God bless America (and let them take over the EU)

I have lived in the UK for four years, have been in France for four months and I think that I can confidently say the the EU is pretty much a farce. (I have never lived in Germany so perhaps this assessment is unfair to them...but who wants to be fair to the Germans anyway?) I spent all of last Friday putting together a "dossier" for the rental of an apartment for my bosses. They are both German, have an English company with a French client. Their company generates a revenue of hundreds of thousands of euros a year, their British bank was willing to give a letter of credit to the owners (one of the biggest French bank' s real estate arm) and yet the rental will be impossible because the Germans don't have a "livret de famille" (a bizarre and archaic jewel of the French administrative culture the point of which is I guess that you don't forget the name of your children or when your mother died) and besides "we just don't deal with foreign companies" - said the lady. When I pointed out to her that this is an EU company and was not established in a distant land like China or Russia she said: "if it were, I wouldn't even be talking with you right now". And that was that. The charming bit is, that the French are unbelievably racist and are apparently completely oblivious to it too. So the French are chauvinistic, incompetent and arrogant about it. The English on the other hand are relatively polite and condescendingly friendly to the foreigner, but they just want to stay out of the whole muck, thank you very much, cannot fathom why anybody would want to deal in those bloody euros as opposed to those "spiffing pounds sterling" and are just permanently "afraid they cannot do anything about anything, ma'am" (especially if they are in the customer services business).

There is no love lost between the French and the English (not to speak of the Germans and either of those) but more importantly: for all the EU Directives and regulations on international collateral, taxation of savings or stock raising, if you try to put the cross-border life into practice, then each country's administration/banks/local authority/car authorities and the rest will do everything to curb your enthusiasm...the one thing that seems to be uniformly true everywhere is that they are light years away from "the land of the free(ish) and the home of the brave" in terms of understanding customers and markets. I think our best bet is to let the Yanks take over the services industry everywhere, including banks, insurance companies, real estate companies, you name it without letting them do the cooking. Honestly.