> This "releases share-holder value" and is the decisive switch to the
> domination of a pure anglo-saxon type of finance capital dominated economy.
I don't buy this. There's not a great deal of evidence that Eurocapital is going down the US road to rentier ruin and foreign indebtedness; many of the alleged spin-offs are actually reallocations of capital, i.e. cross-shareholdings are as dense as ever, but are mediated by venture capital funds, holding companies, and the like. What's happening is that what used to be very tight-knit national networks are turning into multinational ones; EU finance capital remains tightly integrated to the industrial base, via local and state banks, nationalized health insurance and pension systems, as well as a rapidly expanding European Investment Bank (200 billion euros of publicly-owned assets, the biggest single investor in Eastern Europe, and growing 30% a year). But for true rentier decadence, the Eurobourgies would have to completely bulldoze the welfare state, smash IG Metall, and raise interest rates to 6%. Rolf Breuer & Co. are smarter than this.
-- Dennis