Too Many Political Meetings on the Economy in Europe, Not Enough Input from Business

 You may be aware that various European leaders met yesterday regarding the ongoing crisis.  This crisis is economic.

Anyone who has followed Europe’s downward economic trend the past couple of years has grown accustomed to repeated meetings of the leaders of Germany and France, either the heads of state or their finance ministers; plus of course other eurozone countries.  The U.K. has of course been involved on Europe-wide matters, though the U.K. is not a member of the eurozone. 

As I see it, these official meetings exemplify the problem.

It strikes me that what ”should” have been happening is that business leaders, banking leaders, labor leaders, etc., should instead have been having crisis meetings and then have been reporting to and discussing with governments what they think can improve and stabilize matters from a practical standpoint.

People develop core competencies.  So do organizations.  As the USSR demonstrated, running economies is rarely a core competency of governments or their employees, whether they are temporary employees such as presidents or permanent ones such as civil servants.  Under this line of reasoning, Europe has economic malaria.  It is chronically ill economically, though in the aggregate starting from a very high level of embedded physical and intellectual capital; and as is the case now, it suffers acute and painful relapses which are typically not fatal but do put the patient to bed feeling really, really bad.

It’s time for the actual wealth producers in Europe to, in an American analogy, step up to the plate and try to hit one out of the park.  Perhaps indeed it’s late in the game and their team in far behind.  So what.

As Yogi said, it’s never over until it’s over.

It’s time for Europe to show some true grit.  Otherwise, its economic situation will likely continue to be on the wane.