If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Talking points at the World Economic Forum 2010 included repairing the financial system and gauging the pace of weaning leading economies off stimulantsDavos used to be the place where the masters of the universe came for a bit of R&R [...]
If Greece is to recover, it needs EU support. Politics, more than economics, will determine its fateGreece has presented the eurozone with its biggest challenge since the global economic crisis erupted. The issues arising from the high levels of government borrowing and debt in Athens pose delicate problems for the European Central Bank and EU [...]
Booming deficits and bank bailouts mean sovereign bond problems are not only in Greece, but across the EUBooming deficits and the need to finance banking bailouts worth billions of pounds have turned sovereign bonds into the new junk debt market.Investors are now paying about $88,000 (£55,000) to insure $1m worth of debt issued by a [...]
A potentially decisive moment is approaching in the Cyprus settlement talks that started in September 2008. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, is to visit the divided island on Sunday and stay there until Tuesday. He does not, of c…
• Papandreou: ‘The problem we have is home-made’• Warning speculators are attacking Greece as weak link in euroGreece’s embattled prime minister, George Papandreou, has said his country must solve its deep-rooted budgetary problems itself, and warned that speculators were targeting Greece as the weak link in the eurozone.With Greek bonds again under ferocious pressure on [...]
How can Greece dig itself out of crisis? From the sunny shores of south-eastern Europe, it could do worse than take a look at the windswept, north-western corner of the continent and study what the Irish government is doing.
As I noted last week, Gre…
All developed economies are in deep trouble but bond traders don’t boycott countries, they just demand a higher interest rateOne of the world’s most influential bond traders, Bill Gross, says Britain’s growing debt mountain has left the economy lying “on a bed of nitroglycerine”. The economist Nouriel Roubini, known as Dr Doom, argues we should [...]
The memories came flooding back when I heard last weekend that Oskar Lafontaine, the leftwing German political leader, was withdrawing from national politics. Lafontaine is the sort of public figure that lazy journalists often call “firebrand&#…
There is a need to clear up some misconceptions about how Greece, or some other fiscal miscreant in the 16-nation eurozone, would be rescued by its partners in the event that it was unable to refinance its debts.
Quite a few commentators seem to think
Re-emerging Europe (Lex, FT)
Manufacturing interventions seen futile (Chris Bryant, FT)
EU struggles to ‘fly the flag’ in Haiti (EurActiv)