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Archives by Tag 'European Central Bank'
The crises in Europe and the Middle East are very different but they are beginning to cross-infect each other, creating a general mood of uncertainty and fear. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring was at first seen as wholly positive, as dictatorships and police states tum...
“Men and women of Greece, it is with a sense of dignity and patriotic duty, that we made the decision not to betray your hopes and aspirations…The pro-bailout parties did not simply want us to support a government that would impose more austerity, ...
The eurozone is slipping into a recession that could have been avoided. Had policymakers provided fiscal support for stricken countries in the South and guarantees on their government bonds, (as the USG does for US Treasuries) then their economies could have continued t...
Peter Praet, Chief Economist of the European Central Bank, defended the ECB’s policies at Levy Institute’s annual Minsky meeting at the Ford Foundation this past week in New York that. In his remarks, he retreaded the EU’s wheels with the same rhetoric of inflation ...
“Other countries have gone through similar experiences. Latin American countries suffered a lost decade after 1982, and Japan has been stagnating for a quarter of a century; both have survived. But the European Union is not a country and it is unlikely to su...
In the build-up to World War II, the French military created the Maginot Line. This barrier, which utilized state of the art military defenses, was intended to defend France from a ferocious assault by Hitler’s armies. When the attack ultimately came, the Germans made q...
Maria Svoronou has three jobs and was finishing a twelve hour day as euro zone leaders were finalizing Greece’s rescue package in Brussels. For all her hard work, she earns only Eur 870 a month and says that “if the situation gets any worse, I won’t be able to survi...
“How can one speak of default in the future tense when we’re already bankrupt… Don’t you see the people scouring through garbage and sleeping on sidewalks? Those who led us to bankruptcy – the troika and the government – now cla...
I have been following the European sovereign debt crisis since it first developed more than two years ago. It was evident from the beginning that the conditions on the debtor nations being demanded by the “troika” of the European Central Bank, the European Union, and ...
Greeks expect to agree a deal with the Eurozone leaders today, Monday, that will cede much of their country’s independence. Greece will become an economic – and to a large extent a political – colony of Germany and its allies. Berlin will have a say in everythin...
“We are facing destruction. Our country, our home, has become ripe for burning. The centre of Athens is in flames.”
– Costis Hatzidakis, conservative parliamentarian ...
“We are being asked to take even larger doses of a medicine that has proven to be deadly and to undertake commitments that do not solve the problem, but only temporarily postpone the foretold death of our economy.”
– Hieronymos II, hea...
ECB president Mario Draghi’s new lending facility–the Long-Term Refinancing Operation–has helped to pull the financial system back from the brink of another Lehman-type catastrophe, but it doesn’t address the fundamental problems that created the c...
While EU policymakers make arrangements for their 14th summit in the last two years, Europe’s flagging economy continues to slip deeper into recession. On Monday, the Eurozone’s Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) reported that production and ...
For the second time in three years, the banking system has collapsed, which means that the banks are no longer able to fund themselves through the normal means, the wholesale markets. This same thing happened in July 2007 when two Bear Stearns hedge funds defaulted and tr...
European Central Bank president Mario Draghi is either a liar or a fool. Either way, he should be canned immediately before he dumps more money into an EU banking system sinkhole.
What’s all the fuss about? Here’s a clip from Bloomberg that explains...
Imagine if your banker offered to lend you a $150,000 to make up for the money that you’d lost on your home since the housing bubble burst in 2006. And, let’s say, he agreed to lend you this money for 3 years at rock-bottom rates of 1 percent provided that you...
At this point the sovereign debt crisis in Europe is almost getting boring. We’ve seen the same script played out over and over with country after country. The basic story is the markets begin a run on the debt of a country: Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain etc.
The...
“Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” people ask in Athens, Salonika and right across Greece. There’s a sense of collective imprisonment, individual uncertainty and impending catastrophe. Yet Greece has had a turbulent history, and the Greeks have always...
There are extremely important differences between this decade and the period after the First World War and through the early 1930s.
The most crucial is that no fascist or Communist or revolutionary threats exist now if the great economic powers do not meet the econ...
“Today we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time—perhaps for a long time...
There is much more in the way of European chatter taking place in that troubled part of the world. Discussions held at the Brussels summit on Friday saw the 27 countries of the EU attempting to forge an agreement in an effort to create what would effectively amount to a...
The easiest way to understand Europe’s financial crisis is to look at the solutions being proposed to resolve it. They are a banker’s dream, a grab bag of giveaways that few voters would be likely to approve in a democratic referendum. Bank strategists learned not to ...
When the book is finally closed on this week’s EU summit, it’ll be interesting to see what people remember the most. Will it be the proposed changes to the Lisbon Treaty, the new steps towards fiscal integration or the disgraceful behavior of David Cameron?...
Angela Merkel has a cure for the eurozone’s pesky debt crisis. Hair shirts and stiffer penalties. Aside from that, the German Chancellor has very little to offer by way of a remedy. In fact–what was so surprising about Monday’s widely-anticipated press c...