Posted on 05/18/2007 9:52:02 AM PDT by backbencher
New French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has raised the prospect of state aid for Airbus, but said he eventually plans to sell the government's stake.
The French state owns 15% of Airbus' parent company EADS.
President Sarkozy said that the government would do "its duty" as a shareholder if EADS decided to raise fresh capital.
Yet he added that he aims "to put the state's stake on the market", once the company has recovered.
I almost feel sorry for the French taxpayer.
He does have a point, though.
If he wants to sell off the French stake in Airbus, he wouldn’t get anything for it now. Propping up Airbus for now makes good political sense for him, and would let him get a better price for his country’s stake.
I think Sarkozy is smart enough to realize that Airbus is an albatross.
I thought you might be interested in Airbus’s new business strategy... taxpayer money.
Maybe Boeing will use it’s profits to buy Airbus.
Then it can shut down the non profitable parts.
Exactly. He’s cutting the French government’s losses, basically, by propping it up a little while longer and hoping they can actually do something right for the first time in years. If he dumped French ownership in EADS right now, it might topple the company entirely, and with so many French employees, you just know there’d be massive riots. He’s stuck, and maybe he’s trying to wiggle and slowly inch his way out.
}:-)4
Sounds typical of the French if the company or the country is having trouble raise the white flag and surrender.
The arrogant French workers are not helping Airbus either their strikes have caused several more delays again typical Frenchmen.
All this means is that Sarkozy is a true Conservative (relatively speaking) and doesn’t believe in government ownership of private companies.
It is encouraging that perhaps France is beginning to change her course just a bit to the Right.
Of course he will.
What Americans do not understand is that the conservative in Europe is not conservative in an economic sense. A European conservative will be a little more national in thinking, pro-defense, and tough on crime. The European conservative often has a less secular world view as many of these political parties at least in a historical context have a Christian heritage as in Germany and elsewhere. However, the European conservative is in economic thought a socialist in praxis. He thinks father state knows best and should be a regulating hand in the economy, he’s for tight gun control, he supports a social infrastructure in healthcare/unemployment/retirement etc, he’ll go along with enormous taxes to back this social infrastructure, he’ll accept subsidies, allow the state to manage large portions markets such as the energy sector in Europe which still is to this day! Economically speaking, the European conservative is a liberal.
The issue was growing and came to a head a few years ago (pre 911). The US does not want to deal with it now and we have bigger issues to contend with. We also didn’t want to inject this issue into an already strained relationship in 2003 with the Iraq war. Some of the countries impacted are allies that are backing us. Bottom line is that it’s a huge injustice and anyone with a clue and who is honest will admit to that.
We will pretend like with the boarder that this is not happening until private firms like Boeing are with their back to the wall, because believe me when I say Boeing can’t compete with a firm that is backed by the national governments of France, Germany, and Great Britain. They don’t have the money! There is a reason why Airbus could develop so many airframes so quickly and it wasn’t because of their brilliant management. They simply had an endless pot of money to reach into. Boeing has to show profits or else people will dump shares. On the other hand the German government simply buys the shares when people were dumping Airbus shares some time ago. Airbus gets BS loans at rates that are not even remotely realistic. They had firms like Lufthansa and Air France that basically were guaranteed to buy their product, no matter how late, expensive, or poor the performance was. For years you had a case where state managed airlines were more or less buying the state built airplane. Do you really think Boeing had any chance in landing contracts with these state managed airlines? No. The only sales Boeing was making was in market niches where Airbus still had no counterpart.
But the question was “Will this cause a trade war”? And the answer is, no. Like the southern boarder which even this administration attempted to wish away, we won’t deal with the issue until we are forced to deal with it. Right now our aerospace sector is doing well, as is our economy as a whole.
“I think Sarkozy is smart enough to realize that Airbus is an albatross.”
Do we have a name for the latest Airbust jet? The Airbust Albatross.
from May.
Airbus should expand their military aircraft business to offset the cost of the commercial aircraft business.
I would say he’s a liberal in the current American political spectrum, but not a classical liberal in the European sense.
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