2011

Greece to front-load austerity, troika to return | Reuters "Greece pledged to bring forward painful austerity measures on Tuesday, convincing international lenders to return to Athens early next week…

European market consolidates ahead of FOMC decision; GBP softer after potential for QE increases . Operation Twist is likely to be supportive of the dollar; dovish actions include QE and inflation target. Hungarian central bank likely to…

Here’s a great chart just released by the International Monetary Fund for Greece, Portugal, and Ireland as well as Japan, the US and the UK. Note that almost half of the US federal government debt is held by the Federal Reserve and the…

Countries like Slovenia have their own problems. As the euro zone economy worsens, their willingness to support bailouts decreases. And the European institutional principle of unanimity will almost certainly mean that bailout fatigue leads…

I want to highlight three things here from Wolfgang Munchau on the euro zone because he reaches conclusions I have reached. Below are excerpts of what Munchau writes about a Greek default, Italian solvency and euro zone dissolution.

At the beginning of the year, the 60-day correlation between Irish and Greek 10-year yields was above 0.90. Today, the correlation stands at -0.42. At the same time, Irish 10-year bonds yields have become significantly more correlated with…

10% ‘internal devaluation’ in Germany took eight years. We are talking now about 20-30% wage and price cuts in Greece and Ireland. How realistic is that?

Reuters has reported that Bank of China, a dealer in China's foreign exchange market, has stopped doing foreign exchange forwards and swaps with several European banks. Separately, sources say the European banks involved are Societe…

Here’s what I am hearing. At the end, I will tell you how far-fetched I think these things are.

Will the Senate Forget the Lessons from Japanese-American Internment? » Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union "The U.S. Senate is considering the unthinkable, changing…