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 [...]

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 [...]

Am I being a little harsh with Jean Claude-Trichet? Perhaps, it is a hard (if not impossible) job he has on his hands. And in this post I did try hard to think about credible arguments in favour of the recent rate rise.
New arrival on the European economics blogging scene Claus Vistesen argues that [...]

One of the things about targeting expectations, and factoring-in changes, is that the world moves on at a very rapid clip these days. So the ECB rate rise in now, really, yesterday’s news. The big issue today is the fact that the easing cycle in the eurozone may already be over (we need to see [...]

The general impact of the French riots is, I feel, being ably covered by others here, what I am curious about is how financial markets reach their opinions. According to headlines in many newspapers, the euro is falling aginst the dollar as a result of what is happening in France (or see here). This [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The euro is trading this morning at around $1.2150. The big issue seems to be the US trade deficit, which is currently outweighing all other considerations. Still what goes down can come up, and what goes up……
The dollar fell to the lowest in two weeks against the euro, the biggest move of any currency, on [...]

The papers this morning seem to be all full of ‘gloomy’ articles whose principal theme is that Europe has finally been plunged into a grave crisis by this weeks summit.
“People will tell you next that Europe is not in a crisis,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who holds the EU presidency, said after [...]

You know I’m sure most of you think my constant references to Argentina in the context of Italy’s economic problems is troubling, possibly even irritating. You may well be right. I have to say that I followed Argentina steadily from 1998, waiting to see the inevitable happen. The principal problem was, lets be clear, the [...]