bailout

The events surrounding Spain have caused me to throw in the towel on European policy makers. It is clear to me that the events on the ground are moving too quickly for them to adjust their policy stances enough to prevent more catastrophic…

In late April, I wrote a post predicting why the EU is temporarily dropping the 3% hurdle. The gist of the post was that in the euro zone and in Europe more generally, the economy was decelerating much faster than anticipated. To get ahead…

Spain is now ranked ninth for default probability just behind Ireland, with an expected 40% chance of default in the next five years. The Spanish 10-year bond yield has fallen back to 6.70% after reaching a record euro zone high of 6.834%…

Two weeks ago I argued Europe is on the brink of something very big. But the Spanish deal is not it. After the deal, markets rallied initially but soon afterwards, Spanish and Italian sovereign bonds sold off and are at the still elevated…

As I first described here in late April, the Spanish bailout is looking like a bailout of Spanish banks instead of the sovereign. Spain's debt to GDP is still relatively low and so the thinking is that the sovereign debt problems there are…

As I indicated on 27 April on Why the Spanish bailout may be to recap the banks instead of sovereign, I don't believe the Europeans are going to bail out the Spanish sovereign. Instead, given that Spain has low sovereign debt to GDP, the…

Since I have been off for a few days I have a lot of links today, probably too many for one big linkfest but here they are. I will leave out more than usual to strip it down to the most salient ones. There's a lot on Spain and India in…

The Spanish banking system is insolvent and the Spanish government simply does not have the wherewithal to clean it up. This is the problem in Spain that has come to a head, particularly now after the rescue of Bankia, Spain's fourth…

Ever more voices are talking about the possibility of Greece leaving the euro zone despite the fact that there is no formal mechanism for a euro are member country to exit the single currency. This talk, however, makes sense because…

This is not a good day for Spain. The day began with the EU Commission revising its estimates for the Spanish economy. The contraction is now expected to be considerably deeper. Spain unveiled its new efforts to address the banking…