Political Economy

It occurs to me that the sovereign debt levels in Cyprus are unsustainable. As I have said previously, I believe this will lead to a government bond default. And given that capital controls already exist, the move to eurozone exit is much…

Paul De Grauwe, a professor at the London School of Economics, told Tom Keene on "Bloomberg Surveillance" today that the euro area is at risk because "so many big mistakes have been made." De Grauwe went on to say that the "ineptitude of…

The European Commission issued the following press release after the Cypriot Parliament rejected a proposed bank levy to recapitalize its banking sector.

the gist here is that 4.5bn euros in funds were alleged to have been shifted out of Cyprus just prior to the announcement of the country's bank holiday. The article alleges that government officials were prominent amongst those sending…

Today Cyprus voted to reject the deposit tax with 36 MPs voting against and 19 abstaining. One MP was absent. No one voted for the deposit tax. And so this trial balloon of bailing in insured depositors has crashed and burned spectacularly.…

Despite calls from the junior coalition partner the Lib Dems, some businesses and the IMF, we expect Osborne and the Tory-led UK government to maintain the fiscal strategy of austerity. The austerity is counter-intuitively (for some),…

This is a thought experiment. I have written in favour of private sector involvement in the past. And I don't think this is a controversial topic. Where I do have problems with the Cypriot bank saver's tax is in terms of property rights and…

The latest news is the bank levy on small deposits could be lifted. As Ryan Avent just tweeted, it was insane in the brain to begin with, wasn't it?

The latest news out of Cyprus is that the Cyrpiot government has delayed the vote on a bank bailout and savers tax by one day to Monday and that it has also extended the bank holiday from just Monday to Tuesday as well. In my view, the news…

The difficulty in making sense of the results of the Italian election has produced the common imagery of a clown to capture the comic Grillo, who appears to be the most unlikely politician since Lech Walesa, the unemployed electrician that…