Do you want to save the Euro? Well one idea for how to do it has been proposed by University of Missouri-St Louis history professor John Gillingham: reissuing the 12 national currencies that were replaced with just one, while at the same time retaining the euro as a parallel currency that finds its market value [...]

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 [...]

Brad Setser has a post today on Kate Moss, not provoked by her evidently economically intriguing modelling properties, but due to the Kate-Moss-thin credit-spreads which Bloomberg’s William Pesek refers to in this article. What really turns Pesek on it turns out isn’t Kate Moss at all but the possible existence of links between [...]

Just a brief post to let you know that Mark Thoma and I are doing some guest posting this weekover at New Economist.
Perhaps the most interesting dimension is the amicable debate which Mark and I are having about the respective merits of the more activist Fed monetary policy and the rather more quietist approach [...]

This is a big news day. China has just announced that it is going to come off the dollar peg currency arrangement. Well it’s not that simple, they have announced a 2% appreciation of the currency against the dollar, and that the renminbi will now float against a basket of currencies. In fact this [...]

I have felt for some time that Rober Maroni would not have been so outspoken without at least the tacit permission of Silvio Berlusconi, and now we have the evidence to back my hunch:
“Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called the euro a “disaster,” blaming the currency for Italy’s economic slump and seeking to use anti-euro [...]

Really I realise I have been remiss in another important sense. I have long assumed that in fact the decision to reduce deficits was taken due to the coming fiscal pressure from ageing. This certainly was the background to the discussion. However now I look at the details of the SPG this area is not [...]

The euro fell briefly below $1.19 yesterday. There is nothing surprising or exceptional about that, the common currency has been drifting steadily downwards against the dollar for a number of, by-now, pretty well known reasons - better economic performance in the US, a growing interest rate differential between the ECB and the Fed, political issues [...]