Europe

While I acknowledge the real fears that central bankers have about the impact of a restructuring, this political dithering is making matters considerably worse. Clearly, burden sharing is needed and that means bondholders will have to take…

The US dollar, yen and Swiss franc are trading firmer as the impasse on the new Greek aid package unnerved traders ahead of the next IMF tranche due later on in the month

The German court adds another element of uncertainty in the debt drama and may shape the particular outcome. There is some danger that parliament's prerogatives are defined to include the upper house as well and there Merkel does not enjoy…

In my view, a CDS trigger could be a Lehman-style event, yes. Moreover, only a hard restructuring – meaning principal reduction would actually have any meaningful impact on peripheral CDS or interest rates. So, I expect the euro zone…

Point for point, I agree with the commentary from Felix Zulauf in this week’s Barron’s mid-year roundtable discussion. For long-time Credit Writedowns readers, you will recognize almost every one of these points from previous posts. It is…

On balance it would then seem that the consensus remains weighed towards no QE3 either because it is not needed or because it does not work in the first place. I think it is very simple in the end though. If sideways movement gives way to a…

In the US, you have a weakening recovery, uneven job growth, less accommodative monetary policy, tightening fiscal policy at the federal and local levels, austerity in Europe and tightening in emerging markets coupled with secularly high…

A comprehensive outline of the Irish situation and with a retrospective on the steps leading us to the brink.

In a recent column at VoxEU , Hans Werner Sinn of the prestigious Institute for Economic Research claims that the German Bundesbank is effectively propping up banks across the Eurozone’s periphery. He adds that doing this risks a major…

Various news wires are reporting leaks of the IMF/EU/ECB review of Greece. Apparently they are concluding that the implementation of the conditions for last year's aid package have ground to a halt. They are also concluding that the Greece…