Trichet Urges Italy to Speed Up Austerity Plan
European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet on Saturday urged Italy to quickly agree on and push for approval of economic measures aimed at cutting the country’s budget deficit and quelling...
View ArticleBrink think
When Mario Draghi took over as president of the European Central Bank at the beginning of this month, it was felt that he had to prove his credentials in Germany. That task is made harder by calls on...
View ArticleBoring cruel romantics
There’s a word I keep hearing lately: “technocrat.” Sometimes it’s used as a term of scorn — the creators of the euro, we’re told, were technocrats who failed to take human and cultural factors into...
View ArticleThe eurozone and the US: A tale of two currency zones
Europeans think it is all very unfair. They point out that, in aggregate, the eurozone is in no worse an economic position than the US: its public finances are in better shape than the US’s, and its...
View ArticleShould the Fed save Europe from disaster?
Unless Germany agrees to the full mobilization of the European Central Bank very fast, the eurozone will spiral out of control. As The Economist put it, “The risk that the currency disintegrates within...
View Article‘Germany as isolated on Euro as US was on Iraq’
Market participants and EU politicians are starting to sound more apocalyptic in their warnings about the euro crisis as yet another make-or-break summit, on Dec. 8 and 9, draws near. Meanwhile the...
View ArticleEurozone policy-makers place a big bet
Have eurozone policy-makers finally managed to lance the boil? They can certainly point to lower borrowing costs in Italy and Spain as evidence of stabilisation. Many of them argue that this...
View ArticleWhat does Germany want?
A long-forgotten Foreign Minister of Vietnam was fond of recalling how often he had to tell his American interlocutors that Vietnam was the name of a country, not a War. Something similar has been the...
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