Baltics

Rumors of an impending bank failure in Latvia over the weekend led to a run on bank machines. In many places it was impossible to get money.

It is far from clear that the current level of Estonian CDS prices risk in in any more satisfactory way than they did at the height of the crisis, since membership of the Eurozone has brought with it both positives and negatives. The 0.28%…

Edward Hugh writes of an unstable combination which make the countries in Eastern Europe highly vulnerable to both a renewed deterioration in sentiment and an external economic slowdown of the sort we could see following a disorderly Greek…

The BELLS are a group of four countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) who in their wisdom decided to adopt and then stick “come hell or high water” to a currency peg with to Euro. Thus was opened one of the more interesting and…

A year ago, in March 2010, Iceland’s economy was so small that it did not warrant much attention when 93% of its voters rejected the Social Democratic-Green government’s surrender to demands by Gordon Brown and the Dutch, the European Union…

By Jeffrey Somers and Michael Hudson A spectre is haunting Europe: the illusion that Latvia’s financial and fiscal austerity is a model for other countries to emulate. Bankers and the financial press are asking governments from Greece to…

By Edward Hugh “If you know your Thucydides and the Melian dialogue you know that small countries rely most on everyone following the rules. That’s why we follow the rules. If there are no rules, then the big will do what they want,”…

The 30-year campaign of the wealthy to rig our economic system – especially the tax component – for their own benefit will accelerate with the GOP capture of the House of Representatives and the likely capture of the presidency and Senate…

I think this trio of videos from Latvia really puts the whole Irish crisis in perspective. After a spectacular property bubble, Latvia imploded in 2008. I was calling the Baltics the next Argentina. Indeed, by early 2009 we eventually saw…

by Edward Hugh Just to follow up on my recent long Estonia post, a couple of new data points have caught my attention recently: the sharp rise in Estonian inflation and the ongoing goods trade deficit. In the first place it is worth…