After a series of posts on the rise of the euro earlier in the year, I’ve been relatively quiet on this front of late. This doesn’t mean that the problem has gone away. The growing feeling that the US economy was taking off certainly eased the pressure, and the euro has hovered around the low [...]

There’s a fair amount of talk again this week about the various government deficits and what to do with them. Earlier in the week the FT had a piece about the current state of play with the US deficit whilst the Economist is busy musing one more time over the ongoing saga of the [...]

Inflation in the 12 countries of the zone euro slowed for the second consecutive month in July as weak consumer demand seems to have deterred companies from passing on higher energy costs.
Details released today from the EU’s Eurostat show that consumer prices fell 0.2 percent in July, cutting the annual inflation rate for the [...]

Just a brief follow-up on yesterday’s post on Alan Greenspan. Sleeping on it I have the feeling that for blog posting I may suffer from the failing of trying to complicate things too much, or at least of trying to say too much at once.
Really there were two central themes, and since they are a [...]

Really it doesn’t seem to be such a big deal, to add or not to add (0.25% to the Federal Reserve’s overnight funds rate), and in some ways probably it isn’t. But at the same time I can’t help feeling that Sir Alan faces tomorrow one of the most difficult decisions of his whole term [...]

At the time of writing the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England is busy deliberating as to whether to raise the base lending rate (currently at 4.5%). The consensus view is that the rate will go up a quarter point. Others speculate on a half percent rise (the National Institute of Economic and [...]

The Financial Times reports today on Deutsche Telekom’s first quarter results. The expected fall in the domestic fixed-line business was compensated for by a 12 per cent rise in revenues on the part of T-Mobile. A big part of this increase is due to the fact that they added a record 1.2m net [...]

The revelation yesterday that the EU was planning to offer to eliminate its agricultural export subsidies in an attempt to revive progress in the Doha world-trade round may not be all it appears to be. Astute readers of my post yesterday on China’s global impact may have noted the following:
“In the first place the [...]

According to the FT it was a case of “Pick-up in pay awards forced rate increase”, yet for the Guardian the point was rather “Housing boom forces third rise in rates”. My sympathies here are with the Guardian. Of course it is the case that the Bank of England pointed to the rising level [...]

In a week which has already seen Rai president Lucia Annunziata announce her departure (Rai is Italy’s state-run television and radio network), the latest statements from the Italian government about the future of Alitalia only serve to reopen one of the old questions floating round my head: just how solvent is Italy?
The [...]