eurozone periphery

In the last post on the EU, I said that the EFSF is too small. Basically, only the ECB has unlimited liquidity in its arsenal to deal with contagion to Spain and Italy. Willem Buiter agrees and has spoken to Bloomberg about his analysis of…

This step will calm markets – for how long is anybody’s guess. Nevertheless, the budget cuts that this deal requires must be rapid in order to try to calm markets by maintaining the fiction that Greece is not insolvent and that the…

This post is a prelude to a BBC interview on the sovereign debt crisis. I am not going to answer financial Armageddon questions about "what oif it all goes pear-shaped" here because to understand where things are headed you need to know how…

Guilio Tremonti, the Italian Finance Minister, last week compared Germany and its small-minded Chancellor Angela Merkel to a first-class passenger on the Titanic. To repeat: this is not a problem confined to the periphery. The sovereign…

There seems to be an aggrieved sense on the part of creditor nations that after providing so much helpful funding to undisciplined debtors, the creditors are going to be left with losses. There is, they claim, something terribly unfair…

In this interview with Real News Network, Michael Hudson argues that opportunists are using this debt crisis as a grab bag to strip the state of its assets and collect those rents for their own private wealth accumulation. He says what’s…

Tolstoy tells us in the first line of Anna Karenina that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This is directly applicable to Europe. It is easy to tar all (growing) peripheral countries with the…

As Michael Lewitt says, "the interconnected nature of global financial markets render Europe's problems the world's problems. There is no longer any periphery."

Multiple news sources are reporting about a secret meeting due to take place on Monday amongst European officials to discuss the deepening sovereign debt crisis that has now spread to Italy. Below is my translation of an article in German…

Below are S&P’s sovereign credit ratings. Highlighted are the members of the euro zone.