Word: euros
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...euro has soared against the dollar over the past three years - it's up more than 40% since 2002 - European leaders have been trafficking in gloom and doom. Politicians gripe about the damage to their national economies. France's new Finance Minister, Hervé Gaymard, last month called the dollar's decline "very worrying" and said Washington needed to fix the problem. And German trade groups sound more like self-help gurus when they talk - as they frequently do - about the currency crossing "a pain threshold." But despite all the whining, the strong euro has been a considerable boon...
...Call it the Jane Fonda school of economics: no pain, no gain. As in any good workout, the stretching of the euro has forced flabby European companies to become fitter. Since the rising euro means euro-zone goods sold abroad cost more, competitiveness has taken a blow, but not a brutal one. In Germany, for example, overall competitiveness has declined by only about 6% - far less than the dollar's depreciation - according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. How come? For one thing, Germany and the other 11 euro-zone nations now have a much bigger...
...dwindled. Last season, when a heat wave cut the P?rigord bounty from the usual 50 tons to 9 tons, the import of Chinese truffles skyrocketed to an estimated 30 tons from 20 tons the year before. This season, the U.S. is facing its own Chinese truffle deluge; a strong euro has sent the price of French truffle imports up 30% in the past year, leading some restaurants and gourmet-store owners to substitute Eastern truffles for P?rigords. Purists are outraged. "You can't compare the two," sniffs Guy Monier, who sells French truffles for $2,300 a kilo...
...France. That, Gaymard hopes, will stimulate economic growth that, at 2.3% in 2004, was below government estimates of 2.5%. Surprisingly, Gaymard is predicting the same for this year. "Given commodity prices like oil rising, we should count on lower growth next year, not higher," says David Naudé, senior euro-zone economist for Deutsche Bank in Paris, which forecasts 2% in 2005. Gaymard's other idea for encouraging growth: sparking consumer spending with his tax cuts. Sounds like supply-side thinking, American style. Merge or Purge? The consumer-products industry seems to be on a binge-purge cycle. After Procter...
...folks at Disney were also mum about the potential negative effects of aggressive expansion into foreign markets. “It took us a while to figure out that Euro Disney wasn’t doing so well in France because people drink wine in that country, and we didn’t allow any alcohol in the park,” said Mia Rondinella, a Disney representative...