Eastern Europe

As the property markets in Spain, Ireland, and Britain have dried up, a mass of Eastern European immigrants specialized in the building industry have found themselves without a stable source of income. The decline in remittances back to…

As the IMF say in their most recent staff report, the present economic crisis raises the question of whether potential output growth in Bulgaria in the years to come is going to be markedly lower than it was during the boom years. As the…

There is a good deal of speculation in the press at the moment over the tricky issue of whether or not Poland will be able to comply with its agreed deficit-reduction deadline on the basis of the latest budget proposals announced by the…

As Croatia enters the final stage of its EU membership talks, it is perhaps a fitting moment to review the other half of the picture, namely where the Croatian economy finds itself, and what the outlook might be for a continuing convergence…

It seems so if you read the latest from the Financial Times (hat tip Marshall Auerback): Iceland's banking sector is facing a fresh wave of losses after a court ruling raised doubts over the legality of billions of dollars of loans.…

There is a lot more exposure to Italy, Ireland and Spain but we know that Thailand was the ultimate source of the Asian Crisis. These things have a way of metastasising – and we have already seen the strains in Spain and Greece. You could…

A combination of ill-thought out comments by the new Hungarian government coupled with a surge in the Swiss franc is seeing the forint drop like a rock and is seeing CDS on Hungary explode. Many Hungarian mortgages are denominated in…

Highlights The US dollar and the yen are back in black today, as the markets are expressing doubts that the weekend EU/IMF plan will be successful in preventing eventual debt restructuring for Greece and the other peripherals.  While…

Well, I don’t know how many other people have noticed, but the Hungarian forint tanked today. This is the one I had been waiting for, and expecting. And precisely why did it tank? It tanked because Viktor Orban, Hungary’s…

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…