RE: [YEDG] Re: YEDG--June 29 topic (How far can Amazon go?)
RYAN SHIN
Hi all,
I'm planning to cover Jeff Bezons, Amazon's game-changing approach and success (and its future) for the next discussion on Jun 29.
Have a nice week.
Twenty years ago, Jeff Bezos left his job in finance and drove to Seattle to set up a new firm, which he named after a giant river to reflect the scale of his ambitions. Since then Amazon has changed the way that the world shops and upended industries. But, as our cover leader "How far can Amazon go?" warns, it must be careful not to become a bully.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21604550-it-has-upended-industries-and-changed-way-world-shops-it-should-beware-abusing
BR,
Ilchul Shin
no objections Casey!!!
and thanks again for your excellent job today:)
sophia-----Original Message-----
From: "Casey Lartigue, Jr."<casey...@gmail.com>
To: "ye...@googlegroups.com"<ye...@googlegroups.com>;
Cc: "HaE.S"<esh...@hotmail.com>; "rea...@gmail.com"<rea...@gmail.com>; "Siobhan Phillips"<siobhanp...@gmail.com>; "hugt...@naver.com"<hugt...@naver.com>; "Anna SG"<annal...@gmail.com>; "김아름"<sitco...@naver.com>; "sjh...@gmail.com"<sjh...@gmail.com>; "aabm...@gmail.com"<aabm...@gmail.com>; "Mikyung Kim"<seou...@hotmail.com>; "esan...@hotmail.com"<esan...@hotmail.com>; "cool...@hotmail.com"<cool...@hotmail.com>; "Robin Kim"<robin...@gmail.com>; "To: 박종철"<jongche...@hanwha.com>; "From: RYAN SHIN"<ryan...@gmail.com>; "董艳姝"<dongy...@hotmail.com>;
Sent: 2014-06-22 (일) 14:29:11
Subject: [YEDG] Re: YEDG--June 15 topic (minimum wage)Wow! That was a lot of fun! I think it was one of our most interesting sessions. And I'm not saying that just because I was the facilitator.^^CaseyOn Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 10:14 AM, Casey Lartigue, Jr. <casey...@gmail.com> wrote:http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-08/how-seattle-agreed-to-a-15-minimum-wage-without-a-fightCompensation
How Seattle Agreed to a $15 Minimum Wage Without a Fight
By Karen Weise May 08, 2014
Illustration by Joren Cull
On May 1, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray announced he had brokered a deal to raise the city’s minimum wage for all workers from $9.32 to $15 an hour, the highest in the country. That in itself was remarkable. Even more so was that Murray did it without the anger and political bloodshed that’s pitted employers against workers in other cities and has stalled efforts in Congress to increase the federal minimum wage. In what may be a model for other cities and states, Murray put business leaders, union bosses, and community advocates in a room for months with simple instructions: work out your differences, or else.
The “or else” was that Murray and the city council would do it without them. He had the political momentum to back up the threat. When Murray, a Democrat, took office in January, the region seemed ready for a minimum pay bump. Voters in a small town to Seattle’s south, SeaTac, passed a measure to raise wages for transportation and hospitality workers to $15 an hour. Seattle elected a socialist to the city council on a living wage platform. Rather than push his own proposal through the city council, or risk outside groups bringing ballot initiatives that would likely turn ugly and draw the attention of special interest money, he appointed a 24-member group to reach an agreement. “If you want people to get here in the end, you need to bring them to the table,” he says.
To co-chair the group, Murray chose two men on opposite sides of the debate: Howard Wright, founder of Seattle Hospitality Group, an investor in the iconic Space Needle, and David Rolf, president of a local SEIU Healthcare union. The idea tested the widely held assertion put forth by business groups that employers can’t afford to pay workers more. It also offered an alternative to the confrontational battles employees have waged elsewhere, such as the coordinated strikes by fast-food workers in New York and dozens of other cities.
Murray gave the group four months to work out a deal. If they failed, he vowed to present the city council with his own proposal, which both sides were sure to hate. He chose April 30 as a deadline because May is when outside groups that propose ballot initiatives typically start gathering signatures.
Local business leaders decided that joining the effort was in their best interest. “There is no doubt in my mind that this $15 is coming to Seattle,” says Wright. “So if we accept that as a premise, let’s figure out how to do it well.” Labor leaders in the group wanted a pay increase to take effect quickly; business owners wanted to phase it in over many years. Labor insisted that tips and benefits not count as part of someone’s wages; businesses thought they should be able to pay lower hourly rates if they provided other compensation such as retirement contributions. Everyone thought small businesses should get extra time to comply, but no one agreed on how to define “small.”
A month before the deadline, Murray narrowed the group to eight negotiators. The G8, as they became known, took over several rooms in the mayor’s office. A breakthrough came on April 14, when someone—the person asked not to be named, Rolf says—sketched out a chart showing how a proposed compromise would let wages at different workplaces rise at different rates. Businesses could count tips and health care in calculating minimum pay for workers, but only temporarily. Eventually those concessions would phase out and every employer would have to pay the same minimum wage. “You could see the body language in the room change,” says Rolf.
The proposal divided businesses into four groups. Large employers, with 500 workers or more, would need to pay $15 an hour by 2017. But if they provide health insurance, like the local outdoor retailer REI, they could have an extra year. A small business such as a dry cleaner wouldn’t have to pay $15 until 2021, but a restaurant would have to ensure that workers’ pay, including tips, totaled $15 an hour by 2019. Those distinctions would phase out by 2025, when all employers would pay the same minimum. And it would be indexed to inflation, so they’d never need to go through a painful negotiation again.
The final plan came together late on April 30, just before Murray’s ultimatum expired. The proposal now goes to the city council, where Murray hopes to keep its nine members from taking it apart. “I imagine there will be tweaks,” he says. With too many changes, he warns, the delicate compromise could collapse.
The bottom line: Seattle is on the verge of passing a $15 minimum wage for all workers, the highest in the country.
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 3:17 PM, Casey Lartigue, Jr. <casey...@gmail.com> wrote:
Greetings, all--In addition to this week's facilitator(s), I would like to add the following article for discussion.The city council of Seattle has voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.I would love to discuss this topic as part of Sunday's session.Main articles for this discussion* Background* Self-described socialist from India behind the legislationAdditional supporting documents* Announcement by the Mayor of Seattle* City Council bill* Seattle City Council announcement
* 15Now, founded by by Kshama Sawant and Socialist Alternative*****************************************************************The expected backlash and anticipated consequences* Seattle parking lot companies add "living wage" surcharge* Lawsuit challenging Seattle's minimum wage lawMinimum wage workers harmedBusiness owners in limboCasey--
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Casey Lartigue, Jr.
박주하
Thanks Casey & Ryan!
Re Casey's pointing out, our email should be incorporated into one group email. Actually it was made to current one (ye...@googlegroups.com).
However, last time when it was incorporated, some members' emails failed to be included.
But soon, I will try to fix it & let you know!
So in the meantime, please use other additional emails as well when you send each week's theme article.
Thanks & I hope rain makes you melancholy yet, nice Monday!!
Regards,
Serena,
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김은영
Greetings all,
Please attached you find the topics to be discussed this coming Sunday
hope you enjoy TGIF.
best regards,
Sophia
Trading the yuan
Yuawn
Buzz about the rise of China’s currency has run far ahead of sedate reality
IF HEADLINES translated into trading volumes, the yuan would be well on its way to dominating the world’s currency markets. It once again graced front pages this week after moves to lift its status in London, the world’s biggest foreign-exchange market. This was the latest instalment of a five-year-long public-relations campaign. Since 2009, when China first declared its intention to promote the yuan internationally, a string of announcements and milestones has cast the Chinese currency as a putative rival to the dollar.
The hype rests on several seemingly impressive numbers. Yuan deposits beyond China’s borders have increased tenfold in the past five years. The “dim sum” bond market for yuan-denominated debt issued outside China has gone from non-existence to a dozen issuances a month. And the yuan is the second-most-used currency in the world for trade finance.
Adding to the impression that something big is afoot is the competition between cities around the world to establish themselves as yuan-trading hubs. London puffed up its chest this week after the Chinese government designated China Construction Bank as the official clearing bank for yuan-denominated transactions in Britain and agreed to launch direct trading between the pound and the yuan in China. These announcements were made to coincide with a trip to London by Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister (pictured above).
The designation of a clearing bank creates a channel for yuan held in Britain to flow into Chinese capital markets, boosting London’s appeal as a trading centre for the currency. Other cities such as Frankfurt and Singapore have also been awarded clearing banks, but London already controls nearly 60% of yuan-denominated trade payments between Asia and Europe, and this week’s agreement will shore up its position.
London’s currency traders, however, will not be hyperventilating. The rapid growth in the use of the yuan outside China, whether for trade settlement or investment, has been from a minuscule base. The yuan is the seventh-most-used currency in international payments, according to SWIFT, a global transfer system. That is up from 20th place at the start of 2012. However, the Chinese currency still accounts for a mere 1.4% of global payments, compared with the dollar’s 42.5%. Given that many of those deals just shuffle cash between Chinese companies and their subsidiaries in Hong Kong, there is much less than meets the eye to the yuan’s stature as a trade-settlement currency.
Even more telling is the yuan’s standing as an investment currency. The dollar’s biggest selling point as a global reserve currency is the deep, liquid pool of American assets open to international buyers. Despite the barrage of reports in recent years about the dim-sum bond market, China’s offerings are much sparser. Jonathan Anderson of Emerging Advisors Group calculates that global investors have access to $56 trillion of American assets, including bonds and stocks. They can also get their hands on $29 trillion of euro-denominated assets and $17 trillion of Japanese ones. But when it comes to Chinese assets, just $0.3 trillion or so are open to foreign investors. This puts the yuan on a par with the Philippine peso and a bit above the Peruvian nuevo sol, Mr Anderson notes.
What is holding the yuan back? The answer is China itself—both by circumstance and, more importantly, by design. For a currency to go global, there has to be a path for it to leave its country of origin. The easiest route is via a trade deficit. For example, since the United States imports more than it exports, it in effect adds to global holdings of dollars on a daily basis. That does not work for China, which almost always runs a large trade surplus. It has tried to solve this problem by offering to pay for imports in yuan, while still accepting dollars for its exports.
Yet this approach can go only so far, because of the design of the Chinese system. Foreigners paid in yuan cannot do much with the currency and thus look askance at it. China could change this at a stroke by flinging open its capital account. There is speculation that it might do just that as debate about financial reform intensifies in Beijing. But Yu Yongding, a former adviser to the central bank, predicts that caution will prevail, with the government slowly lowering its wall of capital controls rather than demolishing it. That would be far better for China’s financial stability. But it also means that the chasm between the hype about the yuan and the mundane reality is likely to widen.
BNP Paribas
Capital punishment
France’s largest bank gets fined for evading American sanctions
THE American guillotine has fallen. After lengthy negotiations, prosecutors and regulators announced on June 30th the penalties they planned to impose on BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, for evading American sanctions on doing business with Cuba, Iran and the Sudan: an almost $9 billion fine, a guilty plea to criminal charges of conspiracy and falsifying records and a suspension of its right to clear certain dollar transactions.
While not the largest-ever fine imposed on a bank (see table below), it is more than BNP’s profits last year. The requirement to plead guilty to a felony is both unusual and dangerous: some jurisdictions could withdraw BNP’s banking licence and some customers may be forced to move elsewhere. Worst of all, the mandatory exclusion from dollar clearing for a year on much of its oil and gas business, forcing it to route transactions through other banks, is a heavy blow for a bank that plays a key role in international trade.
BNP Paribas is profitable, well capitalised and liquid: it can pay the fine without turning to the markets for money or letting its prudential ratios slip below acceptable levels, it says. The bank will immediately take a charge of €5.8 billion ($7.9 billion) on top of the $1.1 billion it had already set aside and will freeze dividends at last year’s level. Its core tier-1 capital ratio—a measure of its ability to absorb losses—will still be around 10% (down from 10.6% at the end of March) and its leverage ratio will fall from 3.7% to 3%, according to Jean-Laurent Bonnefé, the bank’s chief executive, and Lars Machenil, its chief financial officer. BNP’s share price, which had been sliding since February, rose 3.6% the day the settlement was announced.
But the announcement raises a raft of questions about the proportionality of penalties, the responsibility of individuals in corporate crime, the duties of firms dealing with objectionable regimes and the reasonableness of America imposing its foreign policy via the international financial system and its dominant currency. The bank’s dealings with and for Sudan—where Osama bin Laden found refuge and the UN’s attempt to stem the bloodletting in Darfur was resisted—lie at the heart of the charges against it. BNP concealed a total of $190 billion-worth of dollar-based transactions between 2002 and 2012, according to New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS), including some involving Cuba and Iran. Because they were denominated in dollars, these deals ultimately had to pass through New York and thus came under its regulatory authority. To disguise their origins, BNP stripped identifying information from documentation and re-routed payments through a network of satellite banks.
Internal emails show that a number of senior bank executives were aware of the deals; there was some unease within the bank about the process. In 2005, for example, an email from a senior compliance officer referred to the existence of a network of Arab banks used by BNP to circumvent the embargo against Sudan. According to the DFS, such concerns were dismissed, not least by Georges Chodron de Courcel, the bank’s chief operating officer at the time, who “signed off on continuing illicit transactions”, according to regulatory filings. The commercial stakes were significant: in 2006 letters of credit provided by BNP’s Geneva office were equal to a quarter of all Sudan’s exports and a fifth of its imports.
In 2007 Baudouin Prot, BNP’s then chief executive, ordered an end to sanctions-busting but failed to notice when his troops did not immediately comply. It was not until 2010 that BNP finally ceased dealing with Cuba and late 2012 with Iran. The long lag doubtless fanned regulatory anger and contributed to the size of the fine. By the time the negotiators sat down to work out a settlement, in early 2014, regulatory hearts were hardening, in part because American legislators were clamouring for financial scalps. A deferred-prosecution agreement such as HSBC had secured in 2012 was no longer on offer; it was a guilty plea or nothing for BNP.
The case has left people on both sides of the Atlantic unhappy. One reason is that the individuals responsible seem to be getting off lightly. Some have been disciplined by BNP with demotions and cuts in pay, and some top brass are being pushed out the door, including Mr Chodron de Courcel. None, however, has faced even the mildest legal sanction so far; instead, the bank’s shareholders and customers look likely to bear the brunt of BNP’s misdeeds.
A second source of discontent—in Europe, at any rate—is that the case appears to be an example of America throwing its financial weight around, using the threat of withholding access to its market and currency to force compliance with its own priorities. The French central bank sent a clear message that, whatever the rights and wrongs of BNP’s behaviour, crippling so large a European bank could harm the world’s financial system, as well as a region struggling for growth.
BNP’s behaviour in doing business with the likes of Sudan may have been morally reprehensible but it did not break European or French laws (though falsifying documents would be a crime anywhere). By eagerly exploiting their authority over dollar-denominated transactions, American regulators are increasing the incentives for international banks to set up a payments system based on another currency.
BNP is not out of the woods yet. The Swiss banking regulator says it will look into the bank’s Geneva operations, and conversations with customers and banking supervisors that seek to limit the damage are under way. For BNP, though, at least the worst may be over. Other European banks are not so lucky. Société Générale, Crédit Agricole and Deutsche Bank are all believed to be in American regulators’ sights for sanctions-busting. The saga continues.
Anna Lee
You can simply print out attached pdf files. Enjoy reading and See you on Sunday!!
Marijuana
The great pot experiment
Legalising a drug is harder than it looks
Jul 12th 2014 | SEATTLE | From the print edition
SINCE late 2012, two states have voted to legalise marijuana for recreational use; licensed shops in Colorado and Washington now sell it to anyone who wants it. Six states have legalised the drug for medicinal use, bringing the total to 23. Most Americans now say they favour legalisation (see chart 1). The House of Representatives has voted to defund federal raids of medical-marijuana facilities in states that allow them. Serious newspapers (though not, alas, this one) have appointed pot critics. And an Oklahoma state senator has campaigned to legalise the drug because in Genesis 1:29, “God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed...upon the face of all the earth’.”
When Colorado became the first state to license pot shops on January 1st, tokers merrily queued in the cold for a puff and a place in history. But the mood in Washington state, which opened its shops on July 8th, is more downbeat. Severe shortages meant that barely half a dozen shops opened on day one; including just one in Seattle, the largest city. Several warned that they probably had only enough weed to last a few days.
Colorado’s recreational pot business was built on the back of a well-regulated medical one. Retail licences were initially restricted to dispensary-owners; on January 1st, many stores merely changed their signs. Washington also has a medical-pot business, but it is an unregulated mess. I-502, the voter initiative that legalised marijuana in 2012, charged the state’s Liquor Control Board (LCB) with building a recreational industry from scratch.
Most people think it has done well, but it has not been easy. “We wanted to bring in as many people from the black market as possible,” says Alison Holcomb, a lawyer who drafted I-502. Application fees were kept low, and a lottery determined who would win the limited number of producer, processor and retail licences, regardless of the quality of the applicant. The LCB was overwhelmed by the number of bids—over 7,500—and says it will not finish processing them until early 2015. It has issued only 90-odd licences to producers.
Officially, the LCB hopes that within a year I-502 shops will capture 25% of the market. Others think that is optimistic. For now, prices are high: around $20 a gram, which is twice the black-market (or medical) cost. That partly reflects eye-watering excise taxes: 25% at each stage of distribution, plus normal sales taxes. But wholesale prices are high too, suggesting supply shortages are the main culprit.
Analysts speak of the “Goldilocks” price for weed: not too low (to avoid spurring consumption), not too high (to undercut the black market). For now Washington is erring on the high side, although prices will surely drop as the market settles. Yet the LCB faces an extra challenge. Like Soviet officials organising the tractor industry, it must, under I-502, determine a maximum quota for production. This was originally set at 2m square feet of marijuana plants, although so far only 687,644 sq ft has been licensed, and officials now decline to offer a precise figure. No more than 334 shops may be licensed (although local bans mean that limit may never be reached).
I-502 will create new consumers, but no one knows how many, or how much they will buy. Nor does anyone know how many people will move from the illicit or medical markets to I-502 shops. Meanwhile, the LCB has deliberately suppressed supply to limit the risk of marijuana being diverted to other states or to children, which would upset Uncle Sam. It is as if those Soviet officials were setting local tractor quotas even as the Kremlin enforced a nationwide tractor ban.
Legalisation promises three benefits. First, it will stop governments from wasting lots of cash locking up people who haven’t hurt anyone. Second, it will raise tax revenue. Third, it will put criminals out of business. Washington’s experience suggests that the third promise may be hardest to keep. Even in Colorado, dispensaries rather than shops accounted for two-thirds of sales between January and April.
As support for legalisation grows, more states will do it. Oregon and Alaska will vote on legalisation in November; Floridians will decide about medical pot. California is likely to vote on legalisation in 2016. In other states, particularly in New England, legislators may free the weed.
All states can learn from the trailblazers. This is already happening: after a string of well-publicised incidents in Colorado involving edible products, including two deaths, Washington’s governor tightened the rules. Colorado legislators have copied Washington’s (controversial) provisions for assessing whether drivers are stoned. The market is ill-understood; regulators will need to be flexible.
Research suggests that some of the cannabinoids found in marijuana can help relieve pain and nausea. Others may stimulate appetite (a problem for which America has no shortage of fixes: see article). The drug is also linked to more worrying outcomes, particularly among the young, and may raise the risk of schizophrenia. Alas, federal prohibition has made it difficult to investigate pot’s medical properties.
Campaigners have pursued a state-by-state strategy, but for many medical marijuana is more about paving the way for legalisation than about helping the sick. In most states officials and dispensary-owners conspire in the fiction that customers are all “patients” and shops merely non-profit “co-operatives”. The doctor’s “recommendations” needed to procure marijuana are easy to obtain.
The relationship between medical-pot advocates and legalisers can be fraught. In Washington, the main opposition to I-502 came from a medical industry worried, with reason, that it would find itself folded into the same legal regime as recreational pot shops. But more broadly the spread of medical marijuana has softened up voters: fewer now see it as a moral issue (see chart 2). Campaigners in Colorado used the success of their state’s medical system to argue for the creation of a recreational one.
They also hinted at the great bounties that pot taxes could deliver to state coffers. Colorado and Washington have earmarked a lot of marijuana taxes (in Washington, 81%) for worthy causes such as school construction and drug education. But revenue forecasts have proved inaccurate in Colorado, and the licensing chaos in Washington will have a similar effect.
A thornier problem for regulators may be that tastes change fast. Walk into a medical-marijuana outlet in Washington and you will be confronted with a vast array of products, from marijuana-infused ghee to cheese sauce. Vaporisers, which allow smoke-free consumption, are a big hit. Concentrates, which can deliver a quick, intense buzz, account for around one-third of sales at Rain City, a dispensary south of Seattle. As Colorado’s experience with edibles shows, officials struggle to keep up with such a mutable market. But to regulate it properly they must try, for some day the idea of rolling a spliff may seem quaint.
The other great unknown is the role of the federal government. Not only is marijuana illegal under federal law; it is classed as a Schedule I drug—as bad as heroin. So Washington and Colorado are licensing their residents to commit felonies. President Barack Obama and Eric Holder, the attorney general, have given the two legalisation experiments a cautious green light. But if a drug hawk replaces Mr Obama after 2016, he or she will not find it hard to revive the war on weed in states that thought they had ended it.
Thus, the drug still carries a large risk premium. Big banks will not accept deposits from pot shops for fear of violating federal money-laundering laws. Zealous prosecutors have seized assets and threatened landlords. All this puts off investors and makes it harder for above-board operators to acquire the legitimacy they crave. “Either we should wipe out the black market, or we should not,” says a frustrated Brendan Kennedy, the boss of Privateer Holdings, a marijuana-investment outfit.
That will not happen until the federal prohibition is lifted. That may seem remote, but opinion is shifting fast. “I see [legalisation] as a second-term [Hillary] Clinton thing,” says Mark Kleiman of the University of California, Los Angeles. Earl Blumenauer, a pro-legalisation congressman from Oregon, thinks marijuana will be rescheduled within three years. Bipartisan coalitions can be found for reform.
For now Colorado and Washington will push ahead. Cannabis cafés may open in Seattle this year (probably vaporisers only). Campaigners in Washington want to change the law to allow home-grown marijuana; Colorado allows this, but Barbara Brohl, head of the Department of Revenue, says its unregulated nature is one of her biggest worries. Colorado, meanwhile, is opening up its recreational system to non-dispensaries and, for the first time, allowing retailers or producers to specialise. Drug laws are anything but set in stone.
From the print edition: United States
American spies in Germany
Up pops another… and another
The Americans are snooping even on Germany’s anti-snooping committee
Jul 12th 2014 | BERLIN | From the print edition
So who is listening in?
IF THE tawdry tale is confirmed, the Americans hired a German working for his country’s equivalent of the CIA as their double agent. A 31-year-old clerk sorting classified papers reportedly gave the Americans 218 documents in return for a paltry €25,000 ($34,000). Three concerned the committee in the Bundestag that is investigating revelations by Edward Snowden about American surveillance in Germany. So the Americans are spying on Germany’s parliament even as it looks into American spying.
This was followed on July 9th by news of a second American spy—though few details have been released. The downward spiral in German-American relations began with the Snowden affair and continued with news that America had tapped Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone. It seems that the Americans collect German metadata on a vast scale. American surveillance has caught up a 27-year-old computer-science student in Bavaria named Sebastian Hahn: his mistake was merely to run a server belonging to a network that encrypts internet communications.
Outrage over America’s behaviour is widespread. Joachim Gauck, Germany’s president, called it “a gamble with friendship” between the two countries. “We have to say, enough!” As a former East German, like Mrs Merkel, Mr Gauck is sensitive about state spying and personal liberty. The interior and foreign ministers chimed in. The justice minister accused the Americans of “surveillance mania” and suggested he may prosecute them. The opposition has stepped up calls to give Edward Snowden, now in Russia, asylum in Germany in exchange for his testimony.
Mrs Merkel was in China when the news broke. She would have preferred not to comment there, but the timing left her little choice. The allegations are “very serious,” she said, standing next to a beaming Chinese premier. They “contradict everything that I understand to be a trusting co-operation between friendly partners.” Her counterpart, Li Keqiang, presented China and Germany as bonded in victimhood under a common American threat.
Scenes like these should make American policymakers pause. Are the benefits of their spying worth the costs? In Berlin to plug her new book, Hillary Clinton, America’s former secretary of state, suggested the answer may be no. She offered an apology to Mrs Merkel for the phone-tapping. And she told interviewers that she would like senior American policymakers to visit Germany, to listen and to understand.
Germany will stop short of granting Mr Snowden asylum or expelling American agents. The transatlantic free-trade talks, already controversial in Germany, may survive. But a crucial Western alliance has been damaged. When members of Germany’s anti-spying parliamentary commission meet now, they throw their mobile phones into a box and turn up the music (Grieg’s piano concerto)—for fear of America, not Russia. That is what things have come to.
From the print edition: Europe
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Anna Lee