Is Europe currently facing a widespread credit crunch, or are the problems currently being experienced in the banking sector (aka “the financial turmoil of last August”) only a US phenomenon? Reading many of the articles which have been appearing in the financial press recently you could be forgiven for thinking that the latter was the [...]

Well, three years after the famous “orange” revolution Ukraine is at it again. Voting I mean. At the time of writing only 60% of the votes have been counted, and the margin is a narrow one, but the pundits all seem to be suggesting that the bloc of of parties lead by former premier Yulia [...]

In case you hadn’t noticed, a right royal (no, not royale) row has been going on in recent weeks - a battle of the Titan-Presidents you might almost say - with the key protagonists being European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet in the red corner and French President Nicolas Sarkozy in the blue one. [...]

Well this is a rather frivolous post about a fairly serious issue. Has anyone seen Trichet? (No, not Kelly, Trichet). I imagine the financial markets would like to know what he thinks. Or rather, maybe they wouldn’t, but they need to.
Basically this isn’t a case of quietly fiddling while Rome burns (and Q2 GDP, and [...]

As most of you will have already picked up, Japan today is having upper house elections. Japan’s current leader Shinzo Abe is widely thought to be in for a drubbing. Normally elections to the Japanese upper house would not be considered to be particularly important, but this time there are reasons to believe that things [...]

Well, fresh from my recent exchange with the Economist’s Central European correspondent (and see my original Afoe post which sparked the reply), it is pleasing to be able to announce that that very same journal this week contains a series of interesting articles on some of the very topics which were at issue. In the [...]

Well, the financial markets are happy at any rate. The Turkish stock market jumped 5% on Monday while the lira closed at a two-year high against the US dollar. Tayyip Erdogan (leader of the victorious Justice and Development party, the AKP) was also a happy man: “The new government will bring peace and stability” he [...]

In a recent Afoe post on European Fertility (which was really an extended review of an article in the Economist) I took some considerable stick in comments for being too soft on the journalists over at the Economist who were behind the article (mainly because a large chunk of the “good news” they claimed [...]

Something is afoot in Latvia. According to the latest Eurostat data on annual wage costs, in the first quarter of 2007 wages in Latvia were up by an astonishing 32.7% when compared with the first quarter of 2006 (for a simple graph of the course of Latvian wages since 2001 try this) . Without knowing [...]

According to the Economist last week “Reports of Europe’s death are somewhat exaggerated“. I can only whole-heartedly agree. I think though, it only fair to add, that reports of Europe’s impending old age are almost certainly not, indeed generally it might be felt that the significance of this phenomenon were rather underestimated, than overstated.
Let me [...]