sovereign debt crisis

Until just recently, Germany was more indebted than Spain. The country was the first, along with France, to breach the Maastricht Treaty's 3% hurdle for annual deficits in 2005, prompting a change in the rules. And Germany has also been in…

Over the American thanksgiving holiday three years ago in 2009, the relatively small sovereign-linked debtor Dubai World announced it would suspend payments on its debt obligations. Dubai World was a state-owned conglomerate in the emirate…

This weekly is a follow-up post to the daily I wrote on Greece earlier in the week. As I indicated then, my position on Greece has always been that eurozone leaders would be loathe to 'kicking Greece out of the euro zone". The talk of a…

By Marc Chandler Greece has had trouble implementing the structural reforms demanded in exchange for aid.  The large and rising debt/GDP ratio is also a function of the larger than officially (Troika) expected contraction in the Greek…

Note: this daily will not have links as I am still on holiday. But, I will begin to post more in the coming week and resume a normal posting schedule next week. Yesterday, Moody's Investors Service finally downgraded the sovereign credit…

After the Great Depression broke out, American economist Irving Fischer championed a view of the financial system now called "endogenous money", which sees each person in the economy as a creator of credit. Viewing the economy through this…

A few weeks ago, I postulated that Christine Lagarde was increasingly moving the IMF away from its position as 'enforcer' of orthodox neoclassical economic policy. I backed this up with three specific ways in which the IMF was becoming a…

Yesterday I wrote a lot about this topic for Gold subscribers, asking "Will Merkel grant ‘austerity model’ Ireland retroactive bank recap mutualisation?" This post gives a full account of the European bank recap issue, so I won't re-hash…

The latest information out of Europe comes via the Financial Times where Miles Johnson writes that the Spanish are geared up to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the Troika. Other countries are holding things up, according to this…

In Europe, Spain is expected to formally apply for a Troika bailout in November. Despite the Rajoy's government's denials that it has not sought a bailout, Rajoy and his ministers have never specifically said that they refused to consider a…