euroscepticism

Twelve years I have been at this for 12 years now. It seems remarkable that I have been writing this site, Credit Writedowns, for that long because I can remember the early days like they were yesterday. I was thinking about this fact -…

The euro is “celebrating” its 20th anniversary this month, but they aren’t popping corks across the continent. The underlying assumption of a common currency—namely, that it would lead to a convergence of the member countries’ production,…

So, yesterday I parsed the EU sentiment data from the EU's early expansion period. And what we saw was rising support for the EU right up until 1991. But after that time, support for the EU collapsed and has never recovered. I want to look…

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble talked to German weekly Der Spiegel about the election of Emmanuel Macron as French President, and this interview is being widely quoted in the English-language press without benefit of a…

At the height of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis, German leader Angela Merkel was openly calling for ‘more Europe, not less’. With Emmanuel Macron elected to the Presidency of France on that platform, Merkel has perhaps her only chance…

At the weekend, French Presidential election frontrunner Emmanuel Macron told the BBC that EU leaders “have to face the situation, to listen to our people, and to listen to the fact that they are extremely angry today, impatient and the…

Last week, I wrote how the Labour Party in the Netherlands suffered a historic defeat in parliamentary elections because voters questioned their priorities - and how this is emblematic of Western social democratic parties everywhere. And as…

British Prime Minister Theresa May will trigger her country’s exit from the EU on 29 March, a spokesperson for the Prime Minister has confirmed. Afterwards, the clock will be ticking, as the UK will have two years to wind up any…

Yesterday, I was talking to a veteran journalist based in Rome. He remarked that youth unemployment in southern Italy was 60% and that this was one of the biggest problems to deal with politically. The spectre of strong, able-bodied young…

Bloomberg View had a good column today on the popularity of the European single currency. The article shows how the euro has gone from being unloved in Germany at introduction in 2002 to well accepted, while the opposite has happened in…