Archive for the ‘European Union’ Category

Japan, European Union Strike New Trade Deal – Wall Street Journal (subscription)


Wall Street Journal (subscription)
Japan, European Union Strike New Trade Deal
Wall Street Journal (subscription)
Much of the focus at the G-20 summit this week will be on whether the U.S. retains its role as a global economic leader amid President Trump's America First policies. WSJ's Gerald F. Seib previews what to watch out for on North Korea, trade, and ...
EU And Japan Strike Trade Deal, Call It 'Strong Message To The World'NPR
EU, Japan seal free trade in signal to TrumpReuters
Japan and Europe's huge new trade agreement shows that US leadership is already fadingVox
Salt Lake Tribune -Omaha World-Herald
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Japan, European Union Strike New Trade Deal - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

EBRD nuclear safety work gets boost from European Union – The FINANCIAL

The FINANCIAL -- The European Union (EU) has made a 19 million contribution to the Nuclear Safety Account (NSA), one of the nuclear safety funds managed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

The NSA was established at the EBRD at the request of the G7 in 1993 to fund operations to ensure the safety and security of Soviet-designed nuclear power plants. It currently finances the Interim Storage Facility 2 and the Liquid Radioactive Waste Treatment Plant of the decommissioned Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The EUs contribution is vital for the support of the Chernobyl spent nuclear fuel facility project, known as ISF-2. The facility has been built and is currently being tested, with an ambitious schedule to start retrieving spent fuel from the old dilapidated storage pond by the end of this year.

The operation of retrieving, processing and ensuring the safe storage of more than 20,000 spent fuel assemblies accumulated during the activity of three nuclear reactors at Chernobyl will take approximately seven years. The facility will be handed over to the Chernobyl operators in 2018, according to EBRD.

The EUs contribution to the NSA was signed today during the Assembly of the NSA donors held in London at the Banks Headquarters.

Vince Novak, EBRD Director of the Nuclear Safety Department, said: In terms of nuclear safety, the completion of this 400 million facility will be a major achievement and a huge step forward in the reduction of radiological hazards. We are very pleased to be able to continue this work to increase nuclear safety and security in eastern Europe.

The EBRD work on nuclear safety has contributed to the success of one of the most ambitious projects in the history of engineering: securing the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident with the giant arch known as the New Safe Confinement the largest moveable land-based structure ever built.

Recently, with EBRD and donor support, the first shipment of spent nuclear fuel left the base in Andreeva Bay in north-west Russia to begin the journey to its final destination, the nuclear reprocessing plant Mayak. This is a crucial milestone in overcoming the legacy of the former Soviet Northern Fleet and its nuclear-powered submarines. Accidents and a lack of funding saw the storage sites contaminated and fall into dereliction presenting a real risk of radioactive material entering the Barents Sea and the food chain.

The EU has been by far the largest donor to the EBRD-managed nuclear safety funds. The latest contribution brings the total EU donor funding for all nuclear safety funds to 2.437 billion.

The NSA has received some 385 million from donors including: Azerbaijan, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the European Union, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and the United States. In addition, the EBRD has contributed 217 million from its net income for the completion of ISF-2.

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EBRD nuclear safety work gets boost from European Union - The FINANCIAL

EU says it will respond if US imposes punitive steel measures – Reuters

HAMBURG The European Union will respond if the United States imposes punitive tariffs on steel, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Friday at the G20 summit in Hamburg.

"Should the U.S. introduce tariffs on European steel imports, Europe is ready to react immediately and adequately," Juncker told reporters.

In a dig at U.S. President Donald Trump, he said that a new EU-Japan trade deal signed on Thursday showed that Europeans were not putting up "protectionist walls".

Juncker and Commission officials declined to give details on how the EU executive would respond if Washington imposed new quotas or tariffs on steel - measures that European leaders say would be unjustified and penalize U.S. allies in response to oversupply in world steel markets that is largely created in China.

A Commission spokeswoman said: "We should rather have a talk about the overcapacity in steel than about protectionist measures against steel imports from other parts of the world."

(Reporting by Noah Barkin in Hamburg and Elizabeth Miles and Robert-Jan Bartunek in Brussels; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; editing by David Stamp)

WASHINGTON During his campaign and first months in office, President Donald Trump set a number of explicit economic goals like boosting annual growth in gross domestic product to 3 percent, and promised to expand manufacturing employment and bring sidelined workers back into the labor force.

SAN FRANCISCO The U.S. economy is now a decade on from the start of the global financial crisis and at what most economists view as full employment, yet when it comes to wage rises, the answer seems to be forget about it.

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EU says it will respond if US imposes punitive steel measures - Reuters

‘It’s a corporatist racket!’ Tory MP bashes big businesses for EU single market whining – Express.co.uk

Kit Malthouse accused the Confederation of British Industry of wanting to cling on to the single market, which he said favoured big business.

The CBI and top firms are meeting Brexit secretary David Davis on Friday to push their desire to stay in the single market and customs union.

Appearing on Daily Politics on the BBC, the MP for North West Hampshire said: The CBI represents large businesses generally and it doesnt surprise me that they would want to cling on to this kind of corporatist racket that has suited them for so long.

Small business I think would have a much more different view.

GETTYBBC

The EU is generally accepted to be a bit of a corporatist racket

Tory MP Kit Malthouse

Host Jo Coburn picked the former deputy mayor of London for business and enterprise up on the point.

She said: Is that how you regard the CBI, that their voice is clinging to a corporatist racket?

Mr Malthouse replied the European Union favoured enormous businesses who were not forward facing.

Yeah, I mean the EU is generally accepted to be a bit of a corporatist racket, he said. It favours enormous businesses who are not as agile, not as forward facing, not as globally facing and they like the protectionist approach of the EU.

So it doesnt surprise me that they want to hold on to it.

Britain's top business leaders are co-ordinating a plot to derail Brexit by demanding the country stay in the single market and customs union.

The CBI and the leaders of other top firms, are meeting Brexit secretary David Davis in Chevening, Kent, to push their case for a softerBrexit.

In a sign of whats to come, the CBI last night called on the Government to reach a deal with theEuropean Unionthat protects businesses and delays the UK's exit.

However, the Brexit team has said it wants the UK to leave the single market at the end of formal EU exit negotiations in March 2019.

EPA

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David Davis and Michel Barnier give a press conference at the end of a meeting at EU Commission in Brussels

Director General of the CBI,Carolyn Fairbairn warned that the likelihood that Britain would get this done on time was impossible.

Ms Fairbairn said: Instead of a cliff edge, the UK needs a bridge to the new EU deal.

Even with the greatest possible goodwill on both sides, its impossible to imagine the detail will be clear by the end of March 2019. This is a time to be realistic."

Her proposals would force Britain to accept free movement of EU citizens and still be governed by the European Court of Justice.

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'It's a corporatist racket!' Tory MP bashes big businesses for EU single market whining - Express.co.uk

The European Union Has a Currency Problem – The National Interest Online

Donald Trump, for all his rhetorical clumsiness and intellectual limitations, still sometimes makes a valid point. He does when he says that Germany is very bad on trade. However much Berlin claims innocence and good intentions, the fact remains that the euro heavily stacks the deck in favor of German exporters and against others, in Europe and further afield. It is surely no coincidence that the countrys trade has gone from about balance when the euro was created to a huge surplus amounting at last measure to over 8 percent of the economywhile at the same time every other major EU economy has fallen into deficit. Nor could an honest observer deny that the bias distorts economic structures in Europe and beyond, perhaps most especially in Germany, a point Berlin also seems to have missed.

The euro was supposed to help all who joined it. When it was introduced at the very end of the last century, the EU provided the world with white papers and policy briefings itemizing the common currencys universal benefits. Politically, Europe, as a single entity with a single currency, could, they argued, at last stand as a peer to other powerful economies, such as the United States, Japan and China. The euro would also share the benefits of seigniorage more equally throughout the union. Because business holds currency, issuing nations get the benefit of acquiring real goods and services in return for the paper that the sellers hold. But since business prefers to hold the currencies of larger, stronger economies, it is these countries that tend to get the greatest benefit. The euro, its creators argued, would give seigniorage advantages to the union as a whole and not just its strongest members.

All, the EU argued further, would benefit from the increase in trade that would develop as people worried less over currency fluctuations. With little risk of a currency loss, interest rates would fall, giving especially smaller, weaker members the advantage of cheaper credit and encouraging more investment and economic development than would otherwise occur. Greater trade would also deepen economic integration, allow residents of the union to choose from a greater diversity of goods and services, and offer the more unified European economy greater resilience in the face of economic cycles, whether they had their origins internally or from abroad.

It was a pretty picture, but it did not quite work as planned. Instead of giving all greater general advantages, the common currency, it is now clear, locked in distorting and inequitable currency mispricings. These began with the enthusiasm in the run up to the currency union. High hopes for countries such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, and to a lesser extent Italy, had bid up the prices of their individual national currencies. In time, reality would have adjusted such overpricing back to levels better suited to each economys fundamental strengths and weaknesses. But the euro froze them in place, making permanent what otherwise would have been a temporary pressure. At the same time, Germany, which at the time was still suffering from the economic difficulties of its reunification, joined the common currency with a weak deutsche mark, locking in a rate, International Monetary Fund (IMF) data suggests, some 6 percent below levels consistent with German economic fundamentals.

Right from the start, then, the currency union divided the Eurozone into two classes of economies. Greece, Spain Portugal, Italy, and others became the consumers. Because the euro had locked in their overpriced currencies, populations in these countries had the sense that they had more global purchasing power than their economic fundamentals could support and consumed accordingly. At the same time, the currency overpricing put producers in these countries at a competitive disadvantage. Germany, having locked in a cheap currency position, faced the opposite mix. It became the producer for all Europe even as its own consumers, feeling a little poorer than they otherwise might have, remained cautious. Because Germans in this situation had every incentive to sustain production, while others did not, they made more productive investments, improving their economic fundamentals and so widening the gap between economic reality and the euros expression of it. Updated IMF data suggests that by 2016 Germanys relative pricing edge had doubled to 12 percent.

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The European Union Has a Currency Problem - The National Interest Online