fiscal

The decision by EU Commissioner Olli Rehn to appear before the world's press today, and inform the assembled throngs that, as far as the EU Commission could see, Spain will not be sticking to its 6% of GDP fiscal deficit commitment next…

This chart from Spiegel gives you a sense of the magnitude of the deficit reductions that must be accomplished in order to get the European periphery under the Maastricht 3% hurdle.   Source: Spiegel

by Win Thin Hungary is perhaps taking a more obvious approach to influencing monetary policy than Brazil, as ruling Fidesz party has reportedly submitted an amendment to the Central Bank Act that would give the cabinet sole control of…

by Win Thin Details of Ireland’s four-year budget plan are emerging and it contains the expected mix of spending cuts and tax hikes that is needed to get IMF/EU aid.  Ireland did not bow to outside pressure to hike the corporate tax…

I was eavesdropping on a conversation about Credit Writedowns on another blog (Pragmatic Capitalism) and wanted to share some of my thoughts with you on the conversation. One commenter, Mattay said: Harrison is an MMTer. As I read him,…

One might be forgiven for thinking that a 110 bln euro EU/IMF package would suffice for Greece and stabilize the situation as IMF packages typically do over time.   However, over the past month 10-year Greek yields have 260 bp and…

A recent CNBC article highlighted for me why the Irish are being pressured to accept a bailout when they have repeatedly said they don't want one yet. The problem is Portugal (and Spain). To the degree that the Irish situation continues to…

US President Barack Obama was on "60 Minutes" last night in an interview taped on Thursday. He gave a synopsis of his thinking about the recent US mid-term elections. Here is a bit of what he had to say as written by CBS which…

The latest video from Bloomberg with Jim Bianco is below. Bianco believes the markets will be disappointed Fed if the Fed shows less than 5 months of $100 billion in QE tomorrow. He also doubts whether a tax hike would be a "big, big"…

The Germans are planning to put forward a plan to change  guidelines to the stability and growth pact (SGP) to give it more teeth. The sense in Berlin is that the SGP, which limits budget deficits to 3% and debt-to-GDP to 60%, has been…