Germany

Later this week, I plan to write a more comprehensive post on the European sovereign debt crisis to incorporate what we have learned since the French and Greek elections. Here's a short preview of what I will have to say.

In 1921, the US, a creditor nation, was fighting boom time inflation and turned to 'austerity' to defeat it. Europe on the other hand was seeing a debt-laden deflationary episode after the Great War. This episode has historical lessons for…

The mood has turned against austerity in the euro zone because it is now rightly seen as anti-growth. The question is what next. Here I will hazard a few predictions of where euro zone policy is headed including a EuroTARP.

ECB President Draghi's support for a growth pact for Europe is important, perhaps under-appreciated by the market. This is not simply a tactic to deflect attention from the IMF's call that the ECB ease monetary policy further. The ever…

I thought now would be a good time to see how my ten surprises for 2012 are tracking as we are nearly a third of the way through the year. I posted these as my first weekly newsletter and these are events that have 1-in-3 odds of happening…

I have been saying that I expect German data to disappoint and come in on the softer side. Why? This post explains.

The concept of German decoupling from the Eurozone recession may have been wishful thinking. The latest German Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) has converged with that of the Eurozone as a whole. Manufacturing PMI is a closely…

The string of developments has encouraged risk-off behavior. Equity markets are lower. Core bonds are higher. The high beta currencies, such as the freely traded emerging market currencies, the Australian and Canadian dollars, the euro,…

Since the Great Financial Crisis began, Austrian house prices have zoomed at a pace well above the rate of inflation and the rate of rentals. The price action and other anecdotes make this sound suspiciously like a bubble. The same has…

I thought I would mix it up a bit with this clip of a Volkswagen factory in Dresden, Germany. The factory is very cool.