Well, this was really what I had been waiting for, not that I welcome the news, obviously, but simply that as far as I am concerned it is far from unexpected. People have been ‘writing off’ Italy’s grave structural problems far too easily IMHO:
Industrial production in Italy declined 0.9 percent month-on-month in October for an [...]

I’d simply love to be a fly on the wall in London this weekend. The G7 finance ministers are about to meet the central bankers, and as in by now well known, these two groups haven’t exactly been hitting it off too well lately, at least, and better said, in Germany and Japan they haven’t. [...]

This was Wolfgang Munchau writing in the Financial Times a week ago:
“The pre-announced interest rate rise that the European Central Bank is due to agree this Thursday must rank as one of the most bizarre monetary policy decisions of recent times. The economic recovery in the eurozone remains fragile, as last week’s German confidence indicators [...]

First off, Dave at MacroBlog has a good summary of the core of the economic policy programme adopted by the new German government. He also has some to-the-point comments about ECB credibility issues
But the big news today must surely be the surprising state of the European consumer . Perhaps the most indicative reading on the [...]

The UK economy is still very much hanging in the balance between going up and going down IMHO. The latest BoE growth estimates, coupled with not especially good employment numbers, and indications that inflation may be coming down (and hence interest rates may follow) has caused a noteable pressure on the pound sterling. BoE governor [...]

I think I’d better rephrase that: more overall growth, but a very mixed bag. In deriving aggregate numbers for the zone, four big economies really matter: Spain, France, Germany and Italy. Now each of these economies actually has different characteristics, so it is not clear what ‘the general picture’ means here.
Spain is the European economy [...]

Some good news on the economic front to counter all that bad news on the social one. The French economy grew at an annualised rate of 2.8% in the third quarter of 2005 (or by 0.7% over the prebious quarter). Driving this growth: strong spending by French consumers. At this rate the French economy will [...]

Following-up on my post earlier this week on interest rate policy I see Graham Searjeant has a piece in the Times today arguing that Mervyn King has the balance wrong between fighting inflation and stimulating growth.
In a sense I think that Searjeant is not entirely fair when he says:
Growth has become even more vital [...]

U.K. jobless claims rose for an eighth consecutive month in September, extending the longest period of increases in almost 13 years, “as growth in Europe’s second- biggest economy slows”. This adds just a little more evidence to the fact that all is not necessarily currently all for the best in the land of John Stuart [...]

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 [...]