When I asked, “Who’s next?” I neglected to post the answers which were Washington Mutual and Ukraine. Hope that I was only half-right.

Newsweek has a longish (for Newsweek) article this week about how the center-left is in trouble in pretty much all the large European countries:
No matter what they call themselves—Social Democrats, Socialists or Labour—rarely have they simultaneously appeared so troubled. In Britain, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s popularity has hit rock bottom. Germany’s Social Democrats are [...]

“It should be noted that AIG wrote its derivative contracts in London.” – Commenter Thomas, at Crooked Timber
And indeed, we see a report on Bloomberg, the wire service the financial folks use to communicate with each other, that Allianz was involved in a bid for AIG two days before the crisis that led to its [...]

Flight to quality is about the only thing I can say for sure about the ongoing Wall Street crisis that swallowed up a 158-year-old investment bank and forced Merrill (no-relation) Lynch to be sold to some outfit in North Carolina. (The $613+ billion that Lehman lists as debt is between the 2007 GDP of Belgium, [...]

Something other than Georgia for a change. Via the 8th Circle, here’s a recent article in the Economist about a possible economic downturn in Eastern Europe:
The party is nearly over
After a good run, Eastern Europe faces an economic slowdown
IT HAS gone on splendidly for years, and the party isn’t quite finished yet. For [...]

James Sherr writes in today’s Telegraph:
… Russia is exasperated with the West and also contemptuous of it. In the Georgian conflict, as in the more subtle variants of energy diplomacy, Russians have shown a harshly utilitarian asperity in connecting means and ends. In exchange, we appear to present an unfocused commitment to values and process. [...]

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 [...]

Middle-long, middle-brow article on European demographics in this weeks NY Times Magazine. (If it asks you for a login, try bugmenot.)
If you’re already interested in this topic, 80% of it will be familiar stuff. There were a couple of interesting new points, though:

[...]

So Romania’s economy grew by about 8% in the first quarter of this year.
To put this in context: Romania has been growing at a rate of around 6% per year nonstop since 1999. So — on paper at least — its economy has nearly doubled in size since then.
And you can see it. Bucharest [...]

The release of a recent poll showing that most Hungarians preferred life under communism caused a mild shock in the foreign community, but provoked little more than a characteristic shrug from Hungarians. After all, under János Kádár Hungary was one of the least repressive regimes in the Soviet bloc, the “Goulash Communism” of the 1980s [...]