Baltics

This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros. Hard on the heels of yesterday’s Latvian GDP numbers we now have news that Estonia’s economy shrank at the slowest annual pace in a year at the end of 2009 as a modest recovery in…

There are a lot of interlocking threads in the Greek saga. One consistent theme that ties all of the different threads together is the fragility of complex systems. In our globalized and complex world of finance and banking, every major…

This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros. Well, as we say in English, it never rains but it pours. Latvia, which has had the deepest recession of all 27 European Union member states, contracted by nearly 18 per cent in the…

This comes via the FT: Latvia’s prime minister has warned Swedish banks they risk choking off recovery in the Baltic state’s crisis-hit economy unless they resume lending. Banks such as Swedbank and SEB, which dominate the Latvian…

This comes from Bloomberg News: Estonia is set to meet its goal of adopting the euro in 2011 because of the Baltic country’s work on fulfilling fiscal requirements, European Union Economic Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said.…

The last I had heard about a prospective Gulf currency union came yesterday morning in a note by Marc Chandler who is the Chief Strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman’s FX group.  He indicated that he was more optimistic about a Gulf…

The Irish government announced draconian spending cuts of 6 billion Euros in order to stave off a debt crisis in the worst modern-day downturn in the nation’s history.  Even so, Irish government bond yields have been rising relative to…

Moody’s anticipates continued losses at Danske Bank, SEB, and Swedbank due to large exposure outside of the Nordic markets.  In particular, exposure in the Baltics is likely to lead to continued writedowns for Nordic banking…

This post from November 2009 is a reminder of how things looked in the sovereign debt crisis just a few months ago.

Marshall Auerback here.  I want to add a few thoughts on the situation in Latvia which Ed has highlighted on several occasions. His allusion to Argentina to describe the situation in the Baltics last July was on the money. I have a solution…