Lau here.
Europe is on fire.
And no, I’m not talking about the heat we had this summer. I mean literally burning. Parts of it, anyway.
What started in the middle of September with a teachers’ strike and a protest over conditions at a school outside Paris has since devolved into something else entirely: second-generation immigrants waving foreign flags, alongside far-left outfits, working their way methodically through every flammable object in the republic. Buses. School buildings. Street furniture. At a certain point they ran out of things to burn and started on the trees.
Throughout all of it, the mainstream press has stuck to its guns, almost admirably, and continues to file this under “protests over conditions in schools.”
Because of course nothing expresses your frustration at the bus being late quite like burning the bus. And nothing conveys your dissatisfaction with a shortage of teachers like (checks notes) beating up actual teachers in the street.
Here’s where the “protest” stands as of this week:
More than a thousand high schools disrupted at the peak, with 222 of them blockaded
Two dozen schools burned or ransacked
More than 700 police officers injured, along with 170 students and 65 staff
Over 5,000 arrests, nearly 90% of them minors
Now in Belgium too, with Liege, Mons, Charleroi and Brussels all hit in the past two weeks
I swear, some days living on the old continent feels a lot like this.
So understandably, when I found myself at a friend’s cocktail party over the weekend, the conversation drifted to European affairs. And one of the guests summed up the whole continent in four lines:
Europe has subcontracted its security to America. Its economy to China. Its energy to the climate lobby. And its labor force to the Islamists.
When I heard this, my mind went immediately to the chart below.
What you’re looking at there is the size of the American, European and Chinese economies over the past thirty years, measured in dollars.
And if you look a little closer, you’ll see that back in 2008 the European Union’s economy was actually bigger than America’s. Today it’s about two thirds as big, and for the past five years it has been trading second place with China.
Keep in mind, too, that there are a lot more people living in Europe than in the United States. The EU has roughly 449 million. America has about 342 million. So Europe has a third more people and produces a third less. Per person, that’s somewhere around half.
Mind you, this isn’t a bad quarter or a rough patch. This is seventeen years of stagnation on the continent that invented most of the modern world.
So what happened?
Nothing happened. Seventeen years is long enough to be a choice, and Europe made four of them (each one tying into something our man at the party said, as it happens).
I could write volumes on each. But to save you the time, here’s the whole thing in one diagram below.
So yeah. European priorities are a long way out of whack, and it shows.
In fact, we got more proof of that just last week.
While European schools burn and European economies continue to stall, this went on display inside the European Parliament in Strasbourg. A giant naked Donald Trump, covered in gold, perched on the shoulders of a frail little man sinking under his weight, with “The Orange Plague” written on the base for good measure.
Now, I’m not objecting to political satire. I’m actually a big fan of it. In fact, I like it so much that I would dearly love to see someone try wheeling in an equally flattering statue of the German chancellor, the French president, or the president of the European Commission.
But of course that will never happen. Not in a Europe where you can have your house raided for calling a politician fat, and where free speech comes under assault more or less daily.
We all understand that this has nothing to do with political satire. It’s about making a (misguided) political statement inside one of the European Union’s main institutions, aimed at a sitting American president, at a moment when Europe is holding about the weakest hand in its modern history.
I suppose that’s what happens after decades of rule by unelected officials and out-of-touch bureaucrats.
Civilizational exhaustion at its finest.
Now, if you’re reading this from the other side of the Atlantic, you may be wondering why any of it should be your problem.
Two reasons.
The first is arithmetic. The EU is America’s largest trading partner, and the last time Europe stalled, back in 2011, it knocked more than a full percentage point off American growth without a single thing breaking in America.
The second (and I’d argue the more important) is that the very policies that brought Europe to this point are currently on sale in the United States. Even leaving Mamdani’s New York out of it, each one comes with a constituency behind it and a think tank writing papers about it.
That’s why you shouldn’t see any of this as just another foreign news story. Think of it as a look down the road.
I’ll have more to say about all that in the coming weeks.
For now, last week’s pieces are linked below, including a guest essay from my friend Joel Bowman on a continent that’s busy running in the opposite direction.
A Whole Continent Is Running from Socialism
If you’ve been with me a while, you know socialism isn’t an abstraction to me. I was born in the USSR, in the last decade before it came apart, and grew up with the empty shelves, the lines around the block, and the almost comical gap between official propaganda and reality on the ground.
The Market Just Made a New High. It's All Resting on One Bet.
The S&P 500 set another record yesterday.
From the Comments
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate most about writing here is the conversation that happens in the comments. Here are eight that stood out last week, for different reasons. Each one links back to the piece it appeared on, so you can click through if you’re interested in the context.
Thanks again to everyone who left a comment last week. I read all of them, even the ones I don’t get a chance to reply to individually. Over the coming days, I’ll try to catch up on the questions and the longer threads.
Regards,
Lau Vegys
P.S. If you joined as a paid member last week, welcome aboard. A few links to help you find your way around:
The latest (September) issue, with our newest recommendation, an American rare earth company.
The first recommendation: a uranium play, with the full thesis, buy-up-to price, and tranche levels.
The second recommendation: a silver pick, same treatment.
The third recommendation: a U.S. gold developer trading at a fraction of what its ounces are worth.
The live portfolio: the scorecard of every open position and where each one stands.
The first Special Report: a deep dive into uranium and the opportunity behind it.
What is happening in Europe is as sad as it is funny. Disincentivize the native population and incentivize the immigrants. Suppress free speech too. Now they're pushing war with Russia as a fix to shooting themselves in both feet. Europe deserves to be overrun by the same people they CRUSADED against just a few centuries ago.
Those four points are deadly accurate. On point 4, I wrote this on another site last week:
The Christian Church is now little more than a symbolic remnant of western civilization that, for 1400 years fought to keep Islam confined elsewhere and thus survived. The west now, after decades of illiberal rot, institutional capture, cultural and economic vandalism, has consciously opened the gates and bankrupt welfare-state coffers to Islam and, led by elected Jacobins and Bolsheviks terrified of insulting them, have consigned the future of the west to Islam. Meanwhile, Europe is inching towards civil war and the UK may already be in one with the state apparently on the side of Islam. In such a self-degraded culture, honesty on this question is not to be found on ballots of electable candidates or "politically acceptable" parties.