Germany

Mired in the worst recession since the 1970s, Portugal's governing coalition is going to turn up the austerity dial even higher. The goal is to reduce the Portuguese deficit to 4.5% of GDP in 2013 in order to be in a position to switch out…

According to a questionnaire given by the leftist German party "Die Linke", German pensioners have seen a significant erosion of their purchasing power over the last twelve years. Average pension payments this year after deducting all…

Do you remember when Europe used to say the IMF would get involved in Europe over the euro's dead body? Well I certainly do. Back before Greece got its bailout deathwish, it wasn't even clear there would be a bailout, let alone one with…

Spiegel, a widely-read German magazine, has published a trilogy of articles on inflation in German that it has also translated into English. The theme is “How Monetary Policy Threatens Savings” and I see this as a must-read for those…

The Financial Times is reporting that Portugal is likely to need an extension of the three-year bailout plan it received in 2010. This is a disaster for the euro zone and I am writing this post to explain why. The most pressing issue is…

Two weeks ago I told you that Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s humiliating defeat to Merkel had narrowed options to sovereign bailout, monetisation or default for Spain. Now that the Spanish bank bailout is unraveling and Catalonia is…

By Paul De Grauwe, Professor of international economics, London School of Economics, and former member of the Belgian parliament and Yuemei Ji, Economist, LICOS, University of Leuven This post was first published at VoxEU Germany’s large…

Last week I promised to provide a little more insight into what the ECB is doing with its OMT program and what this should mean for the euro, economic growth, and European sovereign bond markets. This weekly post is dedicated to that theme.…

Here are my first quick reactions to the ECB's new monetisation scheme. They have decided to buy bonds on the secondary market in potentially unlimited quantities up to three-year maturities for countries that submit to a Troika program.…

The big news today is based on a report by Bild, a German tabloid, which reported that Jens Weidmann, the head of Germany's central bank, offered to resign on multiple occasions due to his opposition to the ECB's plans to monetize euro zone…