Cicero's Songs

The latest economic news out of eastern Europe is not just bad in itself. It underlines that the epicentre of the financial crisis has shifted from America very firmly to this side of the Atlantic. Rapid devaluations of all the free floating currencies in Eastern Europe, irrespective of the policies or the circumstances that apply in any given country suggests a collapse of confidence that borders on the irrational. Meanwhile, the other European free floating currencies, such as the Swedish Krona or Sterling have also devalued. This leaves the countries that have fixed their currencies to the Euro zone, but have not yet adopted the single currency itself, looking very vulnerable. Bulgaria, Estonia and Lithuania are all tied to the single currency through a system called a currency board, which means that none of the national currencies, respectively the Lev, Kroon and Litas are issued without a corresponding collateral of Euros in the reserves of the Central Bank. In theory, therefore ...

Nord Stream is the extremely controversial plan to build an undersea gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. It is controversial for two different sets of reasons. One is concerned with the potential environmental damage of the pipeline on the already damaged and degraded waters of the enclosed Baltic Sea. The seabed of the Baltic is said to contain a large amount of different poisons in its sediments that would be stirred up by the construction. Such poisons included heavy metals, phosphate and other pollutants that have run off from the land, but also includes the remains of large numbers of mines that were laid during the first and second world war, which have not been fully mapped and have never been entirely cleared. However it is not so much the environmental issues that have created the greatest controversy, it is the political issues. Firstly, the undersea route by passes the already existing pipelines between Russia and Western Europe- it avoids land transit through countries s...

I made a comment on the putatively Scottish antecedents of Lech Walesa. I see Lepidus suggest that Walesa is another version of the proto-Indo European word for stranger that gives English the word Welsh and the Germans the word Wendisch- and indeed is the root of the name Wallace, from which (it is suggested) the Walesa actually derives. I don't think- short of DNA evidence- that we can truly check to what degree Lech Walesa is actually Scottish- after all there were so many Scots who settled in Royal Prussia, and in particular the City of Gdansk (then, of course, Danzig), so there is every chance that the former President has at least some Scottish blood- if not from the first bearer of his surname. The area around Gdansk has a distinct identity- and, unusually for Poland, quite a strong accent. Indeed the Slavic population of that formerly most German of Provinzen, Prussia has not always regarded itself as Polish, but rather Kashub- or Kaszub, in its Polish spelling. The Kaszuby...

Last night Cicero attended a talk given by Steve Forbes , the American publisher and former presidential candidate at the London Junto- a discussion group for financiers, loosely modeled upon Ben Franklin's original Junto . Ben Franklin famously said "Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.". So it was particularly appropriate that the leading American advocate of flat tax should be speaking to the group. Cicero has been involved with the Baltic countries since he first discovered the Estonian Legation in London in 1979 and Estonia has been in the vanguard of the flat tax movement in Europe. Following Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia and Montenegro have all adopted modified flat tax regimes, with new countries joining the list quite regularly. So far, no Western European state has adopted flat taxes. A major benefit of a flat tax is that since there are no deductibles, it becomes extremely simple to calculate-...