"Debt crisis feels far from Europe’s small towns" by Edward Cody,
Washington Post | December 17, 2011
This article was in my December 25th Boston Globe.
MONTARGIS, France — When dusk falls and Christmas lights illuminate holiday shoppers strolling along Golden Street, this little town seems a world away from Europe’s economic crisis. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s dire warnings that the European Union is at risk of collapsing and that hard times lie ahead for France are drowned out by Christmas carols broadcast into the wintry air.
“The people who are talking about the crisis and those kinds of things all the time are not right,” said Viviane Malet, the proprietor of four stores along Golden Street who heads 150 Montargis shopkeepers in the Commercial Union. “It’s a mistake to keep harping on it. Life is beautiful.”
In thousands of Europe’s little towns and villages, the debt crisis threatening the common currency, the euro, is like the sound of distant thunder — it may bring a storm, townspeople say, but so far the sun is still out and Christmas is still merry.
The atmosphere of foreboding that has settled over Paris and other European Union capitals is nowhere to be seen here as children on their scooters swerve between elderly couples admiring the seasonal decorations and young families out window shopping.
The expensive social protections that helped pile up the debts — generous unemployment benefits, inclusive health insurance, long vacations — are under attack for living on borrowed funds. But so far they have also buffered the people of Montargis and millions of other Europeans from the worst effects of the financial turmoil in their capitals.
Actually, it was the fraudulent mortgage-backed securities scam that Wall Street devised that did it, but what would you expect from an agenda-pushing corporate tool?
And yet the shadow of a slowdown hangs over the festivities. News from Greece and Spain of devastating government cutbacks and economies grinding to a halt suggests that even here and in the many other European towns that have enjoyed a good life for more than four decades, financial realities may finally be ready to wreak their revenge.
“People are afraid when they hear the news, but in their daily lives they have not yet been hit,” said Benoit Digeon, a deputy mayor and businessman whose praline candies are sold around the world. “But it will come.”
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The pinch felt by
Benedicte Masson, whose pharmacy lies at the top of Golden Street, Veronique Fauchon, owner of the Lord bar on Golden Street, and other Golden Street shopkeepers, however, is not yet the European debt crisis that worries Sarkozy, unsettles the world’s financial markets and forces European Union leaders to negotiate through the night at summits in Brussels. Rather, it is the economic contraction set in motion by the banking crisis of 2008, which started in New York, unfurled across the Atlantic and, late but ineluctable, has seeped into Montargis.
The worst of that crisis was absorbed here by France’s social protections. For instance, Digeon pointed out, 45 percent of the local housing market is subsidized, offering low rents to low-income families. Similarly, he said, the local offices of unemployment insurance, health insurance and welfare payments have a reputation for particular efficiency, drawing young people to Montargis from surrounding villages to enjoy the town’s benefits if they cannot find a job at home....
What, no bailout like what the banks got?
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