The global financial crisis has had a continual capacity to surprise policymakers and the latest unpleasantness would appear to be the failure of the IMF-backed stabilization program in Ukraine barely a month after it was announced.  As we noted at the time, the program emphasized a flexible exchange rate, to avoid blowing reserves on a [...]

James Fallows points out an interesting perspective on Tim Geithner, Obama’s pick to be US Secretary of the Treasury: experience with Asia and at the IMF. Both will be very useful in the current crisis.
When I was with a DC finance firm about a decade ago, my colleagues had fairly regular contacts with him. [...]

The US state of New Hampshire now has more female senators than male in the upper house of state government.
After [the November 4] election, thirteen of the twenty-four state Senate seats in New Hampshire are now occupied by women. Peggy Gilmore (District 12), Bette Lasky (District 13) and Amanda Merrill (District 21) beat out their [...]

Now this is a very interesting question, isn’t it? The only honest answer I can give is that I don’t know, and indeed I haven’t the faintest idea. The government of Latvia (the Baltic state which is currently most rife with “rumours” about imminent devaluations) works in its own wondrous ways, and neither we (nor [...]

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”
Tolstoy
Well this is an interesting little fable of modern family life, even if all the families involved may not be ones which many of my readers would normally wish to belong to.
As is now reasonably well know Russian private oil company Lukoil [...]

The IMF has released yesterday’s concluding statement of its mission to Italy.   It’s mixed reading.  On the one hand, Italy is looking at a full year recession for 2008, let alone 2009 (the latter being the benchmark prediction for most OECD countries).  And long-term problems, such as low employment rates, remain.  However Italy has dodged [...]

While we are likely to see a “substantial” drop in euro-region inflation, Bank of Spain forecasts for the 15-nation euro area do not show price drops. That is they “show an enormous moderation in price gains, but they do show price gains,” according to the latest statements by Miquel Angel Fernandez Ordoñez, ECB Council member [...]

Well it must come as something of a relief for any Italian readers we have here at AFOE to learn that UniCredit SpA, Italy’s biggest bank by assets, has definitely NOT incurred losses on the Russian interbank market. Although perhaps I should rephrase that by adding just one extra word: yet. UniCredit has definitely [...]

As Barcelona-based property consultants Aguirre Newman publish a report that suggests Spanish property prices may need to fall by at least 23% for the market to return to any kind of normality, we learn today that Spain’s annual inflation dropped almost a full percentage point to 3.6 percent in October, according to data from the [...]

I’m beginning to think that our neighborhood grocery store here in Tbilisi could be an interesting source of stories about the politics and economics in the Second World. The tastiest corn chips come from Turkey, the cooking oil brands are almost all Russian (though with relations being what they are, I don’t know if the [...]