STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Europe Takes Over the City
By Staff News & Analysis - September 11, 2010

EU markets chief Barnier warns the City casino days are over … The deceptively quiet Phoney War between Brussels and Anglo-Saxon finance is coming to an end. Life is about to change for hedge funds, commodity traders, and the 'prop desks' of global banks in the City of London. "We want to know who is doing what with short-selling," said Michel Barnier, the European single market commissioner and the Frenchman in charge of the EU's new machinery of regulation. "We need markets, and we need financial institutions that create value-added, but everyone has to be able to answer for what they are doing. People taking crazy risks linked to crazy rewards have to be brought back to their senses," he said, in a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Telegraph at the annual Ambrosetti conference on the shores of Lake Como. – UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: It takes a European socialist to regulate a City capitalist.

Free-Market Analysis: It is likely confusing for most people to understand what is going on regarding the British financial system and Europe. On the surface it looks like a takeover of the British system, with the important regulatory elements migrating to Brussels. This is in fact, we would argue, exactly the perception that is supposed to be offered. It is a dominant social theme along these lines: "Europe is moving in and the French are taking over."

But this is a misperception from our point of view. The Anglo-American axis is in control of Europe and the European Union. This is not usually reported of course. There has been even within the alternative news community a wide range of speculation about the EU. One popular explanation has focused on the idea that the EU is actually a peaceful takeover by the remnants of Nazi Germany.

A mere look back in time should put to rest the idea that the European Union was somehow the creation of a ruined Germany or a shattered France. Belgium itself is a concoction of British Royalty and the Americans and the British firmly bestrode Europe after World War II. What became the European Union based in Brussels and with tentacles in Britain and Eastern Europe would not have found a foothold, let alone succeeded without the active backing of the Anglo-American axis. One can argue the Germans had a hand in it, or even a plan, but it is absurd to suggest that the EU would have gotten to this point without active, behind-the-scenes Anglo-American support.

There are plenty of anomalous events surrounding the EU's continued survival in a time of austerity and financial crisis that point to this secretive support. It is well known by now that the Federal Reserve itself recently helped a tottering EU and Greece with freshly printed dollars; meanwhile despite endless agitation, Britain remains firmly enmeshed in the EU's grasp.

Every British administration promises a referendum on the subject of Britain's continued engagement with the EU, and every administration promptly reneges. In fact, the elite running Britain has no intention of removing Albion from Europe's grasp. The white cliffs of Dover, this time, are to be mercilessly ground to dust along with any remaining independent instincts of the British middle class or working class.

It is a meme, a dominant social theme that the EU is anything other than an Anglo-American creation. The Americans and British bestride the world stage and even now, with all the financial miscalculations and promotional reversals, the Anglo-American axis retains its grip on Western power (an increasingly desperate one to be sure).

The (promoted) perception that the French and Germans run the show in Europe is about as credible from our point of view as the conclusion that British can do nothing about the creeping authoritarianism of the EU and its impact on Britain. The idea that the Red Shield cannot guard the British City from a French and German legal and regulatory onslaught is absolutely risible.

More likely, the various policies being put in place by the EU – the loathsome Napoleonic code being one – would not possibly have found favor in Britain either now or in the future. And one could speculate, based on the logic established above, that it is far easier to add Draconian regulation to the City (and the UK) from Europe than to try to generate within Britain where tradition and precedent make such command-and-control gambits more difficult to legislate.

As soon as one grants that the EU is an Anglo-American invention propped up by the Anglo-American power elite, a whole host of anomalous events become easily understandable. The EU is not being driven by socialists; it is not being driven by Nazis or even public union chiefs. No, the EU is merely a suburb of the Anglo-American ambition to divide the world into "regions" that can be consolidated under Western authority into a one-world government.

The Western power elite, while based in Britain and American, recognizes no boundaries. The idea that finance can only be run out of Wall Street or the City is behind-the-times. Brussels will do just as well, and even better, in fact, because in Brussels the elite is literally answerable to no one. The EU is a profoundly anti-democratic organization and the rules and regulations emanating from Brussels are those that the elite seemingly would have liked to impose within the American or British regulatory structures but could not.

We return at the end of this analysis to the point we have made so many times before. The elite's fear-based promotions are failing one by one. The EU itself is up-in-arms over the generalized failure of the modern economy and the "austerity" that has resulted. Yet these elite promotions grind on nonetheless, even though discredited. The "leaders" of the EU announce new and more significant regulatory endeavors every day as if the groundwork has been laid for them. But the groundwork is lacking.

There is no great enthusiasm for the EU that we can see. There is no great loyalty to the concept of the EU in either Southern or Northern Europe. The efforts of the Western elites to promote the EU as some sort of grandiose solution to a more competitive world are not grounded in reality and increasingly are not accepted by the populations that they were intended to convince.

The whole idea of the dominant social themes that the Daily Bell covers is to present various sorts of authoritarian legislation necessary to "solve" one problem or another. In the process, people actually end up supporting various efforts to confiscate their wealth and diminish their power. But as we will continue to point out, the elite's promotional efforts are failing.

Then there is this: We are aware that many in the alternative news community may consider Britain's working-class community a good deal more supine than the awakening masses in the United States (see the Tea Party). But we have a peculiar feeling about the British. One dismisses Anglo-Saxon culture at one's peril.

After Thoughts

The British are taught from cradle-to-grave to revere authority and it is certainly a class-bound society. But history shows us that at some point, the British populace declines to be pushed further. The elite's dominant social themes are failing to convince at this point, and we would have to think, therefore, that a kind of reverberating cognitive dissonance is taking hold in both Britain and Europe. What are the ramifications?

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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