What a lovely August it has been in Europe. The London Olympics are being hailed as a great games…maybe the greatest (didn’t they say that about Sydney too?), the rioters in Greece have gone quiet, the French are at the beach, the Germans are in Majorca, the Spanish are in denial. All is well with the world.

But August is coming to a close and there is a busy schedule ahead for the Eurolanders.

Just for fun, let’s take a look and see what could possibly go astray. Starting alphabetically.we have…

France: The French government is scheduled to unveil its 2013 budget in September. This is an easy one to predict. Soak the rich, succor the poor.

But the rich can flee. The poor and the middle class cannot. So succor the poor and bludgeon the bourgeoisie. The markets will be disappointed if there are not large spending cuts and realistic austerity measures. But austerity is a dirty word, especially in southern Europe and the bare mention of it often results in unfortunate things like riots, burning tires, bruised gendarmes and such.

So like all good leftist politicians who have never had a real job in their technocratic lives, Monsieur Hollande will opt for the softer options while he would do well to remember what the Iron Lady (Maggie Thatcher) had to say about socialism and other people’s money. What…you don’t remember? Let us repeat it here because it’s worth repeating.

“The problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of other peoples’ money”.

Watch out for France. It reminds us of can of paint perched precariously upon a wobbly ladder…a veritable accident waiting to happen. Maybe it will just take a burly German with one too many steins in hand to bump that ladder. And speaking of Germany…there’s lots going on there too. More on that to come.