2018

This morning, US stock futures are pointing to triple-digit losses after declines in Europe and in Asia. And the European indices are at a one-year low. There are quite a number of proximate causes for the weakness. But the overriding fear,…

I know I should be writing about Italy today since the country was downgraded Friday night to Baa3 by Moody's. That puts it one notch away from junk and potentially makes the country ineligible for quantitative easing, were it to come to…

I've written two posts about the history of support for the EU. And I covered the ground through the EU-15 period when Austria, Finland, and Sweden entered the EU.  Today, I want to continue the post series with the introduction of the next…

Today's daily is a grab bag of topics that I have been thinking about over the past week. I have a backlog of stories from earlier in the week I missed. So let me add these into the mix today. But first up today is this chart from German…

A segment on the Dutch news program Nieuwsuur prompted this post. Earlier today, I was looking at 10-year yields and noticed Italy jumping to over 3.7%. As I write this, the yield is 3.713%. And that's up from a low of 1.633% in the past…

The big news this morning is the slowing growth in China. The third quarter numbers showed the country growing at its slowest pace in a decade. And the questions now are whether this slowdown continues and what China does about it. This is…

So, yesterday I parsed the EU sentiment data from the EU's early expansion period. And what we saw was rising support for the EU right up until 1991. But after that time, support for the EU collapsed and has never recovered. I want to look…

Since 1974, the European Commission has published a twice-yearly comprehensive poll to gauge sentiment on various social and economic issues in the European Union. Today, I downloaded every one of these polls and have been busy parsing the…

Today's daily post is going to be more of a theme post, largely because the news flow warrants it. I have at least three articles in mind, which were published over the last 24 hours that touch on the theme of a building illegitimacy in…

If one thinks of it as a car-replacement service, Lyft could now work as an effective replacement for driving to work or as a replacement for a park and ride commute for many people.