Anglo Saxon is more often used in a negative sense by the French, as in Anglo Saxon bankers or Anglo Saxon conspiracies (to keep the French down). Just recently Le Monde had the wonderful headline President Hollande Defends French Foie Gras against Anglo Saxon lobbies (the reference was to California s ban on foie gras under its animal cruelty laws).

Or perhaps his two advisers were speaking the truth. Maybe Romney really is feeling sentimental about the Anglo Saxon heritage, even as Asian power grows.

When Barnier was appointed, French President Nicolas Sarkozy described it as a defeat for Anglo Saxon capitalism. And so it has proved though perhaps not in the way he envisaged.

In fact, the phrase Anglo Saxon is not often heard any more in the US, where the majority of the population has not been of Anglo Saxon origin for a long time (which is also true of Britain s largest cities). When Americans use the term, it is usually to differentiate white Americans from the rest, which is not something that most Americans, least of all presidential candidates, would now choose to do in public.

Anglo Saxon financial institutions are known for their high dividend payout ratios. From a European perspective, the hunger for dividends and the emphasis on short term performance goals that characterize these institutions is both amazing and frightening.

One answer was provided by two of Mitt Romney s advisers, who stated that their candidate particularly valued the special relationship with Britain because of the shared Anglo Saxon heritage. This heritage, they claimed, was not sufficiently appreciated by the current president.

Two types of contemporary populist, however, stand out the ultra rich business tycoon and the clown. In the Anglo Saxon media world, Rupert Murdoch, owner of far too many newspapers, TV stations, and movie studios, is a typical populist tycoon.

They are likely to place much greater emphasis on consumer lending, especially mortgages and credit cards. With China s mortgage lending equal to only 10 of GDP, compared to 60 70 in the Anglo Saxon countries, there is huge opportunity for growth.

It is vital to remember that elections alone do not guarantee legitimacy, even if they are seen to be free and fair. Americans find it hard to understand this, as do others in the lucky democracies of the Anglo Saxon world.

The center of fiscal conservatism is Germany, while Anglo Saxon countries are still drawn to John Maynard Keynes. This division is complicating matters enormously, because close international cooperation is needed to correct the global imbalances that remain at the root of the crisis.

From the very beginning, these countries have represented the different aspects of Europe s identity Belgium, as an industrial country, continentally oriented, bilingual, and an intermediary with southern Europe, and the Netherlands with its strong agricultural and trading tradition and its Anglo Saxon and Atlantic orientation.

Free market thinking evolved from Anglo Saxon theorists (many from Scotland), who migrated and colonized territories, allowing fortunate individuals to assume that there were no limits to consumption. European continental thinking, responding to urbanization and the need for social order, emphasized institutional analysis of political economy.

Wealth taxes that target land and structures are arguably insulated from some of these concerns, and property taxes are relatively underused outside the Anglo Saxon countries. In theory, taxing immobile assets is less distortionary, though taxes on structures obviously can discourage both maintenance and new construction.

That means moving away from both the Anglo Saxon model of unregulated markets and the continental European model of deficit driven welfare states. Even an alternative Asian growth model if there really is one has not prevented a rise in inequality in China, India, and elsewhere.

Of course, revulsion for liberal economies and global markets is not confined to Germany. A similar sentiment formed one of the motives for the French and perhaps even the Dutch to reject the European Union s Constitutional Treaty, which some regarded as too Anglo Saxon in its economic liberalism.

The market economy is unsurpassed as a system for creating wealth, but only social compensation ensures that this wealth is distributed in a just manner. Europe s social market economies, far more than the Anglo Saxon neo liberal model, regard mitigating the inequalities created by markets as the state s duty.

The Social Democratic movement that shaped the modern European welfare state also originated in Germany. Although the country profited greatly from its reintegration into the world trading system after World War II, Germany never really came to terms with Anglo Saxon capitalism and skepticism about it still runs deep.

The formalistic civil law systems that prevail in continental Europe supposedly provide inadequate protection, so ownership remains concentrated. By contrast, Anglo Saxon common law systems empower judges to interpret open ended fiduciary rules on a case by case basis, thereby establishing legal precedents that are binding on managers.

More recently, Chirac s foreign minister, Michel Barnier, chastised the Romanian President Traian Barescu for lacking a European reflex, because Barescu plans to align Romania with Anglo Saxon liberal economic policies, and wants a special relationship with the US and UK to improve security in the Black Sea region.

Indeed, the ECB already has been driven onto the defensive by the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, financial market analysts, and Anglo Saxon economists in the wake of feverish discussion of the risk of deflation in the eurozone. But what is the appropriate eurozone inflation rate, given de facto economic stagnation?

In the industrial countries, expansionary budgets, coupled with low interest rates and elevated asset prices, has led to consumption or credit fueled growth, particularly in Anglo Saxon countries. Government savings have fallen, especially in the United States and Japan, and household savings have virtually disappeared in some countries with housing booms.

To enable market oriented economies to operate as they should and can, we need to return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo Saxon model of laissez faire and voodoo economics and the continental European model of deficit driven welfare states.

Even with OMTs, there remain crucial differences between the eurozone and the Anglo Saxon economies. Fixed exchange rates within the eurozone impose a constraint that simply does not exist in the UK or the United States, and quantitative easing by the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve is unconditional in nature.

Moreover, the impact of automatic stabilizers which enable the government to mobilize more or less fiscal resources, depending on economic conditions is more powerful in Western Europe than in most of the Anglo Saxon countries. Yet America s macroeconomic situation seems worse than Europe s in terms of consumption, banking, or employment and housing markets.

The response to the economic crisis in Thailand and Korea in the late 1990 s was emphatic preaching about the inherent superiority of the so called Anglo Saxon economic model. But this vision, in turn, also became problematic, and it was unambiguously discredited in 2007 2008, amid a massive outbreak of European and Asian Schadenfreude .

The European Constitution has little to do with any of these challenges, but a majority of French people has started questioning the strategy that has long masked France s diminishing status. They are alarmed by what they see as the domination of Anglo Saxon economic principles the last nail in the coffin of France s mythical exception.

But, to help consolidate its democracy, Georgia now requires support of a different nature, which Europe is better equipped to offer. The models for the balance of powers, the functioning of the judiciary, and local democracy must be inspired by European forms, which are closer to Georgian reality than Anglo Saxon models of the American type.

The public s lack of confidence in the EU s political leadership is totally justified. Instead of actually doing something constructive about Europe s essential problem reforming expensive welfare states to ensure global competitiveness Europe s political leaders are hiding behind straw man arguments about ultra liberal Anglo Saxon models, and pressuring the ECB to lower interest rates as if European economic weakness were Frankfurt s fault.

LONDON The European Central Bank s recently announced policy of bond buying, what it calls outright monetary transactions (OMTs) marks a convergence of European central banks with their Anglo Saxon counterparts. While the ECB s actions represent the best chance yet to put an end to a crisis that has been playing out since 2010, the Bank has markedly raised the stakes for governments.

The CDU FDP coalition prefers to sugarcoat the situation by convincing themselves of an Anglo Saxon conspiracy, abetted by those in the European crisis countries unwilling to perform and reform and whose only purpose is to make the Germans pay. So far, Merkel s coalition is like someone driving against traffic, dead certain that everyone else is going the wrong way.

It is an impressive list national responsibility for bank rescues the sanctity of the EU treaty s proscription of bailouts for governments rejection of European economic governance the ban on direct government financing by the European Central Bank refusal to support mutual liability for debt and, finally, the transformation of the ECB from a copy of the old Bundesbank into a European Federal Reserve Bank based on the Anglo Saxon model.

Not so long ago, Germans and other Continental Europeans pointed to America's working poor, as well as to the sorry state of public services in Britain, as defects that supposedly reflected the inevitable price Anglo Saxon countries must pay for their ruthless form of capitalism. Europeans (Germans in particular), on the other hand, enjoyed the Rhineland model a market economy that harnesses economic success to the cause of social justice.

That sort of responsiveness to popular sentiment in the legislative process gives the lie to the canard that French regulation is inflexible and hopelessly bureaucratic. In fact, the free market Anglo Saxon attitude sounds like nothing so much as the old prejudices about the French that have been around since the novelist Thackeray told English readers The Frenchman has after his soup a dish of vegetables, where you have one of meat.