austerity

Recent Bulgarian developments are worth discussing. Austerity just brought down another European government, as Prime Minister Borisov and his cabinet resigned this week amidst rising popular protests against his policies. But the story…

Eurozone policy seems driven by market sentiment. This column argues that fear and panic led to excessive, and possibly self-defeating, austerity in the south while failing to induce offsetting stimulus in the north. The resulting deflation…

Many investors understandably have not focused on France. The threat of scandal in Spain, the need for yet another round of government support for Italy's third largest bank and the country's upcoming election have commanded attention. What…

The European Union released figures for Q4 2012 GDP today and they were awful. GDP fell by 0.6% in the euro zone and 0.5% in the entire EU. Stock markets are getting clobbered on the news and the euro is selling off. This is not unexpected…

In November, soon after France and Belgium were forced to pump another 5.5 billion euros into bailed out lender Dexia, the ratings agency Moody's stripped France of its AAA sovereign debt rating. The interesting bit was that Moody's…

In the links this morning, I linked to a Handelsblatt interview with the head of Austria's social democratic EU parliamentarians. The overall gist of his comments were that he believed the EU budget was 'catastrophic' because it was in…

According to Greece's finance ministry, Greece's government was able to record its first primary surplus in years. This is a measure of a budget based on revenue minus expenditure excluding interest costs and is commonly thought of a…

Earlier in the week, I wrote a post on Latvia which explained why there is limited applicability of Latvia's travails with austerity for larger economies in the euro zone. One place where Latvia does have applicability, however, is Ireland.

In today's links were two articles which highlighted the juxtaposition between declining sovereign yields and worrisome economic fundamentals in Spain and Portugal.

I had intended to write this post yesterday morning. However, after the bank scandal in Italy and the surprise drop in US GDP, I waited a day. The gist of what I intend to say here is that Italy is in the process of decoupling from Spain.…