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, [...]

Steve Clemons, who’s quite adept at reading the Washington tea leaves, writes that the Doha round of trade negotiations is effectively over.
Why? For most of the present US administration, Bob Zoellick had been the US Trade Representative. Zoellick was an old hand, wise in the ways of both trade and Washington. But when Condelezza [...]

While most of Europe is still busy eating the chocolate eggs we managed to find yesterday, Brad Delong is back in his office, demonstrating on video that it takes a really, really huge mug of coffee to get through the day of a Berkeley research professor. In addition, he also shares some thoughts about his [...]

English weblog England Expects has an intriguing post on the vitality of the euro. More precisely, about its lack of vitality:
For the first time, an official French report has criticised the Euro. Indeed, the latest report of the Council for Economic Analysis (CAE) given to the French government on 23 March, “Economic policy and Growth [...]

Corriere della Sera is now reporting that the Italian Senate is breaking 158-156 to the Left, with the lower house going 340-277. The controversial six seats for Italians abroad, introduced by neo-well actually quite-fascist minister (a former member of the Salo Republic’s army) Mirko Tremaglia, seem to have backfired badly on their inventor, with 4 [...]

Well, by 1630 CET today, the Milan stock market had made a very clear judgment on the outcome of the Italian elections - the MIBTEL index being up just under 1 per cent intraday, despite a pasting for Berlusconi’s own Mediaset..down 1.98 per cent at €9.68 a share. Berlusconi’s departure seems welcome indeed.
More exit poll [...]

Well today is obviously immigration day, as thousands of Latinos take to the streets in the United States to demand some kind of ‘regularisation’. I have been posting on Demography Matters about the changing pattern of Latino migration in the US, and on the not entirely unrelated topic of whether it is the arrival of [...]

While everyone in France is waiting for tomorrow’s decision (and not “démission” i.e. “resignation”, as Villepin said today in a dreadful slipe of the tongue) of the Constitutional Court on the CPE, I urge everyone to go read Wolfang Munchau’s refreshingly contrarian take on the current crisis.
The column is now safely protected by the [...]

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 [...]

News today which is of more than passing interest from the Czech Republic. The South Korean industrial group Hyundai has announced that it is going to build its first European car plant at Nosovice. The factory - which is scheduled to cost around one billion euros - should begin production in October [...]