Well, I am writing this in the form of an extended comment, since I am on holiday and using the ecellent wifi facility in the local public library, but am about to go fo lunch. As I realised as I was going to sleep last night, my last Sweden post was always going to cause [...]

Animated by yesterday’s export driven PMI result, Sweden takes poll position in quantitative easing and commits to keeping 0.25% rates on hold till the end of 2010. Mind you, they are lucky enough to have Princeton economist and avid deflation fighter Lars Svensson in there on the board to steer them through all this. Good [...]

Global manufacturing took another step towards growth in June - but the process was, as ever, uneven. The JPMorgan Global Manufacturing PMI posted 46.9, its highest reading since last August. The current output component even expanded slightly following a year-long period of contraction. The PMI has now remained below the neutral 50.0 mark for thirteen [...]

Well, today is the 30 of June, and still no news from the IMF on releasing the next tranche of the Latvian loan. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why (via Ott Umelas at Bloomberg).
Estonia’s fiscal deficit under European Union terms more than doubled in the first quarter from a year earlier, [...]

There was a very interesting and revealing press conference given by IMF First Deputy Managing Director John Lipsky and European Central Bank governing council member Christian Noyer in Paris on Thursday. Christian Noyer said that, in his opinion, Baltic countries like Latvia would not be helped by joining the single currency (the euro) prematurely.
“It’s in [...]

Japan put in a pretty negative export performance in May. Even shipments to China show little sign of improvement, and the general impression is that hopes for a quick recovery in global demand are looking very premature.

On the other hand a 42 per cent year-on-year fall in imports in May left Japan with a trade [...]

The eurozone economies moved sideways in June, with the flash reading on the composite purchasing managers index (which covers both industry and services) for the 16 nation euro area rising to 44.4, fractionally above the 44 registered in May. So we are just where we were before, contracting more slowly than in Q1, but still [...]

On a morning when we read that faced with cuts of around 25% in the hospital service Latvia’s Health Minister Ivars Eglitis has resigned rather than carry out such controversial “reforms” in the health service he is charged with administering, Latvian American blogger Juris Kaža asks us: is Latvia committing Futuricide?

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Everything in Germany is going up, except it seems the real economy - and except of course prices, which were stationary in May (that is a change of 0% year on year - the lowest inflation rate for over 20 years). Anyway, today it was the turn of investor confidence to put in another good [...]

Quietly clicking my way through Bloomberg last Sunday afternoon, I came across this:
Facebook Members Register Names at 550 a Second
Facebook Inc., the world’s largest social-networking site, said members registered new user names at a rate of more than 550 a second after the company offered people the chance to claim a personalized Web address.
Facebook started [...]