Europe

10-year Italian paper now trades at 6.17% and is poised to break through highs set in August. While the ECB and European leaders recognise that the ECB is the difference here, they are as yet unwilling to have the ECB declare itself…

Risk aversion is taking hold again with global stocks broadly lower; dollar firmer against majors. Price action dominated in part by BoJ intervention; on the data front Chicago PMI and Canadian GDP. Norway’s central bank indicated it will…

Risk appetites returned in a big way in October, as equities, emerging markets, commodities and currencies all generally advanced and smartly so, recouping much of the ground lost in September. The events in the week ahead will likely set…

For those of you wondering what's just happened in Europe, here is an animated explanation.

The big question–apart from how many investors they will get to go along with this, given that they couldn’t reach their target of 90% investor participation when the write-down was only going to be 21%–is whether this will trigger a CDS…

The challenge that the Irish economy faces can best be described in the context of flows and stocks of assets and liabilities. Under the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the IMF/EU/ECB Troika, Ireland must implement a severe fiscal…

CDS buyers hate it, as do holders of Italian, Spanish, Irish, and Belgian bonds. Portuguese bond holders are just fine. There was no reaction in Austria, Germany and France.

I see this deal as a quid pro quo for the banks getting recaps in exchange for writedowns. Because it is a negotiated agreement of a sort of payment in kind, it isn't really clear if the banks are being made whole (as compared to a…

The French paper L’Express live-blogged the event and I just wanted to fill you in on the critical passage right at the outset of the interview that everyone has been talking about regarding the Greek default, the CDS and the euro. My…

Markets rallied strongly in response to the European developments. Yet it is an exaggeration to think that risk appetites returned as the whole month of October has seen equities, emerging markets, commodities and foreign currencies trend…