Bienvenue à la décennie perdue

Sarkozy waxes "heroically" (read: like a demagogue) about the causes, effects and best proscriptions for recovery. Full speech here.

Exchange rates are at the heart of the financial crisis just as they are at the heart of the distortions affecting global trade. And if we don’t take care, monetary dumping will end up generating extremely violent trade wars, so paving the way for the worst protectionism. A French manufacturer can make all the productivity gains in the world. He can, at a pinch, compete with the Chinese workers’ low wages, but he can’t compensate for the undervaluing of the Chinese currency. (…)

So I repeat just how necessary I think it is for heads of State and government of the main countries concerned to meet before the end of the year to learn the lessons of the financial crisis and coordinate their efforts to restore confidence. (…)

I am convinced that the sickness runs deep and that there has to be a root and branch revision of the whole global financial and monetary system, as was done at Bretton Woods after the Second World War. This will allow us to create the tools for global regulation, now made essential by the globalization of trade. We can’t go on managing the economy of the twenty-first century with the instruments of the twentieth, no more than we can design tomorrow’s world with yesterday’s ideas.

When every day the central banks are making cash injections into banks and American taxpayers are on the point of spending a trillion dollars to prevent widescale bankruptcy, it seems to me that we need no longer question the legitimacy of public authority intervention in the operation of the financial system! (…)

In these exceptional circumstances when everyone absolutely has to act, I call on Europe to ponder its ability to cope with the emergency, to rethink its rules, its principles, learning the lessons of what is happening in the world. Europe must give itself the means to act when the situation demands and not condemn itself to inaction.

If Europe wants to safeguard its interests. If it wants to have a say in reorganizing the global economy, its leaders must start thinking together about its competition doctrine – to my mind, competition is only a means and not an end in itself –, about its ability to mobilize resources and prepare the future, about the economic policy instruments and objectives assigned to monetary policy. I know it’s difficult because there are 27 countries in the EU, but when the world changes, Europe has to change too. Europe has to be capable of drastically changing its own dogmas. (…) As EU President, I shall propose initiatives along these lines at the next European Council on 15 October.