sovereign debt crisis

It encourages me to see Portugal fade from the headlines instead of becoming the next Greece. But it discourages me to see Spain take Portugal's place as the next Greece. All the while, the root problem has been the same: the common…

Spain has become the new Greece. Actually, in many respects Spain is now worse than Greece. The Spanish unemployment rate is already so high and unlike Athens, Madrid has made no headway in reducing its public debt levels (whereas the…

The mood has turned against austerity in the euro zone because it is now rightly seen as anti-growth. The question is what next. Here I will hazard a few predictions of where euro zone policy is headed including a EuroTARP.

The agenda in the euro zone is changing. The likely outcome of the weekend elections in Greece and France are just as much an effect as a cause of the shift in the agenda. For the first time since the crisis began, the German insistence on…

Ever since Willem Buiter mentioned the probability of a Spanish bailout some time in 2012, speculation has been rife about a Spanish bailout. In this column I argue that Spain is still too big to bail and that any bailout for Spain must…

"We believe that the Kingdom of Spain's budget trajectory will likely deteriorate against a background of economic contraction in contrast with our previous projections. At the same time, we see an increasing likelihood that Spain's…

As I write this the lower house of Dutch Parliament is debating what and where to cut in order to get their budget under the 3% hurdle as quickly as possible.

It looks like the EU has finally figured out that austerity is anti-growth and that in the EU context this is leading to debt deflation. The word on the street is that the EU is prepared to temporarily relax the 3% Maastricht hurdle. This…

We must stress that opening talks does not mean that a deal is going to be easy. In our view, Hungary did the bare minimum to get the EU back to the negotiating table, and that difficult negotiations remain ahead. On a separate but related…

Recent events in Europe mark the beginning of the push back against German-led austerity, but it is even bigger as the IMF's call for the ECB to cut rates illustrates