The first is that Europe can always find a way, usually at the last minute, of fudging any problem.
A transnational agency, Eurostat, oversees European economic statistics (although that did not prevent Greece from fudging its budget numbers before the euro crisis).
Those in work are seeing their incomes eaten away by rising prices.Faced with this ugly panorama, the government appears to have returned to its old trick of fudging the data.
They reconcile these two emotions by fudging adding a few points to a self-administered IQ test, for example, or forgetting to put a few coins in an honesty box.The amount of fudging that goes on depends on the circumstances.
There is plenty of scope for fudging any fall in value.Mutual funds which invest in bank loans have shown a 10% drop in value since last autumn, according to Lipper, a tracking service.
His was the second recent death of a war-crimes suspect.Jose Maria Aznar, Spain's conservative prime minister, sacked his budget director, Jose Barea, who had accused the government of fudging its deficit figures in order to qualify for European monetary union.
But no sooner did new tax and spending projections confirm that Germany was itself likely to miss the targets for 1997 (the benchmark year), than he began fudging with the best of them.First, Mr Waigel suggested raising cash by selling more shares in Deutsche Telekom.
Fudging the issue of Taiwan's status, he has described its ties with China as "special relations between two regions".He has argued that setting political differences aside will allow the two sides to build mutual trust.
This involves discounting the future liabilities at some rate to give them a present value.Inevitably, this creates the scope for fudging.
Beyond these Mr Netanyahu must promise to maintain the freeze.In this section The world's lungs Just do it Thanks Dad The wages of negligence Euro follies Keep on fudging Reprints Related items Hamas and the peace talks: Contradictory noisesSep 23rd 2010His coalition's hard wing may still howl.
Besides the risk of meeting close to a war zone, there is the even bigger worry that negotiators will agree to launch a new round only by fudging the agenda.
