Leap of Faith

Circled on the liturgical calendar since the early years of Christianity, August the 15th marks the day on which legend has it that the Virgin Mary – with no lack of vitriolic dispute among the experts as to whether alive or dead at the time – was teleported from the earthly realm to her deserved place in the afterlife. Many Europeans, as well as all South Americans and the grateful folk that populate the Philipines, will be taking Monday off work to celebrate this event which, thanks to its elevation to the unimpugnable status of infallible dogma by Pope Pius XII, also honours the labours of economists throughout history – The Feast of the Assumption.

Perhaps, on this one day of the year that the coldly calculating practitioners of the dismal science (sic) might allow themselves to indulge in the mystical raptures more the turf of pneumatologists and return on Tuesday and reveal to the world exactly how the calculation of the real effective exchange rate manages to assign 116 to China – with its 22 billion euro trade surplus with Germany - and 95 to this latter.

Those not reborn by their religious experience will, rightly, answer that ‘it’s only an index measuring rate of change’. The chosen few, however, will actually come to question what in heaven’s name the REER is actually good for.

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As for reading material for this long weekend, we recommend a piece by an essayist who really knows how to use a metaphorical hook to seduce the reader into reading ostensibly dry material. Writing in the most recent Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis weaves a tale that takes the reader from an anthropologist’s study of German folklore into the more current matter of how many of Germany’s banks were disastrously duped into buying repackaged American mortgages (and Greek government debt). It’s seventeen pages long and worth every minute devoted to it.

Readers, for their part, might note the point in which an interviewee describes Germans as people who do not think the other party to an interaction is lying – and imagine what domestic mayhem can break loose when they find themselves married to a culture that has not the slightest expectation that the counterparty to even the most banal of street corner conversations is actually telling the truth. Forget Greek economic competitiveness, Spanish labour market rigidity or any of the myriad other assessments of the dilemma. This is the unbridgeable divide that separates the north from the south of Europe.

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