Two pieces of news on the Iraq front today. The British MOD are reported to be preparing “significant withdrawal of British troops from Iraq over the next 18 months”. In an entirely different context, Ibrahim Youssef al-Shammari has announced that he will act as spokesman for two insurgent groups: the Islamic Army in Iraq [...]

Interesting piece in the FT this morning about Jack Lang, French PS politician, and possible presidential hopeful in 2007. Before going further I should perhaps point out that the only thing I really know about Lang is that when he was the Culture Minister, back in the 80’s, he opened a small museum dedicated to [...]

The euro fell briefly below $1.19 yesterday. There is nothing surprising or exceptional about that, the common currency has been drifting steadily downwards against the dollar for a number of, by-now, pretty well known reasons - better economic performance in the US, a growing interest rate differential between the ECB and the Fed, political issues [...]

Apparently there are still constitutional doubts about the validity of Scr?der’s election call:
“I have my doubts whether the chancellor convincingly demonstrated that his coalition is no longer stable or has lost its ability to rule,” Karin Grasshof, a retired Constitutional Court judge, told Bild am Sonntag newspaper
Any of our German readers able to clarify [...]

Sorry if I’m belabouring a rather obscure and generally ‘non-sexy’ issue: government debt in the eurozone. If I am doing this it is because I think something important is happening. I missed this point during the week.
Fitch Ratings on Wednesday lowered to negative its credit rating outlooks for Italy and Portugal ? both among the [...]

The FT this morning discusses the state of the bond markets for the ‘weaker’ eurozone economies: Italy, Greece, Portugal. As expected interest differentials between government debt in these countries and German debt is widening, but only slowly. Italy is being evaluated at present as the weakest member. As the FT points out the temperature of [...]

I’ve been reasonably quiet about the evolution of the euro during the last couple of weeks. The movement has been a pretty volatile tug-of-war between the general downward drift, and resistance to change. Today there seems to have been a decisive push on one side (maybe because it was a Friday afternoon on a holiday [...]

Well, it’s July 1, so the UK is now officially the holder of the rotating presidency. Yesterday Jack Straw outlined the UK government’s priorities to an enthralled House of Commons:
Mr Straw told the House of Commons that Britain would ?work hard to reach an agreement on future financing by the end of the year?
The foreign [...]

Last year 700,000 new homes were built in Spain. A record number, and one which seems disproportionately high for Spains real future housing needs. In all likelihood the Spanish property market will one day crash, and prices drop considerably from their current highs. But what if they don’t? What if we ‘merely’ get a soft [...]