Final Word from Wednesday, September 20, 2017

For more than three years, ČMKOS labor leader Josef Středula did a better job of representing ČSSD's voters than Bohuslav Sobotka did. Středula was a staunch critic of the CNB's devaluation and picked up the cheap-labor issue much sooner than ČSSD. We commended him for this a year ago. But now Středula is starting to sound like a central banker who refuses to admit that those hurt most when the cheap-money era ends will be the very workers it was supposed to help, because they will be the first to lose their jobs and their underwater homes. Středula is even starting to sound like someone from ABB or Siemens - companies in the forefront of the effort to replace Czechs with robots. High wage demands as the world economy approaches the boiling point might benefit some workers in the short term, but they will cause all that much more pain later. A labor leader should see this, but perhaps not if he's mainly looking for his own short-term blast into politics. [Czech Republic Czech National Bank intervention commitment real estate property mortgage]