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The euro was sold to us as a modernization program for Europe, and we were also told that it would push the Community toward stability. But, in reality, it has drifted apart and become a truly unstable entity.

The euro was sold to us as a modernization program for Europe, and we were also told that it would push the Community toward stability. But, in reality, it has drifted apart and become a truly unstable entity.

There is no reason why the euro should be coming under pressure. The decision to introduce it was smart and far-sighted.

thanks to the common currency, it's no longer possible, for example, to wage speculative attacks on individual currencies. This eliminates a key disruptive factor that massively destabilized markets in the past.

Still, thanks to the common currency, it's no longer possible, for example, to wage speculative attacks on individual currencies. This eliminates a key disruptive factor that massively destabilized markets in the past.

But that's exactly the problem! In the past, exchange rates served as a valve.

Starbatty: But that's exactly the problem! In the past, exchange rates served as a valve. Individual countries could control their economies by allowing their currencies to gain or lose value.

SPIEGEL: What would happen if the old currencies were reintroduced in the euro zone tomorrow? Bofinger: It would be a catastrophe. The German mark would have to appreciate significantly -- I'd say by 10 percent to 20 percent. Everything that we've worked so hard to attain in terms of competitiveness would vanish overnight.

What would happen if the old currencies were reintroduced in the euro zone tomorrow? Bofinger: It would be a catastrophe. The German mark would have to appreciate significantly -- I'd say by 10 percent to 20 percent. Everything that we've worked so hard to attain in terms of competitiveness would vanish overnight.

SPIEGEL: Would it have been better if all countries in Europe had kept their own currencies? Starbatty: Yes. A community can't function when it's made up of unequal partners who are supposed to behave as equals. With the euro, Germany has created an artificial competitive advantage for itself, which has enabled us to conquer markets all over the world.

Starbatty: Yes. A community can't function when it's made up of unequal partners who are supposed to behave as equals. With the euro, Germany has created an artificial competitive advantage for itself, which has enabled us to conquer markets all over the world.

Since 1995, there have been almost no appreciable wage increases in Germany, partly as a result of pressure brought on from increases in subcontracted labor. Politicians have done everything to relieve employers of the burden of paying social security contributions because we fell into this strange panic, believing we weren't globally competitive. With our economic policies, we placed too much of a lopsided emphasis on exports.

Politicians have done everything to relieve employers of the burden of paying social security contributions because we fell into this strange panic, believing we weren't globally competitive.

But competitiveness based on cost, rather than brand value or innovation, makes the Polish economy vulnerable.

And Poland’s cost advantage would disappear if the złoty were to strengthen sharply.

the country must be careful about joining the exchange rate mechanism (ERM II) – the narrow band within which applicant currencies must operate for at least two years prior to adopting the euro. Doing so could cause the złoty to strengthen, as it did to the Slovak koruna, and wipe out Poland’s competitive advantage.

One in four employees is on a fixed-term contract or self-employed.

But flexible labor markets have disadvantages, too. Companies tend not to invest in talent or develop new skills, and the quality of existing skills can suffer. In the longer run, flexible labor markets also increase structural unemployment and fuel the informal economy.

Finally, Poland needs sound public finances – that is, fiscal space for automatic stabilizers during economic crises.

Spain’s grid is barely connected to France so its wind farms cannot export their production when it exceeds domestic demand. Similarly, solar and wind energy from southern Italy is wasted because it is not effectively linked to the industrial north.

Full energy convergence needs more than interconnectors. Widely divergent electricity prices are often determined by national tax rates. Grids that can respond to demand further afield in a continent-wide “supergrid” will need more direct (rather than alternating) current infrastructure. While it took Spain and France more than three decades to build a 64.5km interconnection, some 52,000km of lines need to be built or upgraded across the continent.

Poland argues that Gazprom has confidential data on each country it deals with, knowing its gas prices and infrastructure vulnerabilities. It can then use this data to its advantage, pushing some countries into more onerous contracts than others.

The advantage of a hub would become more apparent when new supplies from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean are integrated into the market by means of the so-called southern corridor supply route.

Geoffrey Feasey of the European Network of Transmission Systems Operators for Electricity says one-third of the most vital projects to connect Europe are being held up by “permitting and public acceptance”.

While a slide in imports accounts for some of the correction, Greece boosted its exports outside the EU by about 30 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 from the previous year, while Italy’s rose 13 percent in January from a year ago, he said.

The metamorphosis is known as internal devaluation

Prevented by membership of the euro from driving down currencies, governments and companies are squeezing labor costs to spur productivity.

On average, the periphery is about halfway to eliminating large structural current-account deficits, which allow for declines related to recession-driven weaker import demand, estimates Goldman Sachs (GS).

The OECD today published an index showing that relative labor costs in Spain and Portugal have now dropped below Germany’s for the first time since 2005.

“It’s potentially good for the economy but only if it results in faster investment,”

“If not then there’s a downward spiral risk.”

Unlike most other Spanish industries, car manufacturing has no sectorwide collective bargaining agreement with unions. As a result, each carmaker has been able to adjust working hours with its own employees, in response to changing demand.

In return, the companies have promised workers that they will not be subjected to the huge layoffs made in other parts of the economy,

I don’t want to give lessons to anybody. But at such a delicate moment for Spain, showing that we believe in flexibility and consensus has certainly been highly valued by the carmakers.”

These huge recessions do matter. For Latvia, the cumulative loss from 2008 to 2012 adds up to 77 per cent of the country’s pre-crisis annual output. On the same basis, the loss was 44 per cent for Lithuania and 43 per cent for Estonia.

In brief, Latvia, worst-hit of the Baltic countries, suffered one of the biggest depressions in history. It is recovering. But it has not yet fully recovered. Are its policies a model for others? In a word, no.

These states have four huge advantages

First, according to Eurostat, Latvian labour costs per hour, in 2012, were a quarter of those of the eurozone as whole, 30 per cent of those in Spain and half those of Portugal.

Second, these are very small and open economies

Its trade partners hardly notice Latvia’s adjustment. But they would notice a comparably large Italian one.

Third, foreign-owned banks play a central role in these economies. For the eurozone, this is the alternative to a banking union: let banks with fiscally strong host governments take over the weaker financial systems.

inally, the Baltic states have embraced their European destiny as an alternative to falling back into Russia’s orbit.

Wind farms are no longer engineering experiments or small pilot schemes. They have grown very large, to the point where they are of the same scale as gas- or coal-fired power stations.

Offshore wind has advantages beyond the presence of sea breezes. The seabed is relatively cheap real estate, and much larger wind farms can be built there than on land. The vast expanses available at sea allow economies of scale that may bring down costs.

The key to cutting costs, Mr. Hannibal said, is to simplify the installation process and turn manufacturing of turbines into a cookie-cutter industrial process. The latest turbines are made of just a few components that are relatively easy to anchor to the sea bottom.

Still, costs remain stubbornly high. Mr. Hannibal figures that the power to be produced by new German offshore wind projects will cost 130 to 140 euros, or $175 to $185, per megawatt hour, which is about triple the wholesale power price.

chief executive of Severstal North America, the United States subsidiary of Russia’s Severstal Group, which now owns the Rouge steel operations.

At Severstal’s Dearborn factory, for example, carmakers including Ford and others account for 70 percent of sales,

The shift to aluminum is gaining momentum. Automakers are under increasing pressure to meet strict new fuel-economy standards by 2025

United States Steel has invested $400 million in a joint venture with Kobe Steel of Japan to make advanced high-strength steel in a Leipsic, Ohio, factory expected to produce 500,000 tons annually.

Inside Severstal’s steel mill on a cold January day, hissing heavy machinery removed oxides from steel sheets, reducing their thickness to the equivalent of five human hairs.

For nearly a century, Ford’s River Rouge factory and its neighboring steel mill have worked in close harmony

new federal fuel-efficiency standards that will require a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a significant boost from the roughly 25 m.p.g. that vehicles average today.

“Sometimes there is a push from the aluminum side, and they win over with a particular model, and steel tends to be the comeback kid, with more innovation,” said Felix Schuler, a Munich-based partner in the Boston Consulting Group’s metals and mining practice.

What seems certain is that ordinary steel is likelier to lose out to its new and improved cousin than to aluminum, Mr. Schuler said.

Novelis is investing nearly $550 million to upgrade plants in Oswego, N.Y., and Nachterstedt, Germany, and to build a new factory in Changzhou, China, to triple its capacity from a year ago to 900,000 tons annually.

Alcoa, the country’s biggest aluminum producer, is investing about $670 million in its Iowa, Tennessee and Saudi Arabia facilities.Continue reading the main story

“Henry Ford was a control freak, and he wanted to control as much of the manufacturing as possible,” Mr. Casey said. “He made the steel, he made the glass, he made the tires.”

In some countries, especially those with the highest youth unemployment rates, short-term contracts are nothing more than opportunities for employers to take advantage of the weak labor market.

But because of her work hours, she still does not qualify for the Netherlands’ monthly minimum wage of €1,477 (about $2,000), and her new career was a long way from where she had always hoped to end up.

An estimated 100,000 university graduates have left Spain, and hundreds of thousands more from Europe’s crisis-hit countries have gone to Germany, Britain, and the Nordic states for jobs in engineering, science and medicine. Many others have gone farther afield to Australia, Canada and the United States.

ransfers from a Luxembourg company to the US would have typically been subject to a withholding tax. Last year, after attracting the attention of Spanish tax authorities, Exxon quietly closed down the operation.

“Normally you would have to pay a 10 per cent withholding tax at source to send profits to the US,

Spain introduced the ETVE in the mid-1990s to encourage foreign investment, and better compete with Luxembourg and Holland for international companies seeking tax-efficient European holding structures. It also allowed for foreign companies to take advantage of Spain’s strong network of bilateral tax treaties with countries in Latin America, such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, which can offer more favourable tax rates than other countries. Once the ETVE has been established all overseas dividends that are paid into it are exempt from tax in Spain, and can be easily moved on to a final destination, providing a small number of conditions have been met. Most importantly, corporation tax must have been paid in the country of origin on the dividends being transferred, and companies using ETVEs to house shareholdings in foreign subsidiaries must not be resident in any country identified by Spain as a tax haven.

In fact, Linthal is an ETVE used by Ambev, a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev, the Belgian-based brewer, to distribute dividends from several Latin American beer brands, such as Argentina’s Quilmes and Cervecería Boliviana Nacional, to its holding company in Brazil.

Between 2000 and 2011, on average, 17 manufacturers closed up shop every day across the country, according to research from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

yes, it means jobs, but on nowhere near the scale there was before, because machines have replaced humans at almost every point in the production process. Take Parkdale: The mill here produces 2.5 million pounds of yarn a week with about 140 workers. In 1980, that production level would have required more than 2,000 people.

But he was frustrated with the quality, and the lengthy process.

“We just avoid so many big and small stumbles that invariably happen when you try to do things from far away,” he said. “We would never be where we are today if we were overseas. Nowhere close.”

Time was foremost among them. The Indian mill needed too much time — three to five months — to perfect its designs, send samples, schedule production, ship the fabric to the United States and get it through customs. Mr. Winthrop was hesitant to predict demand that far in advance.

There were also communication issues.

like moving half-finished yarn between machines on forklifts.

The North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was the first blow, erasing import duties on much of the apparel produced in Mexico.

your coding ability

the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information.

The second, he added, “is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership.

What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead.

What else? Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others.

“Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,” said Bock.

You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.

The least important attribute they look for is “expertise.”

Too many colleges, he added, “don’t deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don’t learn the most useful things for your life. It’s [just] an extended adolescence.”

For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it)

In France, the leader of the far-right National Front, Marine Le Pen, recently acknowledged that her party had received a loan for 9 million euros, or about $11 million, from a Kremlin-linked bank.

Faced with punishing sanctions, a petro-economy pushed to the brink by plunging oil prices and the wildly gyrating value of the ruble, Mr. Putin this month halted the project.

Geological surveys suggested that Bulgaria could be sitting atop an underground ocean of natural gas, enough to be self-sufficient for years, enough to eclipse the advantages of South Stream.

On April 4, 2014, soon after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea, Bulgaria’s Parliament gave initial passage to a bill that effectively exempted South Stream from a number of European Union regulations, most important, the one that would have forced Gazprom to allow non-Russian gas to flow through the pipeline.

“If I hear one more word about competition, I’m going to freeze your you-know-whats off,” Mr. Putin reportedly shouted.

The anti-fracking movement became so broad that in January 2012, Parliament banned not only the extraction of shale gas, but even exploration that would quantify the country’s reserves.

When the Bulgarian government refused, the European Union cut off tens of millions of euros in regional development funds.

In desperate need of the European funds, the prime minister announced the next day that South Stream would be halted until it had full European Union approval.

While “he overreached, and he underestimated the response” to his intervention in Ukraine, said Mr. Gray, the former American diplomat, the Russian leader has been “quite effective” in countries like Bulgaria.“He won a great deal by getting Nabucco stopped,” Mr. Gray said. “Ultimately, his goal is to keep as much control over the former parts of the Soviet empire as possible.”

This is sheer nonsense. Does anyone in their right mind think that any country would willingly put itself through what Greece has gone through, just to get a free ride from its creditors? If there is a moral hazard, it is on the part of the lenders – especially in the private sector – who have been bailed out repeatedly.

American, European and Chinese regulators have put in effect energy-efficiency rules that phase out the use of incandescent bulbs. Big multinationals that make light bulbs like Philips, Osram and General Electric have responded by embracing light-emitting diodes, which use one-fifth of the electricity of incandescent bulbs and half the electricity of fluorescent bulbs.

Many Chinese producers also have a poor and worsening reputation for quality, which may hurt them in the long term.

The industry, for instance, is highly segmented.

Lighting accounts for about 6 percent of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases, and LEDs have the potential to steeply reduce them.

Prices have fallen by nearly half in the last year for low-end, low-wattage LEDs made in China, and by 15 to 20 percent for the higher-wattage versions made elsewhere, buyers and manufacturing executives said.

“We do not buy Chinese LEDs,” said Mike Pugh, the procurement director at Xicato in San Jose, Calif., a large provider of indoor lighting systems for retailers and hotels. “We just can’t take that chance.”

Xicato instead buys LEDs from multinationals like Cree of Durham, N.C.; Philips Lumileds, based in San Jose, Calif.; and Osram Opto Semiconductors of Regensburg, Germany.

Three-quarters of China’s electricity still comes from burning coal, which contributes to severe air pollution as well as global warming.

She earns $500 a month plus medical benefits and free food and lodging in an air-conditioned dormitory where employees sleep four to six i

the solar and LED industries in China received huge loans at low interest rates from state-owned banks following directives from Beijing