#ElPerúQueQueremos

DIVERSOS POST PROVENIENTES DEL EXTERIOR

RELACIONADOS AL METAL ORO Y A OTROS TEMA DE INTERES 

Publicado: 2017-03-25


Por:Dennis Falvy

GOLD - LOOKING AT A MASSIVE BREAKOUT

by: Nikhil Gupta.

Summary

- Gold closes above the 30-day SMA and sustains higher.

- The SPDR Gold Trust ETF follows suit.

- Both are expected to cross their strong overhead resistances in the near-term.

Escape Velocity is a term which refers to the minimum speed that an object needs to break free from the Earth’s (or any other planet’s) gravitational pull and escape without further propulsion. I am expecting a similar scenario in gold and GLD. What could be the trigger? Two things immediately come to mind: A near-term breakdown in the U.S. dollar or fear returning to the broader markets.

On March 16, I had submitted an article titled Gold – This Opportunity Will Pass Sooner Than You Think in which I had commented that investors should get into gold since the precious metal could cross the overhead resistances pretty soon. As for the SPDR Gold Trust ETF GLD, I expect it to surpass $120 by next week.

The daily GLD price chart below indicates that the ETF is steadily crossing the technical hurdles with consistent buying interest. A couple of sessions ago, the ETF closed above the 30-day SMA of $117.19 after taking out the 50-day SMA following the Fed rate hike. Very quickly, GLD has not only crossed two important SMAs but is also sustaining above the 23.6 percent Fibonacci retracement of $117.20. I believe that bulls will find no trouble in crossing the recent peak of $120.40, which coincides with the 200-day SMA of $120.27. Sustenance above the 200-day SMA will bolster the ETF to break out from its medium-term downtrend.

Source: TradingView

GLD is witnessing strong buying interest with help from an equally strong recovery in gold prices. The daily gold futures price chart clearly tells that the precious metal has witnessed five consecutive positive sessions as momentum shifted in the favor of buyers. Similar to GLD, the precious metal is also sustaining above the 30-day and the 50-day SMAs and is about to test the 200-day SMA at $1262.72. At the time of writing this article, gold is repeatedly attempting to remove the bears at the psychological level of $1250.


Source: TradingView

The interesting part in gold’s story is that the commodity has entered into a contracting range, a breakout from which is imminent. I am of the opinion that Aurum will eventually choose the upward trajectory.

I repost this weekly U.S. dollar index (NYSEARCA: UUP) chart to highlight the intense selling pressure that the greenback is facing. Upon a closer look at the chart presented, it becomes evident that the currency is being pushed below the previous tops (marked by the dotted horizontal pink trendline), which should have acted as the support. The U.S. dollar index is on the verge of breaking down in the form a head and shoulders pattern.


Source: TradingView

If the dollar index closes below the important neckline support of 99.50 on a weekly basis and remains depressed, then we can expect levels closer to 96.

Such a tragic fall will act as the booster shot for the dollar-denominated precious metals in the near-term since it reduces the bill for the gold importing nations and consequently, enhances demand. Any immediate breakdown in the U.S. dollar will act as the much-needed trigger that gold and GLD need to levitate.

Gold may also witness increased buying as fear begins to take control of the world markets. Now, this fear does not necessarily have to occur because of a panic fall in the global markets, it can also reign supreme if the tensions between the U.S. and North Korea continue to escalate. Gold has historically been an investor’s best friend in times of rampant fear and crisis.

It might seem like I am being overly optimistic on gold but I am just reading the technical price charts and conveying the sentiments of the broader market which are reflected in the resurgence of gold. It would definitely be an utter disappointment if the precious metal fails to cross the resistances discussed above after such a strong display of strength in the past several weeks.

Having said the above, I will make sure to update my readers if a potentially negative event hampers the rally in gold. So, stay connected!

WHY FACTS DON’T CHANGE OUR MINDS (New Yorker)

By Elizabeth Kolbert

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.

Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.

As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine – they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office – the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well – significantly better than the average student – even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student – a conclusion that was equally unfounded.

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”

A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. The students were handed packets of information about a pair of firefighters, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bio noted that, among other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. George had a small son and played golf. The packets also included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own belief s. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research – or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today – knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime.

The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. Both studies – you guessed it – were made up, and had been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats – the human equivalent of the cat around the corner – it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.

In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that they’d earlier been satisfied with.

This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.

Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water – and everything that’s been deposited in it – gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?

In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.

Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we – or our friends or the pundits on CNN – spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side – sort of – Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on t he timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure – a rush of dopamine – when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring.

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”

__________________________________________________________________________

CAN EUROPE BE SAVED? (The Economist) 

If it is to survive, the European Union must become a lot more flexible .

ON MARCH 25th 1957, with the shadow of the second world war still hanging over them, six European countries signed the founding treaty of a new sort of international club. The European Union, as the club came to be called, achieved success on a scale its founders could barely have imagined, not only underpinning peace on the continent but creating a single market as well as a single currency, and bringing into its fold ex-dictatorships to the south and ex-communist countries to the east, as it expanded from six members to 28. Yet even as today’s European leaders gather in Rome this weekend to celebrate the 60th anniversary, they know their project is in big trouble.

The threats are both external and internal. Internally, the flaws that became glaringly evident in the euro crisis have yet to be fixed. Prolonged economic pain has contributed to a plunge in support for the EU. Populist, anti-European parties are attacking the EU’s very existence—not least in France, where Marine Le Pen is doing uncomfortably well in the presidential campaign, even if the National Front leader is unlikely to win in May. The most dramatic result of the anti-EU backlash so far is Brexit. Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, will not be in Rome for the birthday party; on May 29th she plans to invoke Article 50 of the EU treaty to start the Brexit process. Negotiations over Britain’s departure will consume much time and energy for the next two years; losing such a big member is also a huge blow to the club’s influence and credibility.

The external pressures are equally serious. The refugee crisis has abated, but mainly thanks to a dodgy deal with Turkey. A newly aggressive Russia under Vladimir Putin and, in Donald Trump, an American president who is unenthusiastic about both the EU and NATO, make this a terrible time for Europe to be weak and divided. That a project set up to underpin Europe’s post-war security should falter at the very moment when that security is under threat is a bitter irony. It is also a reminder of how much is at stake if Europe fails to fix itself.

NEVER-CLOSER UNION

The traditional response of EU-enthusiasts to such challenges is to press for a bold leap towards closer union. The euro needs this if it is to succeed, they argue. Equally, they say, more powers ought to shift to the centre to allow the EU to strengthen its external borders and ensure that it speaks with one loud voice to the likes of Mr Putin and Mr Trump. Yet the evidence is that neither European voters nor their elected governments want this. If anything, public opinion favours the reverse.

If ever-closer union is not possible, another Brussels tradition is simply to muddle through. The euro crisis is past its worst, immigration has peaked and Brexit will be managed somehow. If, after this year’s elections, Emmanuel Macron is France’s president alongside either Angela Merkel or Martin Schulz as Germany’s chancellor, the club would be under staunchly pro-EU leadership. Yet muddling along has risks of its own. A renewed financial crisis that upset the euro again, or the election of another government committed to a referendum on EU or euro membership, could tear the union apart.

Is there a better alternative? The answer, as our special report argues, is to pursue, more formally than now, an EU that is far more flexible. In Euro-speak, this means embracing a “multi-tier” system, with the countries of a much wider Europe taking part to different degrees in its policies—and able to move from one tier to another with relative ease.

THE GREAT BRITISH BREAK-OFF

There has recently been a flurry of interest in the notion of a “multi-speed” Europe. But what most EU leaders mean by the term is that core members should be able to pursue common policies in areas like defence, fiscal or welfare policy; it implies that all countries are moving towards the same destination. A broader, “multi-tier” Europe would find a place for non-members as well. The continent consists of 48 countries and 750m people, not just the 28 countries and 510m people in the union, still less the 19 and 340m in the euro.

The core of Europe will be those countries that share the single currency. To solve the euro’s ills, they need more integration and shared institutions—from a proper banking union to a common debt instrument. The next tier would comprise a looser group than now of EU members that are not ready to accept the sacrifice of sovereignty needed to join the euro, which some will not do for many years, and may never.

Beyond that a multi-tier Europe should accommodate widely differing countries. That means a changed mindset more than changed treaties: in the language of Eurocrats, accepting a menu that is à la carte, not prix fixe. This is anathema in Brussels, where the idea that you can pick and choose the bits of the EU that you like is frowned upon, but it is what Europeans increasingly want. Countries like Norway or Switzerland may wish to be closely bound to the European single market. Others such as Britain may not be ready to accept the single market’s rules, but still wish to trade as freely as possible with the EU. They might seek a bigger role in other areas such as defence and security. And places like Turkey, the western Balkans, Ukraine and Georgia might prefer a similar associated status instead of today’s unsatisfactory situation, where they are told they are eligible to be full members but know they will never be allowed to join.

To work, a multi-tier Europe should be pragmatic about the rules that each tier entails. Those in the outer group might not accept fully free movement of people, for instance, but that is no reason to wall off their access to the EU’s single market. Nor should there be a stigma of second-class status for those outside the core: after all, they include Denmark and Sweden, two of Europe’s most successful countries. Ways should be found for countries with military or diplomatic clout (eg, post-Brexit Britain) to join in foreign and defence policies.

For the European project to survive another 60 years, the key is flexibility, in both directions.

Just as Britain is leaving the EU, another country might one day leave the euro. Any such step will be hard to manage. But if the union cannot embrace differentiation, it faces the risk of disintegration instead.

A FRANCO-GERMAN BARGAIN TO SAVE EUROPE

After a deluge of crises the next few years will confound the doubters

by: Philip Stephens

The importance of the Treaty of Rome lay in the fact that even at the moment of signature Germany and France did not agree. Germany wanted the common market, while France was more enthusiastic about the new atomic energy agency, Euratom. Bonn was keen to abolish tariffs on manufactured products; Paris was determined to protect the incomes of its farmers.

The future strength of the European enterprise rested on a shared willingness to put aside such differences in the cause of compromise.

There is a mythology, particularly prevalent in Britain, that says that the EU has always reflected a close identity of interests and outlook between the continent’s two largest nations.

This explains the success of what has been called the Franco-German locomotive.

The reverse is true. The Germans and the French have argued from the outset about the shape of Europe. In Paris, integration has been about building a firebreak against an overmighty US.

For an Atlanticist Germany, Europe has been a route back to national reunification and the way to banish the demons of recent history.

Shortly before the Benelux nations came up with a blueprint for a European Economic Community, France had scuppered German plans for a European defence association. In the decades since the Rome treaty, Germany’s federalist inclinations have frequently collided with the Gaullist preference for national sovereignty.

For France, the single currency was an instrument to contain its partner’s economic dominance. For a Germany reluctant to surrender the Deutschmark, the euro was the necessary route to its desired political union. Berlin is mostly protective of the EU’s smaller nations, France disdainful.

The habit of compromise has been entrenched by the Elysee Treaty — an agreement that by institutionalising bilateral co-operation at every level of government has generated centripetal force to counter the natural centrifugal forces. Even here, a close observer will spot the forced accommodation. The treaty’s German-language text includes an affirmation of the transatlantic relationship; the sentiment somehow never made it into the French version.

Such agreements have served at once as a foundation and catalyst for the wider bargains within the EU that have driven the process of unifying Europe. If France and Germany could bridge their differences in the search for a shared European interest — the one sacrificing sovereignty, the other, ultimately, giving up its precious national currency — how could their partners in the enterprise refuse to make their own compromises?

British politicians never quite grasped this, wasting their time instead in a vain quest to drive a wedge between two nations. Germany’s instincts are almost Anglo-Saxon, the argument has run, so surely we can prise it away from France?

Theresa May has absented herself from the celebrations to mark the Rome treaty’s 60th anniversary, but, on past form, the prime minister will try the same divide-and-rule tactic when Brexit negotiations get under way. And once again it will fail. Germany’s Angela Merkel does want to strike a reasonable deal with the departing UK, but not at the expense of her relationship with Paris.

The deluge of crises these past few years has robbed European leaders of a capacity to think about opportunities. Stagnant economies, a eurozone under siege, the rush of new migrants and the new populism have drained confidence. No one has lost money betting against Europe.

Even now, a breakdown of the Brexit talks could destabilise the union. Marine Le Pen’s bid for the French presidency puts a still darker cloud on the near horizon. Were the National Front leader to win, nothing would be certain.

So what better moment to imagine the opposite. That the skies may be lightening, that the Europe of the next few years, albeit in a modest way, will surprise the Jeremiahs, and that the process will start with another political bargain between Germany and France.

The odds are that Ms Le Pen will lose — to the independent centrist Emmanuel Macron, the favourite in the presidential race, or, possibly, to the Republican party’s François Fillon. Mr Macron is the more pro-European of the two; and Gaullist Mr Fillon the more radical about economic reform. What unites them is a recognition that something has to be done to break France’s economic stasis and consequent political enfeeblement. France has to modernise to become relevant again.

Berlin has been waiting for just this message. France’s weakness has left Germany exposed and the EU unbalanced. By default, Ms Merkel has found herself at once the continent’s reluctant leader and its principal villain.

The chancellor wants above all to restore the old partnership with Paris. So does Martin Schulz, the Social Democrat challenger in this autumn’s German election. Mr Schulz would find Mr Macron the more amenable partner. So might Ms Merkel. Both would try to make it work with Mr Fillon.

There is no magic formula to fill the cracks in a fractured union. A Franco-German locomotive has less traction in an EU of 27 than six. But a restored relationship between Berlin and Paris would be an important source of confidence. It might also mark the beginning of a new “core Europe” with the will and capacity to deepen co-operation. Hard as it is to be optimistic about Europe, it is time to temper some of the pessimism.



Escrito por

dennis falvy

Economista de la Universidad Católica con un master en administración en la Universidad de Harvard; periodista en economía .


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