Following the turbulent river of news which has flowed unrelentingly through the principal European media outlets since Sunday night, today we seem to be swimming in a relative ocean of calm. This is very deceptive. Today the Netherlands is voting and tomorrow the ECB will have a closely watched meeting which may potentially have significant [...]

Conventional marxist theory used to argue that capitalism was doomed to regular and deepening crisis due to the impact of a phenomen known as ‘the falling rate of profit’. Basically the idea runs as follows: since on the marxist view labour is the only source of genuine wealth creation, and capital accumulation means that the [...]

The euro reached its lowest level against the dollar in seven months last week dropping from a valueof $1.311 a month ago to $1.255 on Friday. This was the lowest level since last October. Undoubtedly there are a confluence of factors at work here: yesterday’s French growth numbers, longer term stagnant growth [...]

Provisional GDP numbers for eurozone countries in the first quarter are out today. The German economy surprisingly bounces back, whilst Italy is now officially in recession after two quarters of contraction. Also worthy of note is that the Dutch economy contracted slightly in the first quarter, which may have some implications for the forthcoming constitution [...]

Views of immigration are changing. Back in the mists of time, when I first came to the conclusion that ongoing demographic changes were going to be important, the voices in favour of a reconsideration of immigration policy were few and far between. Perhaps the first and most notable of these voices was the UN population [...]

Currency traders around the globe lazily staring into their screens must have found themselves transfixed last Friday when the flatline indicating the value of the Chinese yuan (or renminbi if you prefer) suddenly jumped to life. And so it was that during a brief 20 minute interval the yuan surged to a level of 8.270 [...]

Earlier this month, when Edward wrote

The alarm shot was given by Dalls Federal Reserve President Robert McTeer when he declared in a speech in New York last week that whilst overseas investors now ?finance? the US current account gap, ?theoretically some day that process will come to an end, the flows will turn against us [...]

With unemplyment currently running at a five year high of 10.7%, yesterday’s news that GM/Opel and KarstadtQuelle are to reduce employment further (’Germany Loses 15,000 Jobs in a Day’ was the Bloomberg headline) could hardly come at a worse time. There is plenty of evidence of the long promised restructuring, but little of jobs growth. [...]

Morgan Stanley (among many others) have been busy cutting their 2004 and 2005 growth outooks. With Oil prices continuosly hitting new highs this all has some sort of inevitability about it. Whilst it is probable that the slowdown in growth will bring oil back from its current peaks, MS estimate that “the new equilibrium for [...]

The Financial Times reports today that the team lead by Wim Kok, set up after the March economics summit, and charged with carrying out a review of the Lisbon process, is likely to find that we are badly behind schedule. This is hardly surprising since the Lisbon agenda was rather stronger on rhetorical nicety (including [...]