Europe

Euro continues to weaken as US markets reopen from holiday; consolidative price action Thursday is being replaced by a return to trend today, with dollar broadly stronger, EM and “risk” broadly lower. European equities are down, and futures…

A headline says that an investment bank survey found almost half the respondents expect at least one country to drop out of the euro zone next year. This is twice the percentage of a couple of months ago. While such a scenario cannot be…

Here is the second version of this foreign news links post that I am starting. The feedback yesterday was good. You all said it makes sense to see what the press in country are saying in Europe since that is the locus of the sovereign debt…

This morning the German government held an auction for 10-year money at just under 2 percent. The auction failed disastrously with a bid-to-cover ratio of just 1.1. The Germans wanted to issue 6 billion euros of 10-year bunds but managed to…

What was to be a subdued period in the markets is turning into a rout. There have been a number of poor developments that have sent the US dollar broadly higher and has weighed on the highly correlated risk assets, equities, emerging market…

Many observers are confused. They cry for the ECB to "man up" and "do what it is supposed to do" and be the lender of last resort. It does have that function for banks, not for sovereigns. The lender of last resort to sovereigns is the…

Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Chief Executive Officer Mohamed A. El-Erian told Bloomberg TV’s Betty Liu and Dominic Chu this morning that U.S. economic conditions are “terrifying” as the nation struggles to recover from recession.…

I have been reading a lot of Western European and Spanish-language press recently. These articles give me a good sense of what the local press is thinking about the euro crisis (and the developing situation in Argentina) in addition to what…

This will surprise many. Der Spiegel reports that Germany’s fiscal management is not as “exemplary” as most perceive.

Bank borrowing from the ECB reach a new high for the year at today's 7-day repo operation. Banks borrowed 247.17 bln euros for a week at 1.25% fixed rate. The key question is what are banks doing with those euros. The answer is that…