European breakup

A headline says that an investment bank survey found almost half the respondents expect at least one country to drop out of the euro zone next year. This is twice the percentage of a couple of months ago. While such a scenario cannot be…

A unilateral exit would be a devastating event for Italy and the euro zone. Inflation would be high but bank and national solvency issues would recede. If the exit were done under these nationalistic pre-conditions of redomination, most of…

Without a credible intervention this process almost always ends the same way. There is in my opinion a very high probability that within weeks, or months at most, Greece will be forced to freeze bank deposits as a prelude to leaving the…

As I said in defense of the ECB last week, “central bankers always prefer to force elected officials to make the tough political choices that are the essence of fiscal policy.” The ECB wants this whole problem to be resolved by elected…

With the fundraiser week winding down, I am going to start making a few changes now. One thing we probably need is a synopsis of the past week’s posts in order to tie the week’s events together thematically. I will make this synopsis using…

Need to Create? Get a Constraint | Wired Science | Wired.com One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality…

It is beginning to look like a Greek exit is ever more likely, which means that the end of the EMU could be near. Even if exits and a break-up are not inevitable, countries should have a plan on the shelf. It is clear that Germany is…

Monetary union was not a good idea, even in the best of circumstances. Time to abandon the failed experiment?

When I was running through Italian default scenarios earlier in the day, I asked “Could Italy unilaterally exit the euro zone and redominate euro debts at par into a new Lira currency to forestall the default? Perhaps. That is something to…

Yesterday, I showed you that contagion had spread and default probabilities were blowing out right across Europe. Every single name on the list for sovereign credit default wideners was European and names like Austria, Estonia, and Slovakia…