I’m not sure what Jerome is driving at here. It seems quite clear that, by promising a further referendum on whatever arises from Angela Merkel’s efforts to revive the Constitution, Ségoléne Royal is taking quite a risk, not least by betting on her ability to get the Laurent Fabius fanclub on side. I wouldn’t bet [...]

I see from EurActiv that the Bulgarians are runing into some linguistic trouble over the single currency:
The country has expressed concern over the differences between Bulgaria’s Cyrillic and the EU’s Latin alphabets, in response to renewed European Central Bank (ECB) demands that ‘euro’ be spelled and pronounced with a ‘u’ and not a ‘v’ [...]

Hungary, as readers of this blog well know, is struggling with a large budget deficit and a terrible balance of payments problem, which has led to a certain amount of trouble. Specifically the fighting in the streets kind. Now, the Socialist government of Ferenc Gyurcsyany came up with a simple plan to cut the deficit [...]

Because they devalued the forint this summer, so everything is now about 7% cheaper.
Well, they didn’t actually devalue it. No. I mean, that would imply there had been a… devaluation. Ha ha, how silly. No, what happened was that the Bank of Hungary moved the band in which the forint was [...]

Did prices really go up when the Euro arrived? The public mind, or at least the dominant media discourse, says they did. The inflation indices say they didn’t, or at least the prices that did go up were outweighed by the ones that went down. This paradox may have been solved. Erich Kirchler, of Vienna [...]

Since the withdrawal of the CPE and the resulting collateral damage to Dominique de Villepin, not to mention Nicolas Sarkozy’s unexpected appearance as a unity figure at the height of the crisis, it’s rapidly being promulgated as conventional wisdom that France “is ungovernable”/refuses to “reform”/cannot be “reformed”. There is only one problem with this discourse, [...]

Chris “Stumbling and Mumbling” Dillow has a very interesting post on signs of German economic recovery. Interestingly, the bellwether Ifo confidence index has shown a dramatic uptick, reaching its highest level since 1991. Dillow proceeds to examine its correlation with the DAX stock market index.
Now, as Chris points out, DAX-constituents are likely to be the [...]

Guy of these pages recently spoke to a “source” who has an interesting counter-take on the Italian economy and the Italian government’s debt problem to that frequently discussed here. Apparently, the feller says, there’s no chance of “an Argentinian-style blowout” because of the low levels of private debt.
The source is essentially arguing that Ricardian equivalence [...]

February in Paris, 1983. A group of student leaders are ushered into the presence of President Mitterand by huissiers. They stay slightly more than an hour, discussing Marxism-Leninism, youth, and society with the ever-inconsistent, sometimes brilliant, sometimes crooked, sometimes socialist and sometime fascist president. Years later, one of them, Jean-Claude Cambalebis remembers the three questions [...]

Well the eurozone government deficit problem has hit the agenda with a thud again in the last few days. Yesterday the FT ran a story about how the ECB has decided that it will not accept government paper (bonds) in the future from any country which has not maintained at least an A- rating [...]