Word: euros
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...Continental Europe, an additional factor feeds the disgruntlement: the euro, which 13 European Union countries have now adopted as their official currency since it was first launched on Jan. 1, 2002. From Madrid to Maastricht, it has become conventional wisdom that the introduction of the single currency jacked up prices. At the entrance gate of Volkswagen's main plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, Ulf Meinecke, 38, shoves his hands into his jacket pockets and says he can no longer afford annual vacations to Italy with his family. "We just go every other year," he says. "Everything is getting more expensive...
That, though, is starting to change. Bulgaria doesn't move to the euro until 2010, but the country is already seeing the effects of integration with the European economy. The Sofia Echo, an English-language weekly, reports that in the last few months of 2006, the price of bread went up more than 10% and is expected to increase another 20% to 50% this year. The evolving landscape is perhaps nowhere better observed than at the gleaming new glass-wrapped Mall of Sofia, where locals sip $2.60 caramel macchiatos, browse stores such as Lacoste and Hugo Boss and take...
London's pre-eminence wasn't guaranteed by the Big Bang, however. More recently, the U.K.'s decision to opt out of the euro in the early '90s stoked concern that Frankfurt - now home to the European Central Bank - would eclipse the City as Europe's leading financial center. Those concerns have gone the way of the franc, lira and deutsche mark. Thanks to London's ability to exploit its long-standing expertise in marketmaking and English's position as one of Europe's primary languages, there are now more euros traded for dollars, pounds and yen each...
...integrated with the operating system and which works like a stripped-down version of the already-stripped-down Photoshop Elements. Isn't that the kind of anti-competitive integration that got Microsoft into anti-trust court last time around? (Not that they ever left: they're facing hundred-million Euro fines in Europe as we speak...
...Germany take the load off the U.S. and the rest of Europe? Growth in the 13 nations that have adopted the euro is expected to be 2.6% in 2006, unusually strong for the growth-challenged Continent, and in the past few months it has outpaced the U.S. for the first time in years. The European recovery is uneven, though, with Italy and France faring less well. Nevertheless, "Europe is going to have a great year," reckons Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund...