Assorted Links - Europe and nukes

1. A 1998 economist article on German Unions. They seem to have acted rationally in the face of globalization. Can anyone imagine labor unions in the United States being this cooperative?

2. The shaky relationship that European leaders have with the truth, from the mouth of the Euro Group President himself:

"SPIEGEL: Are you familiar with the Eighth Commandment?

Juncker: Of course. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

SPIEGEL: Apparently you don't take it very seriously. More than two weeks ago, you denied a report

 by SPIEGEL ONLINE about a secret meeting of several European Union finance ministers to discuss the situation in Greece, even though the official limousines were already pulling up in Luxembourg.
Juncker: The most important commandment is not to inflict harm on others. Although it isn't stated quite that way in the Ten Commandments, it follows from them. The finance ministers of several Euro Group nations had agreed to meet on Friday with the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Jean-Claude Trichet. Because the financial markets in Europe were still open and trading was still underway on Wall Street, we had to deny the existence of the meeting. Otherwise the course of the euro against the dollar, which had already fallen as a result of your report, would have plunged disastrously."

The key takeaway here is that there is a subset of people running Europe who are dedicated to preventing harm and are unlikely to tell the truth.

3. Thomas Schelling on the lack of nuclear terrorism. (HT: MR) Other evidence might be inferred from the lack of a real coordinated terrorist attack in recent years since Sept 11. Perhaps there are very few people intelligent enough to pull off an operation on a large scale in the developed world who become terrorists, or maybe the people with the necessary human capital and the desire to cause harm to innocents are very wary of working with anyone else (think of lone terrorists like the Unabomber), suspecting that their potential allies are more likely to be undercover operatives.

About

I studied Bioengineering at the University of California at San Diego. While there I served as a trustee on the investment committee of the UCSD Student Foundation, a group that manages an endowment to fund scholarships. While in college I applied my interest in finance and economics by working as a summer associate at Clarium Capital Management, working part time my senior year, and joining full time when I graduated in 2006, staying there through August 2010. I am currently working as a portfolio manager at another global macro hedge-fund in the Presidio (And blogging about more directly market related ideas at their restricted blog). I’ve been focusing on quantitative finance, currencies, commodities, the interplay between finance and politics, demography and other long term trends.

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