2011

Greece’s chance of default in the next five years has soared to 98 percent. The day of reckoning is now close at hand.

Leverage is the practice of holding a small amount of government currency in reserve against IOUs denominated in the state’s unit of account while promising to convert those IOUs to currency. This can lead to a “run” on private IOUs,…

David Blanchflower believes that Europe’s dithering has been fatal to the EMU. In an interview with Bloomberg Television, he said that Europe had an opportunity to get ahead of the sovereign debt crisis when it was just Greece. But now he…

As I see it, Japan’s problem was that during the 1980s it was so addicted to investment-led growth and artificially cheap financing that it misallocated capital on a massive scale and failed to include the resulting implicit losses in its…

Obama's job speech may save just one: his own - Opinion - Al Jazeera English "The Speech" did what it was supposed to do - associate President Barack Obama with a bold programme for creating…

It is high time politicians in Berlin to started to recognise that fiscal austerity is not the be all and end all of the policy issues they now face. Ireland is applying fiscal austerity, but this alone may well not be enough. A better…

EUR/USD breaches 1.35 (new trend low) and stocks hit 26-month low amid Greece default concerns. This week is likely to be dominated again by European headlines and US economic data reports. China data support soft landing scenario; Central…

FT.com - Police struggle to combat copper theft "The global boom in commodity prices is being felt in railway sidings, electricity substations and scrap yards as gangs of thieves scour the country for…

The mood in Germany is still about cutting Greece loose to save Italy and Spain

Treasuries Rise, 10-Year Yields Fall to Record on Greece Financial Turmoil - Bloomberg (tags: treasuries) Germany's Schaeuble tipped to succeed…