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The German government warned Monday that a transatlantic trade war would harm both Europe and the US, urging Washington not to take a “wrong path” after a weekend of aggressive trade rhetoric. “I don’t want to judge how close to or far from a trade war we are. Such a trade war would not be in German, European or American interests,” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters in Berlin. However, “closing oneself off and protectionism are the wrong path,” Seibert added, after President Donald Trump at the weekend threatened to impose tariffs on car imports from the European...

The EU will soon unveil a plan for taxing major internet companies like Amazon and Facebook by imposing a levy of two to six percent on revenues in every country where they operate, French finance minister Bruno Le Maire said on Sunday. “The range will be from two to six percent, but closer to two than to six,” Le Maire told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper. The European Commission has said it will present by end March an overhaul of its tax rules, which currently allow US digital economy giants to report their income from across the bloc in any...

Germany’s economy minister on Saturday suggested tightening the rules on foreign investment, following concern over Chinese influence on European firms. Last month, it emerged that Chinese billionaire Li Shufu had quietly bought a near-10-percent stake worth around €7.2 billion ($8.9 billion) in German car giant Daimler — making him the group’s largest shareholder. “We must always adapt our law on the external economy according to new developments, including the threshold at which (the government) can become involved,” Economy Minister Brigitte Zypries told the weekly Der Spiegel. Currently, Berlin can scrutinize a transaction and possibly prevent it, if the foreign investor...

Berlin must work with Paris to improve and deepen the European Union, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel urged as his Social Democrats weigh renewing a coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel. France and Germany, once bitter enemies, “have a joint responsibility to develop all of Europe further,” he told AFP, highlighting “reform of the economic and monetary union” as a top priority. Historically, the two countries have been the powerhouse of the economic integration project that became the European Union; but French President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to shore up the 19-nation euro single currency area and deepen European integration are on...

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel is considering joining French President Emmanuel Macron at the World Economic Forum in Davos next week in what could turn into an epic clash of competing world views with U.S. President Donald Trump. Merkel, who has been struggling to put together a government since a German election in September, had been expected to skip the annual gathering of leaders, CEOs, bankers and celebrities in the Swiss Alps for a third straight year. But after clinching a preliminary coalition agreement with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) on Friday, German officials said Merkel could travel...

The progressive billionaire speculator George Soros has said he will ‘fight back’ against the “dominant ideology” of nationalism, whilst admitting that favoured globalist project the European Union is “on the verge of a breakdown”. Wistfully writing that Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) once ‘epitomised the optimism about the spread of Western-style democracy’ after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Financial Times described the scrutiny the global progressive body is experiencing amidst a wave of patriotism and populism and the ‘wilting’ attraction of the leftist agenda. Soros, alluding to the collapse of the USSR, told the left-liberal newspaper: “It’s déjà...

European Union Council President Donald Tusk on Tuesday urged Britain to change its mind about leaving the bloc next year, as time to conclude a Brexit agreement runs short and EU leaders await more details on how the country sees their future ties. Britain is set to leave the EU on March 29, 2019, but the complex negotiations on its costly departure and future EU-U.K. relations must be concluded by October to leave parliaments time to ratify any agreement. […] “If the U.K. government sticks to its decision to leave, Brexit will become a reality, with all its negative consequences,...

When Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the US last January, politicians in Berlin worried that it could have a dramatic impact on relations between the two allies. A year on, there are reasons for optimism, as well as continued concern. […] Top of the list of German concerns about a Trump administration were his insinuations that the US would no longer automatically come to the defense of Europe in the event of an attack on a NATO member. And the fact that he repeatedly barracked Germany for its trade surplus with the US in his...

France does not want to treat its workers like the UK and US, with zero hours contracts and no protection for the unemployed, Philippe Martinez, the head of the hardline CGT, France’s biggest trade union, has said. Last year, Martinez and his leftist union fought an unsuccessful battle with President Emmanuel Macron over a raft of reforms aimed at freeing up France’s rigid jobs market. Those controversial reforms cut into the power of France’s trade unions and made it easier for firms to lay off staff. Martinez believes Macron is influenced by the “Anglo-Saxon” model but he does not want...

Donald Tusk, the EU Council president and former prime minister of Poland, warned on Wednesday that Warsaw’s Law and Justice (PiS) government could push the country towards what is already being dubbed in Brussels as “Polexit.” In an interview in Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, Tusk said that “for PiS the benefit of being in the EU boils down to the balance of payments, with a complete disregard for other benefits like the common market, legal order, guaranteed security, etc.” He added: “As long as we’re not a net contributor, the game is worth the candle for them. So I can...

France’s Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire on Wednesday urged Germany to plow more investments into major European projects and allow wages to rise, as part of Berlin’s contribution to boosting growth in Europe. “France has taken on its European responsibilities, in reducing its public spending and reforming its economy. We expect Germany to join the movement, by adopting more offensive wage policies and investing more,” he told Die Zeit weekly at a time when Chancellor Angela Merkel is battling to form a new coalition government. Le Maire’s call comes at a sensitive time for Merkel, as public spending is a...

French President Emmanuel Macron has offered a very special gift to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, during his trip to China — a horse from France’s famed Garde Républicaine. The nine-year-old gelding bred in Normandy, named Vesuve de Brekka, is trained and ready for use. […] The tweet says the horse is “a symbol of our friendship.” Macron hopes for big things in return. On Tuesday, the second day of his visit, Macron said the two nations should “settle on an economic and geopolitical plan for the affairs of our world.” …

Globalist French President Emmanuel Macron told citizens in European Union (EU) countries to resist “nationalists and skeptics” and support him as he pushes for greater integration of the bloc. Breaking from tradition by addressing “fellow citizens” in the EU rather than solely the citizens of the country he was elected to govern, President Macron told television viewers on Sunday evening: “2018 is a very special year, and I will need you this year.” “I need for us, together, not to give way on anything, neither to nationalists nor to the skeptics,” he said, in a thinly veiled attack on Central...

French President Emmanuel Macron has come under fire over his policy on jobless benefits after a press leak pointed to plans to tighten monitoring of people on the dole. The investigative weekly Canard Enchainé, citing an internal memo, said those receiving jobless benefits would be required to submit a monthly report on their job-hunting efforts. Politicians both to the left and the right of the centrist president assailed the idea of a monthly reporting requirement, with the Socialist Party tweeting that it was first mooted by the head of the employers’ federation, Pierre Gattaz. But Macron defended the plan in...

German carmakers Daimler and BMW said Friday a new sweeping US tax reform giving major breaks to corporations will add hundreds of millions of euros to their 2017 earnings. The controversial tax overhaul signed into law Friday by billionaire President Donald Trump will slash the US corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. As a result, Daimler projected its net income to grow by around 1.7 billion euros ($2 billion) this year. "The reduction of the federal corporate income tax rate... results in an income tax benefit increasing the net income of the group for the year 2017...

Last week, the finance ministers of Europe's five biggest economies — Germany, France, the UK, Spain and Italy — wrote an anxious letter to their American colleague, US Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, and copied it to all senior Republican politicians in the Congress and Senate. The letter's thrust: The draft US tax bill, if passed as written a week ago, would represent a break with global fair-taxation rules as applied to corporations, and represent a thinly disguised form of trade war. "The United States is Europe's single most important trade and investment partner," the finance ministers wrote. "It is important...

Over 100,000 foreign nationals across all age groups were allocated a PPS Number in 2016, an increase of 13% on the year before. The latest report from the Central Statistics Office looked into the number of PPSN (Personal Public Service Number) allocations to foreign nationals over the past six years — from 2011 to 2016. It found that there was a total of 107,767 allocations to foreign nationals across all of last year. […] Just under 52,000 of all the allocations in 2016 registered some form of employment activity that year — marking a 4.1% increase on 2015. In terms...

The German government says it backs an “open and free internet” following the U.S. decision to repeal net neutrality rules. A spokeswoman for the Economy Ministry said Friday that Germany had “taken note” of the U.S. move but declined to comment directly on it. However, spokeswoman Beate Baron said the German government supports rules introduced across the European Union last year forbidding discriminatory access to the internet. …

The European Union’s top five economies are warning the United States that its massive tax overhaul could violate some of its international obligations and risks having “a major distortive impact” on trade. In a letter to U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, the finance ministers of Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain wrote they had “significant concerns” about three tax initiatives in particular. In the letter, seen by The Associated Press, the five wrote that “it is important that the U.S. government’s rights over domestic tax policy be exercised in a way that adheres with international obligations to which...

France’s finance minister unveiled Friday a decree that would make it the first nation in Europe to allow the trading of some non-listed securities using the blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrencies. The decree, presented by Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire to the government, should enter into force by July at the latest and will apply to non-listed financial securities that EU law doesn’t require to be traded via an intermediary, a market worth potentially more than €3 trillion. In particular, this includes shares in mutual and hedge funds, negotiable debt securities, and unlisted stocks and bonds. Blockchain technology debuted in...