Europe

As Michael Lewitt says, "the interconnected nature of global financial markets render Europe's problems the world's problems. There is no longer any periphery."

Now that Italian bonds are getting crushed and contagion is clearly spreading to the core, Greece will have to be cut loose.

Multiple news sources are reporting about a secret meeting due to take place on Monday amongst European officials to discuss the deepening sovereign debt crisis that has now spread to Italy. Below is my translation of an article in German…

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…

Below are S&P’s sovereign credit ratings. Highlighted are the members of the euro zone.

Europe is in a dire situation. If it doesn't address the underlying causes of the Greek crisis quickly, Europe's political project will face the same fate as communism and the US Confederacy, writes James K. Galbraith.

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…

Investors should consider monitoring the euro's risk reversals to compliment the analysis of spot. The current reading suggests the market less comfortable with long euro exposure than the relative resilience in the spot market would seem…

The Fed is stuck at permanent zero and that means the carry trade is on. If we did have another panic, those swap lines would be handy because the Fed would again become the global lender of last resort.

Dollar is little changed ahead of today’s ECB meeting and ADP report; stocks/commodities are steady. BoE holds steady, ECB is expected to deliver a 25bps rate hike; market focus likely to be on comments. Brazilian policy makers focus on…