Germany

Guilio Tremonti, the Italian Finance Minister, last week compared Germany and its small-minded Chancellor Angela Merkel to a first-class passenger on the Titanic. To repeat: this is not a problem confined to the periphery. The sovereign…

If the sovereign debt crisis spirals out of control, it is not clear who will govern. At a minimum, Germany’s reputation as a foundational support for the European project will be in tatters. Likely, the governing coalition of CDU, CSU and…

There seems to be an aggrieved sense on the part of creditor nations that after providing so much helpful funding to undisciplined debtors, the creditors are going to be left with losses. There is, they claim, something terribly unfair…

According to Der Spiegel, Helmut Kohl, the father of a unified Germany and the German politician most responsible for the single currency, is very unhappy with his protégé Angela Merkel. I found this article to be consistent with what I…

Here’s what Germany’s largest daily newspaper Bild Zeitung has to say about the politics in the US around the debt ceiling.

The problem is if “markets become skittish about Spain or Italy, which cannot be bailed out. So EU leaders will cut Greece loose” and indeed, there is talk about doing just that – allowing Greece to default. The policy of extend and pretend…

The June Flash PMI reports, which were out on Thursday, do not make for agreeable reading, in the sense that while the French and German economies both continued to expand during the month, their rate of expansion, and in particular in the…

This is the second in a two-part essay on the origins of the sovereign debt crisis. Here the emphasis is on the present situation within the euro zone and the imbalances between the core, dominated by Germany, and the euro zone periphery.

This is the first in a two-part essay on the origins of the sovereign debt crisis. Here the emphasis is on Germany’s central role in the last century and a half of European history and in the formation of the euro

The Chinese Seven Day Repo Rate has skyrocketed to a 3-year high, suggesting a cash shortage as credit tightens.