In Roland Emmerich's latest disaster movie 2012 the alignment of our solar system's planetary bodies during the winter solstice in three years will cause the Earth to topple from its axis. This leads to the end of the world.

And three years later it is likely to get even worse, because "there is a movement in the U.S. Congress to create a transatlantic free trade area by 2015." That's the impression I get from Rick Biondi's warning in The Examiner. Apparently the creation of such a free trade area will lead to a horrible "Europeanization of America:"

Europeans have always favored the rule of law and collective order over liberty. Worshippers of foreign philosophies in Congress are embarrassed by this rift, and are working hard with President Obama to reverse it through ideological capitulation.

To effectively unite Atlantica, many policymakers believe we need to meet our European friends in the middle. In essence, we must become more progressive, so our political and economic agendas can harmoniously merge on a transatlantic level. The Europeanization of America is a deliberate and calculated agenda. Once Americans are conditioned to accept and live under more socialistic ideals, a true Atlantic community can effectively be negotiated.

I find his choice of words hilarious ("Atlantica," ideological capitulation," "calculated agenda," and "conditioned to accept") and his concerns truly fascinating as they reveal such different values.

The Wall Street Journal used to be very critical of Germany's economic and fiscal policies and big government, but now the paper is a big fan of the Merkel government. In March the conservative paper declared that Old Europe was right in rejecting Obama's calls for a huge global stimulus. And currently The Wall Street Journal (HT: John) is so thrilled by Chancellor Merkel ("Hallelujah, sister") that it wants to nominate her for chairperson of the Federal Reserve.

What happened? Chancellor Merkel rebuked the world's central bankers for being too politically accommodating:

"The independence of the European Central Bank must be preserved and the things that other central banks are now doing must be retracted," Mrs. Merkel told a meeting sponsored by Germany's association of metal- and electrical-industry employers. "We must return together to an independent central-bank policy and to a policy of reason, otherwise we will be in exactly the same situation in 10 years' time." Referring to the U.S. central bank specifically, she said "I view with a great deal of skepticism the extent of the Fed's powers." Usually when a politician lobbies a central bank, it's to demand easier money. We can't recall a similar tight-money intervention from a national leader, save perhaps Ronald Reagan's quiet support for Paul Volcker in the 1980s.

Conservative bloggers used to complain that Germany is so biased towards the Democrats. They said even a center-right party like Merkel's CDU would have more in common with the Democrats than with the Republicans. That still may be the case, but it seems that Germany's fiscal policy is now more in line with those from conservative Americans. And on a personal level, Merkel might got along better with Bush than with Obama.

Related posts:

Big Spending: What America Can Learn from Germany

National Temperaments Explain Reactions to Economic Crisis

"Since the Berlin Wall fell, the old GDR has been showered with money. Overall, some $2 trillion has been pumped in — the equivalent of about 4% of Germany's economic output every year," writes TIME Magazine and draws three lessons for the United States from Germany’s attempt to spend its way out of a major economic slump: What Germany got for Its $2 Trillion.

The Tapmag blog summarizes those three lessons and discusses other articles, which compare the economic policies of Germany and the United States, some of which where discussed on Atlantic Review as well.

Endnote: According to the New York Times Thriving Norway Provides an Economics Lesson as well.

Are Americans now more open to learn from other countries economic systems, incl. those "socialist" European economies?

Until recently the European countries changed their economic policies to emulate the US system. Now the financial crisis makes the US move toward a more European system, writes the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. is spending hundreds of billions of dollars -- including increased assistance to the unemployed -- to prop up the economy, and wants Europe to follow suit. But most of Western Europe already has a strong, if costly, social safety net, so governments feel less pressure to spend their way out of trouble. The irony is that for years, Europe tried to rein in its own worker protections -- long considered a drag on growth in good times -- to emulate the faster-growing U.S. economy. Now the U.S. is moving toward a more European system.

Yes, the WSJ also points out the benefits of the current US system and writes that most economists expect the US to recover faster than Europe, because "Europe's high payroll taxes, along with restrictions on when and how companies can lay off workers, make employers slower to rehire when a recession ends." Okay, but all this comes at the price of more panic during every recession. Europeans panic less due to the cushions built into the system, which the WSJ considers so important that they start with it: "In Germany, losing his factory job didn't stop Alfred Butt from taking a Mediterranean vacation this winter."What system do you prefer?

Mel Brooks musical "The Producers" will be performed in Berlin in May, writes Der Spiegel (in English). It's not that much of a controversy. Just the usual "Should one be allowed to laugh about Hitler?" newspaper articles.

A bit more shocking is the comment by the heads of the Federation of German Trade Unions Michael Sommer, who suggested that Nazis might rise outside the cinemas as well. DW World:

In an interview with Germany's ARD television, Sommer warned of social unrest comparable to that in the 1930s - when widespread poverty paved the way for the Nazi regime's rise to power. The projected economic contraction of up to six percent is comparable with data from the years 1930, 1931 and 1932, Sommer said.

The article also mentions the violent workers protests in France...

Bloomberg:

European stocks climbed for a fifth straight week, the longest stretch of gains since October 2007, as speculation grew the worst of the credit crisis is over and government measures will succeed in reviving the global economy.

Chancellor Merkel uses her opposition to Obama's financial policies to campaign for reelections, writes Malte Lehming from the German Tagesspiegel.

According to Lehming, Angela Merkel is following Gerhard Schroeder's anti-Iraq war strategy, but implements it in a more sophisticated way:

Is the financial crisis for Angela Merkel what the Iraq war was for Gerhard Schröder -- namely, a reason to seriously strain Germany's relationship with the U.S.? One need not answer with an unconditional "yes" to be very concerned. (...)

There's no question, Mrs. Merkel has good substantive arguments on her side. Mr. Schröder had some as well when he opposed George W. Bush before and during the Iraq war. Nevertheless, Americans and the German opposition -- namely, Mrs. Merkel's Christian Democratic Union -- accused Mr. Schröder of dishonesty. After all, his antiwar views were also motivated by electoral strategy and were not entirely free of general anti-Americanism.

Welcome to the strange new world of the global financial crisis! Are US taxpayers now bailing out German companies like Deutsche Bank for their bad investments, while German taxpayers will have to pay the price for US companies hollowing out their German subsidiaries?

David Vickrey, who used to be a banker in Frankfurt and New York, writes about The Real Outrage: AIG Bailout Funds went to Deutsche Bank and quotes TV talk show host Jay Leno:

Now it turns out they gave $35 billion -- not million -- $35 billion of our money to bail out European banks. See, this is how a global economy works. Our hard earned tax dollars are used to bail out German banks for making bad investments.

David also wrote about the outrage on this side of the Atlantic. Germany has been discussing a bailout of car maker Opel for weeks, amid big concerns that the money would end up at Opel's parent company General Motors in the US. David translates in his blog post How GM Destroyed Opel a

pretty damning indictment in today's Die Welt by an 'anonymous insider' about how parent company General Motors hollowed out it's successful German subsidiary. According to this account, GM confiscated Opel's valuable patents and designs and then forced the German company to pay outrageous 'licensing fees' back to Detroit.

It now seems that some of those patents belong to the US government these days. Chancellor Merkel intends to talk to President Obama about General Motors and Opel during the NATO summit on April 3-4, 2009. That will be an interesting grand bargain with Afghanistan in the middle of it...

Financial Times:

Disagreements between the European Union and the US over how to combat the global recession widened on Tuesday as EU governments made clear they had little appetite for piling up more debt to fight the collapse in output and jobs. Finance ministers from the 27-nation bloc insisted in Brussels that it was doing enough to support world demand and did not need at present to adopt another fiscal stimulus plan, as Washington is urging.
The US-European differences are casting a shadow over next month’s summit in London of leaders from the G20 group of advanced and emerging economies, an event to be attended by Barack Obama on his first visit to Europe as US president.