Germany

This week's Outside the Box is in the tradition of showing the other side of the argument. Normally, anything George Soros says or does politically has my blood pressure up about 20 points. Yet, I posted another piece of his today in Over…

Dangerous stuff being kicked around at a dangerous time. Our sense is both leaders were relieved by the success of ECB intervention to bring down Spanish and Italian bond spreads and they will continue to rely on Trichet’s monetary bazooka…

There are a lot of reasons Germany has been doing well: wage restraint, educated workforce, low unemployment, etc. I could go on and on. But in a global growth slowdown, the Germans will not be immune any more this go round than they were…

The bottom line is this: many in Northern Europe see this crisis as the result of the fiscal profligacy of bad actors which were known before the Euro’s existence to be bad actors. All of these countries except Spain have been running huge…

The front page of Germany’s top selling newspaper, Bild, “has forsaken its usual topless model in favor of gold bars… which the paper is giving away all day."

The past two weeks have seen large disruptions in the global capital markets and various policy responses. Market participants are having a difficult time getting a handle on these developments. There are three things investors should…

The point is that this is a rolling crisis where investors have realised that the sovereign debt profiles right across Euroland have problems. And because there is no lender of last resort, the weakest debtors get plucked off one by one…

In Germany movements in GDP follow movements in the rate of expansion of exports. Let’s not get into why that is for the moment (think Germany’s particular demography), and just consider the possibility, despite all the talk over the years…

Here’s a Bloomberg chart of the yield on 10-year German bonds since reunification. The overall trend is down, most precipitously since 2009.

France and Germany have the greatest exposure to Greece and their banks are expected to be the one’s with the lion’s share of the losses in the voluntary debt exchange deal. Here is a chart from the BBC below, detailing the exposure to…