Greece

Postmortems of last month’s European Union summit meeting have now turned to why the Greek debt rescue failed to restore investor confidence in the country’s finances. Many reasons are advanced: the failure to communicate clearly; the…

The widening European sovereign debt crisis is a direct result of this dangerous extend and pretend policy. Tomorrow we will see whether the ECB has the temerity to step in and start buying up Belgian, Italian and Spanish debt to stem the…

Euroland is coming apart at the seams. Belgian/Bund spreads are now also over 200bps along with Italy and Spain. Belgium has just entered the periphery and France is not far behind.

Felix Zulauf spoke to Barron’s Alan Abelson about his thoughts on the European sovereign debt crisis now that Greece has received its second 100 billion euro bailout. Here I discuss what Abelson says about the conversation and why I think…

In the last post on the EU, I said that the EFSF is too small. Basically, only the ECB has unlimited liquidity in its arsenal to deal with contagion to Spain and Italy. Willem Buiter agrees and has spoken to Bloomberg about his analysis of…

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…

This step will calm markets – for how long is anybody’s guess. Nevertheless, the budget cuts that this deal requires must be rapid in order to try to calm markets by maintaining the fiction that Greece is not insolvent and that the…

The full statement from the EU without commentary

Tom Ferguson gives a comprehensive view of the politicss of the European sovereign debt crisis.

In this interview with Real News Network, Michael Hudson argues that opportunists are using this debt crisis as a grab bag to strip the state of its assets and collect those rents for their own private wealth accumulation. He says what’s…