February 2010

Well, it isn’t only my German economy Q4 call, or my Japanese economy one which look OK right now, this Italian one also now seems very much to the point. In fact, as I suspected it might, the Italian economy went back into contraction…

This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros. A new kind of battle is going on out there at the moment. In what must surely be a new twist to the old dialectic of blow against blow argument, a combination of the internet age…

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie declared a “fiscal emergency” for the state of New Jersey today, announcing massive cuts to schools and hospitals.  The issue is less the budget for this year, which itself shows a deficit of $2.2…

This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros. Hard on the heels of yesterday’s Latvian GDP numbers we now have news that Estonia’s economy shrank at the slowest annual pace in a year at the end of 2009 as a modest recovery in…

Below is the text of the brief EU statement on Greece debt crisis. All euro area members must conduct sound national policies in line with the agreed rules. They have a shared responsibility for the economic and financial stability in…

This comes via BusinessWeek. I imagine it is part of the much anticipated interview in which Obama said bank executives making millions "is part of the free-market system”. President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising…

The following is a post by Marc Chandler, head of Brown Brother Harriman’s Currency Strategy Team. For more of BBH’s currency views, visit the website here. We have argued that the EU faces a horrible dilemma.  One horn is the moral…

The past week saw a huge fall in the number of persons making an initial filing for jobless claims. The U.S. Department of Labor reported: In the week ending Feb. 6, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 440,000,…

The latest on Greece, according to Le Figaro in France, is that the EU will announce an agreement on support for Greece. In the article, Hermann van Rompuy stresses that Greece did not ask for 'financial aide,' whatever that means. It…

There are a lot of interlocking threads in the Greek saga. One consistent theme that ties all of the different threads together is the fragility of complex systems. In our globalized and complex world of finance and banking, every major…