credit default swaps

Whether the writedowns make investors feel relieved because of the alleged balance sheet transparency remains to be seen. However, the balance sheet woes at Erste highlights how active banks within the EU are in cross-border relationships.

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%…

Here’s my take on the wideners.

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 question is not whether Greece will default but what will happen once it has. If Greece defaults but stays in the euro, not only will it not solve the underlying lack of competitiveness, but markets will immediately turn their attention…

Young people and the elderly throw incendiary devices and yogurt to protest Greece's proposed austerity measures.

I expect a soft restructuring sometime in 2011 followed by a certain degree of dithering and a hard restructuring down the line. But, of course, the tail risk is there.

While I acknowledge the real fears that central bankers have about the impact of a restructuring, this political dithering is making matters considerably worse. Clearly, burden sharing is needed and that means bondholders will have to take…

In my view, a CDS trigger could be a Lehman-style event, yes. Moreover, only a hard restructuring – meaning principal reduction would actually have any meaningful impact on peripheral CDS or interest rates. So, I expect the euro zone…

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of talking on CNBC along with Marc Chandler of Brown Brothers Harriman about the European sovereign debt crisis. I also wrote a piece in the New York Times about the same issue, concentrated on Greece. While…