Witold Gadomski has a lengthy article on the crisis in Saturday’s Gazeta Wyborcza. It’s a tremendously boring article about the central bank, the bank oversight commission and some elected jerk who picks up a pay cheque for punching the clock at the ministry for finance every day. A big problem is that the important offices […]
The papers the other day reported that the Baltic countries are in serious trouble. The crisis has hit them harder than it has Poland. Latvia’s economy contracted 4.2% in one quarter. I patiently await a rash of articles highly critical of the flat tax which the Baltic countries embraced in the 90s. Patiently waiting… Waiting […]
Before you get too cocky, Mr President Elect, you might want to sit yourself down and listen to words of wisdom from “free” market ideologue Witold Gadomski. The man is free with his advice and it would pay you to listen and listen good. The fact is, Mr. Obama, you have carefully avoided saying where […]
How do you present arguments for and against something while making sure it’s plain the reader should be for? One way to do it is to present the arguments against as being, in fact, opinions held by, for example, politicians. This is a method that Dean Baker has drawn attention to on numerous occasions. For […]
There really is no such thing as a cloud without a silver lining. The crisis is now being used as a stick to beat Poles into accepting the euro as their national currency. “Look at Slovakia,” they say. They do not say: Slovakia’s central bank has surrendered its say in how to deal with the […]
Polish workers (among others) are required by law to play the stock market with at least part of their pension savings. I hardly need to go into what has happened to the stock markets of late. Gazeta Wyborcza had a cheerful lead story on Thursday: The Shares Slump is Devouring Pensioners (a very free translation […]
Witold Gadomski of Gazeta Wyborcza is beginning to sound desperate. Today’s front page story in his newspaper is that the crisis is at hand. Ukraine and Hungary are in serious trouble and for foreign investors there is really no difference between all those East – sorry – Central European statelets. They’ll pull their money out […]
Witold Gadomski is plainly relishing the opportunities the current financial troubles offer for a fight. Here he is in last weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza, telling us all to calm down, calm down. There is no cause for alarm. The system works. He quotes Stiglitz: “The fall of Wall Street has shown the world that a certain […]
These are exciting times with banks crashing, insurance companies being nationalised (by GW Bush!) and so forth. Back on page 33 of today’s Guardian there is an article headlined “Merrill Lynch boss to get $11m payoff after nine months’ work.” The same man, John Thain, was given $15 million just for taking the job. He […]
The view from Gdańsk of the Lisbon aftermath is not too different from that in Bologna and, at a guess, everywhere else in Europe. My fellow monkey reports that the President of Italy said: “you can’t think that the decision of lit
