bailout fatigue

The Cypriot banking system is insolvent. Heaping private losses onto taxpayers is bad public policy. Let's start with those two statements, because starting there makes clear that forcing losses onto bank creditors was the only choice in…

This morning we learned that after hours of tense negotiation, Europe has hammered out a 10bn euro "bailout" of Cyprus. I put the term bailout in quotes because the key feature of this deal is the bail-in of Cypriot depositors to the tune…

A reader of our blog here at Credit Writedowns recently wrote to me, detailing why Italians voted as they did in the recent general election. Her view speaks more to a rejection of corporatism and corruption than austerity.

This weekly is a follow-up post to the daily I wrote on Greece earlier in the week. As I indicated then, my position on Greece has always been that eurozone leaders would be loathe to 'kicking Greece out of the euro zone". The talk of a…

In February, I penned a piece on how and why Greece will exit the eurozone since there seemed to be so much chatter about the coming Grexit. However, as I have said in the past, a Grexit will not happen any time soon. I strongly believe…

Mired in the worst recession since the 1970s, Portugal's governing coalition is going to turn up the austerity dial even higher. The goal is to reduce the Portuguese deficit to 4.5% of GDP in 2013 in order to be in a position to switch out…

According to a questionnaire given by the leftist German party "Die Linke", German pensioners have seen a significant erosion of their purchasing power over the last twelve years. Average pension payments this year after deducting all…

The Financial Times is reporting that Portugal is likely to need an extension of the three-year bailout plan it received in 2010. This is a disaster for the euro zone and I am writing this post to explain why. The most pressing issue is…

Last week I promised to provide a little more insight into what the ECB is doing with its OMT program and what this should mean for the euro, economic growth, and European sovereign bond markets. This weekly post is dedicated to that theme.…

I'm back from vacation! The links are light today so let me give you an added few tidbits from this week's Gold member post on the euro zone.