Word: frenched
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Coup de Glace Re "The French for Entrepreneur" [Sept. 7]: I live in France and I hold one of the government's new auto-entrepreneur licenses to sell cold drinks and ice cream from a tricycle. While I congratulate the government on its new initiative, once you clear away the "jungle of administrative red tape" there are still the local traditions to deal with. Permission to trade has to be sought from each mairie. I applied to 11 and got permission to trade from only one. Even my local village has refused me. France may have rediscovered the word entrepreneur...
...measures like increased capital requirements are implemented, the average return on equity of investment banks would drop by one-third. "It's out of the question to systematically increase layers of capital in the banks if there's no supplementary risk," says Ariane Obolensky, managing director of the French Banking Federation. But the tide is against such critics. As Stark of the ECB put it in a speech this month, "the simple statement that 'if banks are too big to fail, they are probably too big to exist' is a reasonable rule." The postcrisis financial system, he predicted, "will probably...
...quick one, mind you. European leaders regularly argue that a hasty withdrawal would spell disaster for Afghanistan, neighboring Pakistan and for their own countries. French Defense Minister Hervé Morin has warned of "absolute chaos" if France pulled out and opened the door to a rush of other withdrawals. "When the security of our country is at stake," said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a speech earlier this month, "we cannot walk away...
...paper authored by Wolfgang Schäuble, a close confidant of then Chancellor Kohl, and Karl Lamers, then foreign-affairs spokesman for Merkel's Christian Democratic Union. They outlined a new "core" Europe in which France and Germany would make up the inner "core of the core." The French never formally replied to that proposal. That was "a mistake," says Jean-Pierre Jouyet, the former French Minister for European Affairs who now heads the national stock-market regulatory agency...
...France is pushing closer ties and Lamers, since retired, believes both countries have finally gotten the message. "Sarkozy has learned and realized that he, too, has made mistakes in the past," he says, citing the French President's initiative for a Mediterranean Union which caused irritation in Berlin in 2007. "There's an understanding on both sides now that the countries need each other...