Spain

By Edward Hugh According to the Economist’s Buttonwood, “desperate times require desperate measures”. I am sure this is right, times in Spain are certainly getting desperate and many of the measures being implemented in Brussels, far from…

This post is extracted from my newsletter sent out four weeks ago, at a time when the mood in Europe was much better than now and when there was even a sense that the crisis was in the process of being resolved. I mention this to remind…

It's only fitting that I write something today on Europe's multiples since I wrote yesterday on P/E multiples in the US. What prompted this were two different articles.

Europe is in recession right now, but the US is in a weak but fairly long-lived economic recovery. The difference in economic fortunes owes entirely to differing policy responses in both regions. In Europe, the economic paradigm has…

The core of the issue is not whether the country could see one, or even two, quarters of positive performance, but whether any faltering recovery will be sustained out into the future, through 2014 and beyond. It is here that all the old…

Many investors understandably have not focused on France. The threat of scandal in Spain, the need for yet another round of government support for Italy's third largest bank and the country's upcoming election have commanded attention. What…

The European Union released figures for Q4 2012 GDP today and they were awful. GDP fell by 0.6% in the euro zone and 0.5% in the entire EU. Stock markets are getting clobbered on the news and the euro is selling off. This is not unexpected…

I’ll be watching a number of things in 2013 in order to get a better sense of what the future will bring. On January 22 Princeton University Press will be publishing my book, The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road…

Last year, I started off the newsletter with a list of ten surprises for 2012 which I reviewed last month. I apologize for not having a similar list of ten surprises for 2013 yet. I think it is a good exercise to go through to hone one's…

According to the Irish Times, the government of Ireland has entered into a deal with the ECB to cut the country's debt by liquidating the nationalised Irish bank Anglo Irish. As I noted in the Saturday post on Ireland's superior economic…