Europe

The resilience of the euro in the face of seemingly incontrovertible evidence that Portugal will need to get assistance and that very same program and approach has not been enough to stabilize the Greek and Irish situation is amazing.…

Reuters has reported that the parliament in Portugal will likely reject the socialist government's austerity budget, a move which will precipitate the collapse of that government, new elections and a likely bailout by the European Union.…

Rumors of a missed coupon payment in Ireland made the rounds and many now are down playing it. However, the problems in the periphery have not lessened. The real immediate focus is on Portugal. The government's new austerity measures will…

By Edward Hugh As Japanese officials continue to toil away in what we all hope will be a successful bid to avert a worst case nuclear meltdown, even while thousands of Japanese remain missing and unaccounted for, financial market…

By Marc Chandler The Japanese nuclear accident has implications for Europe. The EU wants to have stress tests on members nuclear plants. The tests are not mandatory, but may be difficult to refuse. Switzerland has halted its nuclear…

Moody’s cut Portugal by two notches to A3 and kept a negative outlook despite the recently announced fiscal tightening and despite the tentative plan to expand the EFSF. This downgrade really shouldn’t come as any surprise. As we wrote just…

Ray Dalio spoke to Barron's in an interview that appeared in the weekly this past weekend. The themes of the conversation were the following: The world is on a dual track with emerging markets doing much better than developed…

European officials have reached an agreement in principle that falls well shy of the “comprehensive plan” officials had promised and is unlikely to provide investors with a sense of closure to the debt crisis that began in late 2009. Yet…

Last Wednesday, BNN's Howard Green spoke to Rob Cox of Reuters and me about two issues: the monster rally from March 2009 and the ongoing European debt crisis. On the markets, yes, I foresaw a rally two years ago because stock prices…

By Michael Pettis Barry Eichengreen had a very interesting piece in last week’s Wall Street Journal. In it he argues that we are approaching the end of the period in which the US dollar is the world’s dominant reserve currency, and…