Europe

Until just recently, Germany was more indebted than Spain. The country was the first, along with France, to breach the Maastricht Treaty's 3% hurdle for annual deficits in 2005, prompting a change in the rules. And Germany has also been in…

Quick post here. Apple's sales estimates were downgraded, as I posted yesterday. The reason for the downgrade was channel and supplier checks which revealed lower sales volume than initially believed. Apparently, Apple has told suppliers to…

Over the American thanksgiving holiday three years ago in 2009, the relatively small sovereign-linked debtor Dubai World announced it would suspend payments on its debt obligations. Dubai World was a state-owned conglomerate in the emirate…

Quick post here to continue the theme of Christine Lagarde doing a complete makeover of the IMF. Yesterday, the Financial Times reported on an IMF staff paper that accepted capital controls as a necessary evil in specific cases, a sharp…

This weekly is a follow-up post to the daily I wrote on Greece earlier in the week. As I indicated then, my position on Greece has always been that eurozone leaders would be loathe to 'kicking Greece out of the euro zone". The talk of a…

In February, I penned a piece on how and why Greece will exit the eurozone since there seemed to be so much chatter about the coming Grexit. However, as I have said in the past, a Grexit will not happen any time soon. I strongly believe…

By Marc Chandler Greece has had trouble implementing the structural reforms demanded in exchange for aid.  The large and rising debt/GDP ratio is also a function of the larger than officially (Troika) expected contraction in the Greek…

Note: this daily will not have links as I am still on holiday. But, I will begin to post more in the coming week and resume a normal posting schedule next week. Yesterday, Moody's Investors Service finally downgraded the sovereign credit…

After the Great Depression broke out, American economist Irving Fischer championed a view of the financial system now called "endogenous money", which sees each person in the economy as a creator of credit. Viewing the economy through this…

A few weeks ago, I postulated that Christine Lagarde was increasingly moving the IMF away from its position as 'enforcer' of orthodox neoclassical economic policy. I backed this up with three specific ways in which the IMF was becoming a…