Jörg Haider has died in a car accident. This will make a christian democrat+far right coalition even more unlikely.
Can his party survive him? I suppose some people might be reluctant to vote for the more overtly nasty Strache, and I don’t imagine the government parties getting more votes next time. Still, probably not.

A few days ago, Edward explored the gap between the Eurozone’s monetary and political architecture (and the lack of the latter) as a potential risk to the Eurozone itself.   But in what looks likely to be a weekend of rapidly changing events, here is a new wrinkle: Nicolas Sarkozy has convened an emergency heads of [...]

Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland, has won the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize “for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts”.
Finland has it all!

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has officially dissolved the parliament, and new elections are set for December 7. He made no secret of why he thought the coalition broke up:

The democratic coalition - I am convinced, deeply convinced - was destroyed with only one thing – personal ambition. The personal ambition of one individual which [...]

Asset freezes.  Threats of litigation.  Expressions of mystification about the intentions of a foreign government.  The latest round with another axis of evil country?  No: the current state of relations between the UK and Iceland.  As we were saying before we were so rudely interrupted, Iceland is leading the way from a banking crisis to [...]

Thought this article made for interesting reading:
When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany’s inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is [...]

With European countries in a rush to take banking sector liabilities onto the public balance sheet, they might want to take a look at where that route goes, in extremis: Iceland, as a banking crisis becomes a full blown macroeconomic crisis.  Today has seen a bewildering series of events, even against the backdrop of a [...]

in the American Presidential election!
Well, sort of.
Those 16 votes? Georgia, because McCain has been rather more truculent towards the Russians. Some say there’s not much difference between the candidates, but apparently the Georgians disagree! Macedonia, because Obama has supported a resolution taking Greece’s side in the Great Name Debate. That hasn’t [...]

“We do not have a federal budget, so the idea that we could do the same as what is done on the other side of the Atlantic doesn’t fit with the political structure of Europe,”
Jean-Claude Trichet, commenting last week on the Eupean “summit” in Paris last Saturday
“If you concentrate on California or Florida, it is [...]

In my work inbox this morning, a message from TeleGeography. Their latest report on IP transit pricing is out. This bit struck me: 1,000Mbits of transit over Gigabit Ethernet in Bucharest now costs no more than it does in London - and only a couple of dollars more than in San Francisco. That’s incredible, and [...]