France

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…

About two months ago I wrote about Emmanuel Macron as a risk, rather than a saviour. Today, following his 1st round presidential victory in France, I feel even more that he represents a risk that is unappreciated. Here’s why.

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…

Yesterday three big things happened in three different eurozone economies that I think are interrelated. And I am going to tell you what I believe they mean for the European political economy by tying them together in this post under the…

The situation in Greece is not about Greece at all. It is about enforcing an economic framework onto all Eurozone countries. And because the policy goal is primarily about enforcing this economic framework everywhere in the eurozone, there…

Europe is growing again and I see this growth phase lasting a while unless something in the Greek negotiation derails it. And while the Greek negotiations are tense I still believe Greece is an outlier that has indeed been isolated, making…

Although the euro is now headed up after it overshot to the downside, I believe the European recovery has legs and will continue indefinitely as long as a calamity in Greece doesn’t pull Europe down.

The meltdown in Brazil is not exactly unexpected since one of my ten surprises for 2014 was that Brazil goes into recession. But I find the pace of the currency reaction alarming and we should be prepared for a crisis as a result. In the…

The euro crisis is a crisis of Europe, not of European countries. It is not a conflict between Germany and Spain (and I use these two countries to represent every European country on one side or the other of the boom) about who should be…