Ireland

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…

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…

Tolstoy tells us in the first line of Anna Karenina that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This is directly applicable to Europe. It is easy to tar all (growing) peripheral countries with the…

The question is not whether Greece will default but what will happen once it has. If Greece defaults but stays in the euro, not only will it not solve the underlying lack of competitiveness, but markets will immediately turn their attention…

I expect a soft restructuring sometime in 2011 followed by a certain degree of dithering and a hard restructuring down the line. But, of course, the tail risk is there.

If E.U. leaders are smart, they will understand that the turmoil they fear from a Greek restructuring will be much worse if that default is a unilateral one forced by a population that has taken to the streets.

William Black writes that the non-payment of debt – including bank debt – by the nations on the periphery would lead to severe banking crises and a return to recession in the core of eurozone. This is what is behind the stance of the ECB,…

The primary difference for Euroland to sovereign issuers is that the Euro can only be created by the ECB – it is the issuer of the currency. The governments of Ireland, Greece, Spain, Germany, etc. are the USERS of the currency. The…

Karl Whelan finds that a recent analysis by Hans-Werner Sinn on an alleged ECB bailout is incorrect. Willem Buiter is now out with a commentary on the same issue corroborating Whelan’s view. Below are the bullet points he highlights in his…

A comprehensive outline of the Irish situation and with a retrospective on the steps leading us to the brink.