sovereign debt crisis

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

This post is a prelude to a BBC interview on the sovereign debt crisis. I am not going to answer financial Armageddon questions about "what oif it all goes pear-shaped" here because to understand where things are headed you need to know how…

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…

Speculation of some agreement has helped lift the euro, peripheral bonds, and generally has underpinned the risk appetite in recent days. This leaves the market vulnerable to disappointment or a "buy the rumor sell the fact" type of…

I believe the sovereign debt crisis will deteriorate further. And then we will just have to see what the politics of the individual countries in Euroland look like. If austerity brings the economy to a crawl and europopulism is well…

Here’s a list of the countries with the highest debt to GDP in the world

Safe havens continue trade on the back foot as risk appetite resurgences; European stocks up over 1%. Euro trades above $1.42 ahead of tomorrow’s summit; EZ summit likely to address two key issues. Brazil’s central bank expected to deliver…