By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: February 02, 2003

By DAVID BROOKS
December 1, 2011

Nations like Germany and the U.S. are rich primarily because of shared habits, values and social capital....People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.

This ethos is not an immutable genetic property, which can blithely be taken for granted. It’s a precious social construct, which can be undermined and degraded.

Right now, this ethos is being undermined from all directions. People see lobbyists diverting money on the basis of connections; they see traders making millions off of short-term manipulations; they see governments stealing money from future generations to reward current voters.

The result is a crisis of legitimacy. The game is rigged. Social trust shrivels. Effort is no longer worth it. The prosperity machine winds down....The real lesson from financial crises is that, at the pit of the crisis, you do what you have to do. You bail out the banks. You bail out the weak European governments. But, at the same time, you lock in policies that reinforce the fundamental link between effort and reward. And, as soon as the crisis passes, you move to repair the legitimacy of the system.

That didn’t happen after the American financial crisis of 2008.

For Sale: Europe Begs Its Former Vassals for a Bailout

By Michael Moran

| Posted Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011,

WEI GU
Reuters Breakingviews
Published Thursday, Oct. 27, 2011

Feb2009 | Truck & Driver | Anonymous

JUNE 15, 2011, By STEN STOVALL.

The European pharmaceuticals sector has long been chugging toward a
so-called patent cliff, when many top-selling drugs will lose legal
protection, unleashing generic versions onto markets that will sap
billions of dollars of revenue from "Big Pharma." The cliff is fast
approaching. White-knuckled investors have been hoping that drug makers
would have found replacement products by now or adequately diversified
themselves to withstand the impact. Indeed, some are better placed, and
some already have taken much of the hit, such as GlaxoSmithKline PLC,
which also has hopefully put behind it exposure to huge legal claims
regarding its once top-selling diabetes drug Avandia. Still, an
estimated $250 billion in sales is at risk through 2015, according to
data from Internet pharmaceuticals consultancy EvaluatePharma.

May 26, 2011 | NYT|By SIMON JOHNSON.  Ms. Lagarde
personifies the strategy of gambling for euro zone resurrection with
other people’s money. Why would taxpayers in the U.S. &
 elsewhere want to support her?...The founding assumption for the
euro zone in 1999 is that its countries' productivity levels would
converge — i.e, that Greece would become very much like Germany. It
didn't much matter if some countries within the zone ran current account
surpluses while others ran large deficits.
The deficit countries could finance themselves with loans from the
surplus countries, the reasoning went, because they would use the money
for productive investments and economic growth would allow them to keep
their debt levels relative to GDP under control.
None of this happened.
The productivity gains were seen more in Germany and some other northern
European countries. Unit labor costs, reflecting the net effect of
productivity gains and real wage increases, rose sharply in
Mediterranean Europe. 

Sept. 14, 2006 | Economist |

September 2, 2010 | Globe & Mail | CATHERINE McLEAN
Special to The Globe and Mail
A wide variety of languages, laws and consumer needs can be obstacles to
working across the pond. A Calgary maker of bicycle carts rides tandem
with a German partner, and gains valuable insights

Apr 24, 2008 | The Globe and Mail. pg. B.14 | Josh P.
Hamilton. ``Billionaire Warren Buffett, who will embark on a four-city
European trip next month to meet with owners of family businesses, has
for years been laying the groundwork for an acquisition in Europe.

At the centre of that effort is Angelo Moratti, scion of the founding
family of Italian energy company Saras SpA. Mr. Moratti is helping to
organize a tour that is scheduled to take the Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
chairman to Milan, Madrid, Frankfurt and Lausanne in the third week of
May.`` ...`Mr. Moratti is a "bird dog" who may be able to point Mr.
Buffett to profitable ventures in Europe, said Tom Russo, who helps
manage more than $3-billion, including Berkshire shares.``

April 24 2010 | Financial Times | By Jonathan Moules who profiles Saul Klein of Index Ventures.

Mar 26, 2001 | Financial Times pg. 06 | by Gillian Cribbs.
The numbers in Europe may not be impressive compared with the US, but
some companies in Europe are displaying a greater degree of
sophistication in the way they are setting up corporate universities;
[Surveys edition]

May 8, 2000 | TIME EUROPE VOL. 155 NO. 18 | by AISHA LABI.

21/10/06 G&M op-ed.

Muslim silence in the face of Mr. Ahmadinejad's foolish rants is highly
damaging. Unopposed, such dangerous radicals as Mr. Ahmadinejad may
appear to be speaking for a large portion of the Islamic world. That
helps no one, least of all Muslims.

Friday, June 17, 2005 WSJ op-ed by historian Paul Johnson.
In a must-read editorial in today's Wall Street Journal, historian Paul Johnson lays out what ails Europe today.