John Quiggin writes about the banking crisis:
Suppose Bank A owes a trillion dollars to bank B which in turn owes a trillion to C which in turn owes a trillion to D which owes a trillion to A. Now suppose that A gets into liquidity trouble and can’t pay. Then B is similarly in trouble [...]

Why do the leading candidates in the French presidential election seem to have utterly strange European policies?
Take Nicolas Sarkozy. He supposedly believes in “rupture” with old ways and a dash for a new free-market, hard-nosed, toughness cult future. And Euroscepticism is at the heart of this. But at the same time, he has promised [...]

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 [...]

It was only just over two weeks ago (two weeks, which following the logic of a historical time which seems far from uniform, now seem like half a lifetime) that guest poster P. O’Neill, said this:
For understandable reasons — the addition of 10, and soon to be 12, new member countries, and the constitutional crisis, [...]

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 [...]