I can't say I'm especially pro-military, but I think it's worth noting that a simple budget increase like this is definitely going to be vastly more effective at strengthening our armed forces than what Rishi Sunak BASED HIS ENTIRE CAMPAIGN ON, which was mandatory service for young people.
Budget for good weapons, equipment and vehicles is way more important to a modern army than just having a lot of warm bodies to throw at a target- just look at Russia's atrocious waste of lives in Ukraine.
Well first this doesn't really have anything to do with the article.
But to answer your question:
Be in a situation where your central bank (they can't get bankrupt as they literally print money) doesn't give interest (negative interest even better)
Be big, financially competent and trustworthy enough that no one doubts that you can pay back any loan.
Now people that have too much money and need a convenient place to store that money without too much costs buy your debt for more than what it's worth.
Sorry I somehow forgot the first part of your question.
If I understand correctly they threaten to sell off the debt they hold which will increase the supply of that debt, while at the same time decrease the amount of potential buyers.
To still be able to sell their debt the EU countries now have to (as any country needs a constant influx of money) make the new debt more attractive by offering better interest etc
An investigation has been opened into the financing of French far right National Rally (RN) leader Marine Le Pen's 2022 presidential campaign.Prosecutors in Paris said they will look into allegations of embezzlement, forgery and fraud, and that a candidate on an electoral campaign accepted a loan.The investigation was opened a week ago following a 2023 report by the National Commission on Campaign Accounts and Political Financing (CNCCFP).The commission's role is to scrutinise candidates' election expenses and funding and to flag any issues that arise.
No more details have been given on the reasons for the inquiry, nor has Ms Le Pen's camp commented.The RN has previously received loans from Russian and Hungarian banks.
The Russian loan worth €9.4m (£7.9m), however, was all paid back last year.
In 2017, the RN was charged with giving party members suspected fake jobs as assistants at the European Parliament.
A court will judge Ms Le Pen and 24 other members of her party over the alleged misuse of EU funds in September.A veteran of French politics, Ms Le Pen ran for president in 2012, 2017 and 2022.
She was re-elected to parliament during the first round of France's snap parliamentary election last month.Her party unexpectedly came third, despite having achieved a decisive victory in the European Parliament elections just weeks before.
The original article contains 251 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 14%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
At what point will a naked war for resources with Saudi Arabia make sense? Like if a leader went to the EU/America/Japan/Korea and said, "we're gonna take the Saud's oil and sell it for $25/barrel to everyone that helps us for 25 years." And then we went to the public and said, "25 years to get off oil for good" when does that ship?
The issue with the Gulf Wars is that we wanted to control the oil resources via local proxy. Honestly, we (the US, I realize this is on the Europe@) could use our Navy to directly control about half of Saudi Arabia's oil and buy ourselves time to get off oil.
The Saudis don't have a Navy. About half their reserves and a massive chunk of Iran, Kuwait and the other Gulf State's reserves are in the Gulf. We don't have to set foot on the Peninsula.
The issue is that currently, the cost of extracting oil exceeds $25/barrel. Personally, I would be glad to see the Saud family ousted from Arabia, as there are countless reasons to consign those disgusting Salafists to the dustbin of history. However, reducing the price of oil at this moment is not feasible.
Turns out people really don't like being ruled over by nakedly colonialist regimes, and when people really don't like things they tend to blow stuff up, and when people blow stuff up, it hurts the bottom line of oil companies, i.e. the only thing you care about for some reason.
Do you want to create a second Iran? Because that's what happened there.
So we need the ECB to start QE in a big way to buy back government bonds. However the Saudis do not own too many.
We also have to go electric on transportation and that much much faster. Only a third of the EUs oil comes from the US and Norway. The rest comes from mainly dictatorships. Going green means supporting democracy. Staying on fossil fuels means supporting dictatorships.
Yep, even if you didn't care about the environmental aspect (which you should), not having to rely on dictatorships all over the place for your energy needs should be enough reason to transition away from fossil fuels.
Glad my money isn't wrapped up in EUR. QE = inflation.
I'm all for going green, it's worth mentioning that having trade with dictatorships is a two-way street, we can also use that trade as leverage to hold them slightly accountable.
In this case it gives the Saudis central bank money, which then leads to more money being removed over the coming years. Since the Saudis want to dump it, they have to sell it below market value. Due to that at intresst this means the ECB is moving money out of the monetary system. Hence this is deflationary. We actually saw that in the real world as well. QE meant low intresst rates. The intresst rates shot up as soon as QE was stopped.
There are a lot of battery factories being built in the EU right now. Even if they come from China, it is a one time purchase and not a total dependence.
This might change in the near future some time ago(not to sure how long exactly) I read an Article about a massive ore field of the resources needed for electrical components being discovered in Denmark(idk if it was Denmark exactly, but it was in Scandinavia).
Because Hungary had been strongly social democratic basically since WW2 (though much of that was behind the iron curtain), and they'd been hugely improving up to their entrance to the union, with only a little mistake of electing Orban once, before going back to a sane Premier.
And then 2010 arrived, and the entire country took a swing Hard Right and down shit street, but by that time they were already in.
The EU countries in general just cannot get over the right wing tendancies and xenophobia of which they are a deep cause. By exploiting developing countries and shitting toxins into the environment we make their countries worth fleeing from, and where else to flee than prosperous countries. They are only following the wealth that was extracted from their countries.
Our reaction is to act surprised and say "no room here, we're struggling too", after having voted for parties that will take the wealth and move it upwards away from the common people. So instead of using our "superior" education to vote for parties that want to redistribute wealth, we vote populist - people who find scapegoats in the poor. "Immigrants are the problem!", "Leftists are the problem".
I'll just add that Fidesz (the right wing governing party) started out centrist in 1990. In 2010 they'd moved towards the right, but in a lot people's minds they were one of the big, reasonable parties since the end of Soviet control. And also just in general "the opposition".
The social democratic governing party also was inept and admitted as such (see Őszöd sleech).
So what happened was the left side of the spectrum lost all support, and what in many people's minds was the centrist or centre-right opposition picked it all up. Just over half the votes gave them a supermajority and from that point they gradually attained complete control over all institutions as a result.
We in Europe have a similar problem in Slovakia at the moment with PM Fico with a similar autocratic (and pro-Russian) approach. Europe will have to adapt to the rise of the extremists from the right (and soon from the left too?) and other global development.
Europe
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