Environments

There are some environmental changes in the EU that some in current Romanian so-called Government could pay a little attention to.

It was highly customary to do just about anything internally with any funds dropped on the doorstep, however the seemingly geographically specific declarations of Angela Merkel mark a new financial mood in the EU.

Although she spoke specifically about Spain, Portugal and of course Greece, she sternly pointed out that at least Germany had enough of bailing out financially collapsing countries. The changes would mean 'normal' bankruptcy once a country hits the rocks. And instead of just pouring tax payers' money into yet another major bail-out, the bond holders would be heavily impacted.

For example, in Greece the heavy austerity measures impact the citizens on unprecedented scale, but the actual result is not a relief from debt. As the Telegraph noted, it is purely a bail-out for investors... so we can cut all the false political BS.

Romania is also simply (well, actually, in typically self-contradicting ways that wasn't lost on the audience) running off to the IMF, switching on the tears and internally, hitting ordinary citizens with unprecedented (and illogical) austerity measures. But whilst it does this, and also ring fences the various upper circles' financial dealings, it is not addressing at all a structural problem.

It simply relies on the IMF money pouring in, to plug holes that (and this is the fundamental misperception, or delusion) seem temporary.

Let's not forget, for example, Romania's state pension scheme is at the very bottom of Standard & Poor's recent list about EU countries. It is the most unsustainable, because amongst many factors (and including the surreal levels of corruption hemorrhaging money in every direction), the recent measures are not at all tackling the underlying problems.

So if the complex underlying time bomb does go off in that country, too, then Angela Merkel's stance could have interesting implications. Of course, if she gets her way for an overall EU-wide scheme of orderly bankruptcy being introduced.

When ministers in the Romanian Government are too preoccupied with declaring 1.5 million Euros and hiding 7.7 million Euros from contracts made on public money (just one most recent example), it is hard to believe that anybody in Romanian Government is actually preoccupied with addressing structural underlying financial problems where the successive IMF loans are little plasters on a very large wound.

To add to this, those layers of politicians simply do not care about foreign investment even, at a real and proper scale. It reaches levels of embarrassment whereby, for example, debts to American companies have only been paid once the USA's ambassador in Bucharest had 'private and direct' chats with members of the Romanian Government. He amicably points out that if the country behaves like this, it will scare away private investors.

Unfortunately he is talking to a pretty deaf audience. Well, one with selective hearing... and I'm sure that also the reverberations of the true implications of Angela Merkel's statements are filtered out by that selective hearing so epidemic in Bucharest.