bailout

Last year, we saw a sea change in official German policy regarding the euro crisis and inflation. The German government came out in favour of accepting higher inflation domestically in Germany as a sacrifice for eurozone wage and price…

Portugal is going to market with a 10-year sovereign bond issue, its first since 2011. I think this is a pretty big deal. Think of it as a complete return to public market access for the Portuguese government, one of the critical…

I have been saying for some time now that Germany is concerned about its own public finances. So it is good to see that Angela Merkel is now confirming this. According to the Telegraph, Merkel believes that Germany simply doesn't have the…

A recent ECB household-wealth survey was interpreted by the media as evidence that poor Germans shouldn’t have to pay for southern Europe. This column takes a look at the numbers. Whilst it’s true that median German households are poor…

In all of the bailed out nations of the euro zone, sovereign default is the worry as this can create a cascading knock-on effect like the failure of Creditanstalt in 1931 that ushered in the banking crisis of the Great Depression. We see…

I was on BNN's Headline with Howard Green yesterday talking about the Fed's QE program. I said that QE would be tapered and I believe it will likely end at the end of this year if the economy does not slip into recession. This is the…

The European Union is an existential crisis because its crowning achievement, the single currency, has come under assault from all sides. The continued existence of the Euro has even been called into question as country after country within…

Depositors in Eurozone banks are facing a steep learning curve on just exactly what deposit insurance means. This column points out that the precedents set in Cyprus and Iceland show that deposit insurance is only a legal commitment for…

Back to the Willem Buiter interview in Financiëele Dagblad. Here Buiter continues with some comments on Jeroen Dijsselbloem's admission that bail-ins will be the preferred vehicle for conducting rescues going forward so as not to burden the…

Here are some quick points on the Cyprus deal which the Eurogroup agreed to last night. The agreement outline is very much along the lines of what I have been recommending regarding bail-in guidelines and is therefore a much fairer deal…