Japan’s second-largest trading company Mitsui & Co. have just published a forecast: oil may rise to a record $96 a barrel in August, when hurricanes typically cut U.S. output. Like all such forecasts, this is subject to a large margin of possible error. But the arguments are coherent and certainly plausible. At least there is [...]

Of course, I could be accused of only latching-on to the data that suits me, and it is true that there has been some reasonably optimistic reporting about the German economy of late: we had the German IFO index, and there was the apparently world cup driven consumer confidence index rise. So todays news that [...]

This post has one sovereign virtue: apart from in the current sentence it will not refer, either directly or indirectly, to the Catalan Statute. The topic it does deal with however is probably equally vital for the future of Spain. The issue is Spain’s housing boom, and the role of immigration in fuelling it. Two [...]

The Czech Republic is booming apparently. Both per-capita GDP and fertility are definitely on an upswing, although surprisingly perhaps, for once I am not going to try and suggest that these are connected:
The Czech republic has joined Slovenia among new member states with higher levels of wealth per capita than old member Portugal, according to [...]

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, not unexpectedly, the ECB decided to leave its main refinancing rate unchanged at 2.25% yesterday. Rather more surprisingly (for some at least) the German Federal Statistical agency reported that German economic growth ground to a halt at the end of 2005.
According to the Financial Times:
Johann Hahlen, president of the federal statistics office, said that [...]

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 [...]

Only last week, following the Russian decision to turn of Moldova’s gas supply along with Ukraine, Alex and I were asking ourselves the question: whatever happened to Moldova.
Well here comes the answer, from Randy McDonalds Live Journal, they are either growing wine or leaving it seems:
Moldova, as it happens, shares with Georgia a long tradition [...]

Some people start the year by resolving to give something up. Sweden’s new year’s resolution, it seems, is to give up oil by 2020.
Breaking dependence on oil brings many opportunities for strengthened competitiveness, technological development and progress. The aim is to break dependence on fossil fuels by 2020. By then no home will need oil [...]

Over at TYR, I argued that the explanation of the Ukraine-Russia gas dispute was an effort by the Russian side to break up the European gas customers as a negotiating block by exploiting the conflict between the transit states (like the Ukraine) and the customers (like Germany). This gave rise to further discussion down-blog right [...]