Mario Monti - former European commissioner for the EU internal market - is interviewed in the FT today. On the recent ECB decision to raise interest rates he has this to say:
“Critics of the ECB say its monetary policy has been too restrictive. Mr Monti disagrees but says “there is an institutional credibility to be [...]

This much is uncontroversial: in late 2003 the CIA kidnapped Khalid al-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen, and carried him off to a prison in Afghanistan for interrogation. In the end they released him when they realised that his only crime was to have the same name as some other man they wanted to get [...]

We have what appears to be the biggest outbreak yet of the avian flu in Europe in Ukraine. More than 2,000 domestic birds have died of it in a remote region of the Crimean peninsula:
President Viktor Yushchenko declared a state of emergency in five villages on Saturday after the agriculture ministry said it had identified [...]

This was Tony Blairs view, that ‘very difficult negotiations lie ahead’ on the EU budget. You bet they do. Just look at the list of proposals:
- a cut in the seven-year EU budget to roughly €850bn, or 1.03 per cent of the union’s GDP;
- Britain would give up part of its rebate: €6bn-€9bn is [...]

Steve Johnson has been hard at it, writing away in the Financial Times:
“The chief problem for the yen is that the flattening of the US yield curve has made it uneconomical for Japanese investors to hedge their ongoing purchases of US Treasuries, but a falling yen encourages overseas investors to hedge their purchases of Japanese [...]

Well the G7 meeting has come and gone, but I’m not sure how much the world is going to notice the fact. If I had been a fly, perhaps I would now be glad I hadn’t wasted my efforts. Basically there is a ’shift’ from focusing on the oil issue to the inflation one, but [...]

José Barroso, European Commission president, yesterday advised Tony Blair not to act like the Sheriff of Nottingham, taking from the poor to give to the rich. I don’t know whether Tony’s been taking his advice, but this decision seems significant, and seems to reflect a willingness to try and get a deal. I don’t [...]

The FT has just put this up:
The Kurdish regional government’s surprise announcement that it had begun drilling for oil in the north of Iraq sparked alarm yesterday, two weeks ahead of national elections.
As the FT indicates, the decision of the Kurdish government hinges on the controversial article 109 of Iraq’s constitution, which gives the [...]

One of the things about targeting expectations, and factoring-in changes, is that the world moves on at a very rapid clip these days. So the ECB rate rise in now, really, yesterday’s news. The big issue today is the fact that the easing cycle in the eurozone may already be over (we need to see [...]

I’d simply love to be a fly on the wall in London this weekend. The G7 finance ministers are about to meet the central bankers, and as in by now well known, these two groups haven’t exactly been hitting it off too well lately, at least, and better said, in Germany and Japan they haven’t. [...]