Well, these are indeed troubled times. According to the latest news to come off the Reuters wires the International Monetary Fund has announced its readiness to offer financial and technical help to Hungary, effectively stepping in and providing support for an EU member state in difficulty at a time when the EU institutional and [...]

The medium-term outlook (for Ukraine) is sensitive to both external developments and policy responses. A benign external environment, featuring even higher steel prices and additional FDI, could produce growth in excess of 7 percent, but inflation could prove hard to control under a peg. Under an adverse external outlook, by contrast, the peg could lead [...]

“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 [...]

Well the action in Russia this week has moved on slightly, and the damage has started to spread from pressure on the domestic stock market (accompanied by capital flight) to the real economy - via a very rapid tightening in credit conditions for Russian domestic users. We are also seeing a rapid slowdown in Russian [...]

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”
Tolstoy
President Dmitry Medvedev’s recent decision to inject $20 billion into Russia’s flagging stock markets – which were down nearly 50% from last May at the time - together with the $60 billion odd dollars of support injected into its groggy banking system [...]

Well some times I agree with Wolfgang Munchau, and sometimes I don’t. This is one of the occasions when I do, especially the following passage which can be found in his Financial Times op-ed this morning:
“Some degree of competitive adjustment is probably needed but the huge scale of the shock that is unfolding in Spain [...]

“Look, Doctor, he’s just faking……. Even now in the hour of his death he has to trick us.”
The opening sentence: ‘There’s a long silence, and then I say …’ indicates the three functions of this book. It is an attempt to find a self through utterance, after a lifetime of non-communication; this was prompted by [...]

Last Monday morning when most of Spain’s citizens were busy watching YouTube videos or TV news coverage of Rodolfo Chiquilicuatre doing his bit of buffoonery at the Eurovision Song Contest, many readers of the English speaking financial press were hard at it peering into another video, the one of the Financial Times’ Ralph Atkins interviewing [...]

Does anyone happen to know offhand the “official” dollar rate of the Ukrainian currency, the Hryvnia? I am asking this question since clearly over at the central bank they are having difficulty deciding at the moment, since - like the legendary character Hydra - they seem to be speaking with two “heads” at the same [...]

Slovakia today won EU approval to adopt the euro on Jan. 1 2009, thus becoming the 16th member of the European single currency zone. The EU Commission announced today on its Web site that Slovakia had reduced both the fiscal deficit and inflation sufficiently to qualify. At the same time the [...]