Blogged coverage of Madrid from Iberian Notes

From Reuters, a brief chronology of ETA’s background and previous attacks

Latest reports from Madrid say that 173 people have been killed in today’s bombings. The Spanish government say that ETA is responsible

It is still too early to be able to count the toll with any accuracy. The link I post below speaks of 50 dead, others speak of more, and others less. Let us only hope the lower estimates are the accurate ones!
(Update 15 minutes after first post: the official death toll has now risen to [...]

I have already posted on my own blog about what I see as the surreal consequences which might follow from this wish becoming a reality. If what I think happens next to the Spanish economy really does happen - and I have no doubt whatsoever that the housing bubble will crash one or other of [...]

The great leftist protest movements of the past have often involved a certain questionable division of labour. The workers march and the academics think. Well, I guess France has always been a bit different.
First, Les Inrockuptibles circulates an Appel contre la guerre ? l’intelligence (Petition against the war on intelligence), accusing [...]

You can smell the coffee now: this is the opinion of Morgan Stanley’s Serhan Cevik referring to the nearest thing to an ‘economic miracle’ that we have in or around the EU at the present time:
“It?s time to smell the coffee ? Turkey?s disinflation process is not a temporary phenomenon. Though currency movements play [...]

So Greece has a new government, Haider seems to be staging a comeback and next Sunday Spain is going to the polls. On this latter I will post something during the week, meantime, since I confess to knowing next to nothing at all about the significance of the Greek results, or the real state of [...]

Germany’s center-right and liberal parties have finally agreed on a candidate for the country’s largely, but not completely, symbolic presidency. Because these parties have been winning elections at the state level over the last few years, they have a working majority in the body that elects the president, even though they are actually in opposition.
(The [...]

Well I suppose it’s better to end the week on a bang rather than a whimper, so here I go with another of those posts. What really ended the week on a high note (or should I say a low one) was the US labour market. And since I am arguing that the euro-dollar parity [...]