France may look like the sick of man of Europe, but Germany's woes run deeper, rooted in mercantilist dogma, the glorification of saving for its own sake, and the corrosive psychology of ageing.

"Germany considers itself the model for the world, but pride comes before the fall," says Olaf Gersemann, Die Welt's economics chief, in a new book, The Germany Bubble: the Last Hurrah of a Great Economic Nation.  (Released last month in a German edition, hopefully an English edition will soon follow.)

Mr. Gersemann says the Second Wirtschaftswunder - or economic miracle - from 2005 onwards has "gone to Germany's head". The country has mistaken a confluence of exceptional events for permanent ascendancy. It cannot continue to live off exports of capital goods to China and the BRICS as they hit the buffers, or by stealing a march on southern Europe through wage compression, a zero-sum game.

Marcel Fratzscher, head of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), makes a parallel critique in his new book, Die Deutschland Illusion, no translation needed.

It is the self-deception of a country "resting on its laurels," prisoner of the "household fallacy" that economies are like family budgets, and falsely reassured by the misplaced flattery of foreigners who rarely look under the bonnet at the German engine below.

The Russian economy is highly dependent on oil and gas exports, and reducing Russian oil and gas exports would be the most direct way to cause pain to the Russian leadership. However, Europe is heavily dependent on Russian gas and oil, particularly gas.

The countries in the EU did not need to be in this position, because the EU has plenty of gas reserves that could be economically tapped using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Because of the environmental lobby, though, the EU has allowed itself to become dependent on foreign energy sources -- particularly Russian.

Perhaps Peter Foster said it best in Canada's Financial Post on March 8:

"Europe's alternative-energy policy is in a shambles. The EU would be even more vulnerable but for a typically unanticipated example of free-market ingenuity: hydraulic fracturing and the boom in oil shale gas. But guess what: Greens are everywhere resolutely opposed to fracking, and nowhere more than in Europe. [L]ike their peace march colleagues half a century ago, they are ultimately dupes for an authoritarian agenda."

We've just made it really easy to give a friend the enlightening gift of a subscription to To The Point.  There's a new option on our subscription page:  a one month only non-recurring gift subscription for $9.99.

Now what could you give a friend that could more open his or her eyes to the world and give them more insight upon it than this - and for less than ten bucks?

It's also the way to bring a currently non-member friend to the To The Point Rendezvous in Las Vegas next month (see Rendezvous at Mandalay).

Here's how it works. 

China's Xi Jinping cannot make any serious concessions to Hong Kong's democracy movement. The Umbrella Revolution spreading from the affluent Island to the poorer quarters of Kowloon is an existential threat to the Chinese Communist Party.

"If he were to give way, it would set off contagion across the mainland," said George Walden, a veteran British diplomat who survived the Cultural Revolution inside China and later negotiated Hong Kong's future with Deng Xiaoping.

"The authorities see this as a matter of life and death, a fuse that can take down their world," said Zhao Chu, a Chinese columnist and star on Weibo - China's Twitter.

For China's Communist Party, the Hong Kong drama exposes its Catch-22, the impossible contradiction of its policies.  Yet the crisis comes at a treacherous moment for Hong Kong as well.

The enclave is up to its neck in China's credit bubble, channeling $1.2 trillion in hard currency loans to Chinese companies. The International Monetary Fund said the "extreme tail event" of a credit shock in China would "entirely wipe out capital in Hong Kong's banking system."

My first email early this morning (5/16) was to congratulate TTPer Karma Singh.  You've been reading his reports on India, the last one being India's Ronald Reagan (4/30/14).

The results of history's largest election - well over 500 million ballots cast - were announced today, giving India's Ronald Reagan - Narendra Modi - a stunningly massive victory. 

The corrupt Congress Party, which has monopolized power in India for most of the last 67 years, had its clock cleaned.  Modi has a mandate to govern India as strong as Nehru's Congress Party in the 1950s.

Nehru was a Third World Socialist who ruined India's economy.  Modi is and will do the opposite. India has much to be proud of today and much to look forward to.  Now we in America must hope that we'll follow in India's footsteps and elect a pro-capitalist pro-freedom pro-patriotism government, starting this November...

...But we certainly won't be taking those steps by electing an immoral idiot like Jeb Bush as president.