Eastern Europe

Today I saw two blurbs about Eastern Europe which I want to pull together with a bit of added commentary about the automakers in the U.S.  The first blurb had to do with the Baltics and their probable downgrade to junk by the ratings…

The first time I wrote about the Baltics was back in August in a post entitled, "Are the Baltics the new Argentina?." Since then, things have gotten progressively worse and the Baltics are clearly in Depression with Latvia leading the way…

This comes via Angus Robertson over at Research Recap: Fitch Ratings forecasts that Emerging Europe (EE) will suffer its steepest fall in real GDP since the collapse of the Communist planned economic system in the early 1990s, reflecting…

If you want to know what a modern-day depression looks like, try Ukraine. Growth in the ex-Soviet state, hit by shrinking markets for its steel and chemical exports, stood at 5.8 per cent of gross domestic product in the same period of…

Standard and Poors had their hands full today cutting credit ratings.  They cut Ireland. But, they also cut Hungary, putting the country just above a junk credit rating.  I don't think these will be the last sovereign debt ratings…

The remittanc income from Mexican and Central American immigrants working in the United States bck to their home nations is not the only huge remittance flow in the world. One of significant import is in Europe, where millions of indivuals…

While most people have their attention tuned to the spectacle over at AIG, financial institutions in Europe are having their own difficulties. In the last day, I have seen news stories of European banks looking for ways to raise capital in…

After Europe emerged from the worst war in human history, its cities lay in ruins. Its economy was in tatters. It was in this environment that an Iron Curtain fell over Europe dividing it into east and west, separating Europeans from each…

About a week ago I reported on an Austrian story that the EU was gearing up for a bailout of any eurozone members which found themselves in difficulty (see my post, "EU planning 200 billion euro package for Eastern Europe". This report is…

The Absolute Return Letter March 2009 "Many of today's policy proposals start from the view that "greed" and "incompetence" and "poor risk assessment" are the ultimate source of what went wrong. In fact, they were not the true cause at…