As Manuel points out in the accompanying post, Romano Prodi’s resignation as Italy’s Prime Minister is a rather sudden and dramatic, but scarcely unexpected, development. The immediate political crisis may be resolved as rapidly as it appeared, but again as Manuel indicates it may only serve as a prelude for further things to come, and [...]

When scientific paradigms collide everyone should duck, at least that is the best advice I can offer at the present moment. The provisional German retail sales for January are now in, and they don’t make especially pleasant reading:
“European retail sales dropped for the first time in 10 months in January as spending in Germany [...]

This weekend’s election results in Serbia, and in particular the gridlock state of the political process and the resilience of the vote for the nationalist Serbian Radical Party (as ably explained by Doug in the previous post), pose new, and arguably reasonably urgent questions for all those who are concerned about the future of those [...]

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 [...]

Brad Setser has a post, the perrenial dollar story, which IMHO, has one large and significant ommission: it doesn’t really mention the euro. Personally I don’t really see how you can consider the future evolution of the dollar without taking the euro into account. This realisation provoked a rather long comment from me on Brad’s [...]

“Global imbalances matter” seems to be the favoured warcry over at Brad Setser’s blog these days (I’m not sure anyone really disagrees with the idea that they matter, all the arguing seems to be about how much and why). Recently however Brad seems to be drawing support from a rather unexpected quarter: “one part [...]

Yesterday the news from Italy was the sudden drop in industrial output, today it is the fact that this makes Berlusconi’s re-election much more uphill work. In particular his coalition just lost a vote in Messina, Sicily, that they normally should have won.
This trend in indutrial output is important for what it implies about [...]

Hungary converted itself into the latest country to join the line of EU members awaiting chastisment for failing to enforce budgetary discipline after it became clear that its deficit for 2005 could be almost double official forecasts.
Joaqu�n Almunia, EU monetary affairs commissioner, told European finance ministers Hungary’s deficit this year was projected [...]

Italy has, of course, it’s own version of the twin deficit: on the one hand a political system which maintains serious democratic and credibility deficits (viz the mutual ppresence of Tremonti and Fazio in Washington this weekend) and the equally important financial deficit which has generally received less attention in the press. (We can [...]

Germany isn’t the only EU country where serious ongoing economic problems are leading to political gridlock. Italy’s situation is no better, and arguably worse. This ‘worse’ aspect was pushed into the headlines yesterday by the resignation of Economy Minister Domenico Siniscalco. This is sending shock waves throughout the entire Italian political system. It still isn’t [...]