Our rock star Fed Chair – Janet Yellen loves photo ops with unemployed auto workers and college students majoring in art appreciation who don’t understand why they can’t get jobs – has been saying all year that the Fed will raise rates before yearend. The obvious time to get started was the September meeting of the Open Market Committee, but Yellen blinked.
“Pity makes suffering contagious.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
World War I dealt Europe a huge body blow. It wasn’t just that it was a war, or even that it was a major war. After all, Europeans had been fighting wars with each other since before Europe was Europe, and many of them were very large wars, indeed (the Napoleonic conflicts, for example).
Back in 1973, in his novel, The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail described a dystopic future early in the 21st century in which European civilization would be crushed under the weight of a million desperately poor immigrants. Raspail was wrong about the source of the migration,(1) but he was right in his timing and very close to being right on the scale of the problem.
Although it seems to barely register in the US, the refugee/immigration crisis in Europe dominates both the headlines and everyday conversation on the Continent. The specter of 500,000 desperate people(1) fleeing the horrors of the Syrian war and other catastrophes – and with who-knows-how-many hundreds of thousands more coming along behind them – has aroused strong emotions and caused consternation among the EU governments.
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