed, they are in effect saying that Austria’s banking system is screwed. That is because Austria, in a last fit of imperial grandeur, thought it its god given right to recreate a financial Holy Roman Empire all over again. They fell into the Central Europeans’ trap. Austria got burned badly and the Central Europeans know that the Austrians, much as they would love nothing better than see them go to hell, must now bail them out as that’s the only way to save the Austrian banking system.

“After leading the way in providing credit to the eight former communist nations that joined the European Union in 2004, Austria’s banks are now on the hook for 201 billion euros ($254 billion) in loans, equal to about 71 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. International investors rank Austria’s bonds as less safe than those of Italy, Spain or even Slovakia”. ©Bloomberg 2009

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aSskJbEPpc4A&refer=europe

Who’s having the last laugh now??

© Sameh El-Shahat 2009

© Sameh El-Shahat 2009

Yes folks, let’s get some comfort from the fact that we were not the first, nor shall we be the last, to endure a bad recession. The Bible and the Koran talk at length about the first recorded severe recession, which took place in Egypt.

Pharaoh had a dream and so he called up Joseph of the Multicoloured Kaftan (because make no mistake of it, Hebrews of the time wore neither sarongs or raincoats) to interpret it for him.

“From the Nile were coming up seven cows, of handsome appearance and robust flesh, and they pastured in the marshland. And behold, seven other cows were coming up after them from the Nile, of ugly appearance and lean of flesh, and they stood beside the cows which were on the Nile bank. And the cows of ugly appearance and lean of flesh devoured the seven cows that were of handsome appearance and healthy” (Bible, Genesis, Ch 41)

“The king (of Egypt) said: “I do see (in a vision) seven fat cows, whom seven lean ones devour, and seven green ears of corn, and seven (others) withered. O ye chiefs! Expound to me my vision if it be that ye can interpret visions.” They said: “A confused medley of dreams: and we are not skilled in the interpretation of dreams.”” (Koran, Surah 12: 43-44)

This was the first recorded premonition of a recession as recorded in the Bible. It is also confirmation, if you ever needed one, that Jews, Muslims and Christians use the same software and manuals to run their lives. Have you seen the similarity in the cow story? Freaky or what?

Of course Pharaoh didn’t go to Joseph straight away. We have it on good authority that “Pharaoh sent and called all the necromancers of Egypt and all its sages, and related to them his dream, but no one interpreted them for Pharaoh.” For “necromancers” read “economists” or “newspaper business columnists” and it seemed that none of them gave Pharaoh the answer he wanted. At a deep subconscious level, being the tragic figure he was, he wanted to hear about a recession and all the necromancers could talk about was IMF this, economic hiccup that, soft landing this…YAwwwwwn.  Joseph rightly analysed the dream as seven years of bad harvest, each represented by a bulimic cow. In return for hitting the jackpot, he was elevated to the highest office of the land and made a super prophet for good measure. It is no coincidence that cows played such an important role in the early prediction of recessions. This blog is about Holy Cows and it don’t get any holier than cows in the Bible or the Koran for that matter. By being a leading indicator, they provided Joseph with the kind of raw hard data that he needed to make the right prediction. The fact that it happened to be what Pharaoh wanted to hear was a lucky break.

At the same time, other leading indicators turned negative...

Fast forward to today, the media has been practically BEGGING for a recession for months now and sooner or later they were going to be right. You know, like a watch that’s stopped is always right on time twice a day. The media needs a recession to sell papers and sell advertising slots between doomsday scenarios. Economists in banks need recessions to sound important. Recession is so sexy as a subject that it is the only exception when we don’t shoot the messenger even when his or her message is SO cataclysmic. In fact, the people who predict recessions get to be prophets, best-sellers and central bank governors. So far so good….We’ve won the war, we’ve predicted recession and got decorated, and now we have recession. So how do we win the peace? What does the media talk about when there is actually is a fresh recession on? It’s too early to start predicting a recovery with the blood still up to the knees and rising. An innovative approach that is currently being tried out is to actually sell recession is a good thing.

Now economists can talk about GOOD recessions that because people expect them to have the clinical bedside approach of German doctors who practiced on humans in WWII. Heartlessly, a certain economist called Joseph Schumpeter spoke of how recessions are good at mopping up excess capacity from the economy. By destroying weak companies, recessions release skilled workforce back into the work market to work into strong companies and make them even stronger. It should there come as no surprise that someone with such an emotionless approach to financial annihilation had a Germanic name, he was Austrian after all. It should come as even less of a surprise that he expounded a theory called “evolutionary economics”. You know, survival of the fittest and all that jazz… Austrians are a wonderfully cultured people but they are not known for their warm and fuzzy humanity. They have brought us such wonderful people as Mozart and Arnold Schwarzenegger but they also gave us Hitler and Blitzkrieg. Distasteful, to say the least.

Recession is nothing less than Blitzkrieg. It takes no prisoners and I doubt very much that we as its prey will enjoy very much while “excess fat” is mopped from our capacity. I mean we all love evolution and defend it against the encroaching advances of Creationism because we are the fittest, the survivors. Humanity has won the survival race. Evolutionary economics are not nice because many of us will be the losers, bleeding money and equity till the bailiffs turn up. Nothing to be celebrating there.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/holycows/2627068/Bring-on-a-recession.html

On the upside, we can learn a lot from behavioural economics, which is all about watching monkeys, apparently…

© Sameh El-Shahat 2009