So it’s Halloween tonight. Celtic holiday, sort of, taken over by the Anglo-Saxons, sort of, and then transported to North America and refined into a truly weird combination of costumes, scary, and sugar.
I’m a transplanted American living in Germany, and I’ve found that Halloween is just catching on here. Apparently nobody knew about [...]

Well we now have some of the details of the IMF package for Hungary, and interesting reading it makes. Hungary has in effect secured a 20 billion-euro ($25.5 billion) loan which is going to be sourced by three institutions: the IMF, the EU and the World Bank. The International Monetary Fund is going lend Hungary [...]

As every woman who has ever had dealings with a man knows only too well, it is a lot easier for people to make promises than it is for them to keep them. And when Europe’s leaders met in Paris on the 12 October, a lot of fine promises (which were all, surely, very well [...]

Yesterday, the Ukraine received a USD16.5bn loan from the IMF and the IMF at the same time said that it would agree with the Hungarian government on a rescue package in the coming days. Under normally circumstances this would be good news for CEE assets. However, it seems like the markets are totally giving up [...]

Well, only seconds after I jokingly suggest in my last post that Bulgaria may be talking to the IMF even as I write, Bloomberg flash up on my screen that Romania already are - although, not for a loan, please note. But, they would say that, now wouldn’t they?
Romania is in “close dialogue” with the [...]

Well, today I have come across three short news stories, each of which, in its own way, sent some kind of a shiver down my spine.
Iceland’s Interest Hike
First off, we have Iceland, where the central bank has just raised interest rates by a whopping six percentage points:
Crisis-hit Iceland’s central bank boosted interest rates by [...]

Hungary announced on Sunday that it had reached agreement with both the International Monetary Fund and the European Union on a broad economic rescue package, which will include substantial financing, in a bid to stabilize a Hungarian economy which has been both shaken by the global financial crisis and faces long term macro [...]

Via Crooked Timber, French Politics has interesting things to say about the Sarkofund:
In France it’s hardly unprecedented for major capital spending to be directed by the state, whether under the Commissariat au Plan, through state-controlled or -influenced enterprises, or directly by the Ministry of Finance. Sarkozy always danced nimbly between the neoliberal and state-capitalist camps. [...]

London gets a visit from AFOE founder David Weman. Here’s a photo of him and fellow long-time fistfulist Matthew Turner, at the Prince of Wales, Highgate.
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Your US federal government, the benchmark for effective policymaking that we can only approach by creating a similar monster state: they are still promising to balance the budget, as if that was a) realistic and b) desirable.