French promise to punish Les Rosbifs for not supporting the euro
Les Rosbifs seem mortally to have offended the French by refusing to take part in the eurozone's €440bn loan guarantee scheme. Jean-Pierre Jouyet, head of the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, has said...
View ArticleIreland's love affair with masochism
A more shocking set of numbers is hard to imagine. The latest bailout package for Ireland's insolvent banks will raise the nation's budget deficit from an already alarmingly high 12 per cent to a jaw...
View ArticleIssing blasts Europe's drift to fiscal union
As the eurozone stumbles towards the establishment of joint liability for the sovereign debt of its 17 member nations, Otmar Issing, the German economist and former director of the European Central...
View ArticleIf the euro is in such a mess, how come it's so strong?
It's a paradox, but with the eurozone debt crisis threatening abject disaster, the currency itself has rarely been stronger. True enough, it's come off the boil a bit of late, but the big picture of...
View ArticleReturn to sovereign currencies wouldn't be as traumatic as assumed
The currency team at Bank of America Merrill Lynch have taken a stab at what "fair value" would be for the major legacy currencies in the euro in the event of a breakup. And they've come up with some...
View ArticleBritain could never have voted for a treaty that condemns much of Europe to...
In all the hullabaloo over Britain's use of the veto, and whether the UK has once more cut itself adrift from the rest of Europe, it seems to have been forgotten what was actually being voted on here –...
View ArticleIMF chief offers nothing but platitudes
Christine Lagarde's blood-curdling warning of a 1930s style depression is all very well as far as it goes, but she fails to provide anything in the way of solutions. After a brief interlude in which...
View ArticleBeware the economics as Irish growth again stalls
So much for the Irish economic miracle – regularly cited by eurozone leaders as a shining example of how you can combine austerity with membership of European Monetary Union and still get growth. Er,...
View ArticleIMF scratches at the surface of the eurozone debt crisis
So has Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, achieved the "Washington moment" she hoped for? In her own mind, she believes she has. The IMF's spring meeting in...
View ArticleWhy the euro is doomed to fall apart: it was an incredibly stupid idea in the...
The euro is doomed to fall apart: no, not because I'm some nasty man in UKIP but because the basic idea was such a terrible one. Our chart above (from JP Morgan Asset Management, which you can see more...
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