Can financial innovations help the eurozone?
For all that financial innovation has got itself a pretty bad name recently, there’s no shortage of people with bright ideas as to how to address the euro crisis. Robert Barro is one. He thinks the...
View ArticleS&P downgrades Europe
S&P brought its hammer down on Europe today, with nine — count ‘em — downgrades of euro zone countries. The removal of France’s triple-A has been getting most of the headlines, but for me the...
View ArticleGreece’s endgame looms
The big deadline in Greece is March 20 — that’s when the country has a €14.4 billion bond maturing that it can’t afford to repay. So Greece and its creditors are playing chicken with each other right...
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Why Europe’s crisis can’t be averted
I got a glimpse this morning of what Lance Knobel calls Davos’s “class distinctions, even if you have a white badge” — I was invited to a breakfast meeting under the auspices of something called the...
View ArticleThe Europe debate
Remember the Krugman vs Summers debate last year? That was fun, in its own way. But this year’s Munk Debate looks set to be simply depressing. The invitation has the details: the motion is “be it...
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Why Richard Koo’s idea won’t save the Eurozone
A lot of people were looking forward to Richard Koo deliver his paper at INET last week; it comes with associated slides, here. Koo is the intellectual father of the idea of the balance-sheet recession...
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How Europe’s banking crises threaten the eurozone
The size of the run on Greek banks is not at all clear: while it seems that something on the order of €1 billion has left the banks of late, it’s less obvious whether that was over the course of one...
View ArticleWill Grexit topple Obama?
One of the hardest questions to answer, when people ask about the European crisis in general and the Greek crisis in particular, is “why should we in the US care?” The simple answer is that well, this...
View ArticleAddressing Europe’s risks
What exactly does the EU’s José Manuel Barroso mean, when he says today that the EU should move towards “a full economic union”, which would include “a banking union with integrated financial...
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European dysfunction chart of the day, Greece vs Germany edition
Mark Dow has found an astonishing set of results from a February opinion poll in Greece; it’s hard to imagine that Greek attitudes to Germany have improved since then. Here’s just one of the 13 slides:...
View ArticleGeorge Soros and the two choices facing Europe
There’s a good reason why the likes of Paul Krugman, Joe Weisenthal (twice), Cullen Roche, Ezra Klein, and everybody else are raving about George Soros’s analysis of what went wrong in the Eurozone:...
View ArticleSubordination in Spain causes very little pain
Sony Kapoor has a very good post on the Spanish bank bailout today, explaining that when Spanish credit spreads rose in the wake of the bailout, that had nothing to do with the fact that bailout funds...
View ArticleWhen peace does not mean prosperity
The timing of the Nobel Peace Prize announcement was set in stone a long time ago, of course, but I love the way in which it comes just two days after EADS and BAE — two European arms-dealing behemoths...
View ArticleAdventures with reprofiling, Lee Buchheit edition
It’s always illuminating to sit down with Lee Buchheit. He’s the dean of sovereign debt restructuring, he’s living through by far the most interesting period of his career right now, and this week I...
View ArticleDoomed Europe
It’s long — at some 4,500 words — but I can highly recommend the debate between George Soros and Hans-Werner Sinn about what Soros calls The German Question. The debate is profound, and the two stake...
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