PARIS — European governments on Thursday pressed ahead with radical cost-cutting plans in a bid to tackle a debt crisis, as financial markets rallied and thousands protested in France against pension reforms.
The Spanish parliament passed by just one vote an unpopular raft of austerity measures to contain overspending, including a reduction in pay for civil servants, a freeze on most pensions in 2011 and a cut in child benefits.
It was feared that a government defeat could have forced new elections and added to jitters among investors over the poor state of public finances in Spain, which just scraped out of a long recession in the first quarter.
Meanwhile in France, tens of thousands of people turned up for rallies across the country called by trade unions in protest against the government’s plans to raise the official retirement age from 60 in a bid to cut debt.
And during a visit to Germany on Thursday, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Europe should follow China’s lead and boost economic growth since US consumers can no longer support the global economy alone as in the past.
[More]
Related:
Spanish politicians approve 15bn-euro austerity plan
Europe triggers bears to stalk markets once more
I know I sound like a broken record as I continue to follow this situation but in my mind it’s very important because everyone in the world is eventually going to be affected by it if Europe continues it’s meltdown and I can’t see how they can contain it unless every voter over there does a complete “180″ and reverses every political belief they have held for decades. I’m not hopeful.
You are bang on Jack and I also think that Canada and the U.S. should take heed. The mind set here is not really all that different due to a strong union sentiment and huge numbers of public sector employees.
I really don’t know what the answer is except for our government to take the same course of action as Reagan did with the air traffic controllers.
It would take a huge amount of guts and John Q Public would suffer in the short term. The military would probaly end up being called in to maintain the peace until such time as cooler heads prevailed but boy what a difference it would make to our country.
Re# 2: The sooner we suffer the less we will suffer. Bring it on! When I was a young man I worked on an industrial scale pig farm. One of my many jobs was to spread liquid manure in spring. A pto driven pump shot the muck 40′ to the right of the huge tank which I pulled with a farm tractor. I propose, instead of the army, we send one of those giant pig sh*t spreaders. I’ll do it for free.
Re# 1: The more you play the record the more it is likely to wake someone up. Keep up the good work Jack.