I am very happy to be back here at AFOE, if not only, for a brief one-stop guest post about the economics of the German VAT hike and more specifically how market commentators and analists might just be reading the German economy somewhat falsely at the moment in the sense that they are not taking [...]

With the ECB adamant that it will continue to raise rates this would seem to be the most untimely of questions, but there are now signs that this may well be the case.
Firstly this in Bloomberg today:
Federal Reserve to Cut Rates in 2007, Corporate Bond Sales Show
Thinking about refinancing your mortgage in [...]

Did prices really go up when the Euro arrived? The public mind, or at least the dominant media discourse, says they did. The inflation indices say they didn’t, or at least the prices that did go up were outweighed by the ones that went down. This paradox may have been solved. Erich Kirchler, of Vienna [...]

Expanding on (and slightly copying) my comments in Edward’s post below, I was really shocked to see the spin in the western coverage of the Ukrainian gas crisis. The part that didn’t shock me - just made me groan - is the spin of a western press that seems to have decided in advance [...]

Inflation in the eurozone is not about to spiral out of control. I have been arguing this for months now. The latest piece of evidence: French consumer prices fell 0.3 percent in November as compared with the previous month:
French consumer prices fell 0.3 percent in November on the previous month, national statistics office INSEE reported [...]

So, President Basescu is unhappy.
This is not unusual. President Basescu is often unhappy. You’d think that, having won the election last December against Prime Minister Nastase, he’d be at least content. But Basescu is a scrapper, and he’s always looking for a fight, and in recent weeks he’s found one. It’s [...]

More evidence today of how the Central Bankers and their economic advisers are doing their best to sound the inflation alarm. This time it is ECB Chief Economist Otmar Issing:
European Central Bank Chief Economist Otmar Issing said a surge in oil prices may lead to higher-than- expected inflation in 2006, as the bank edges closer [...]

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 [...]

As I keep indicating the French economy - although not a spectacular success - continues to outperform the German one. This is interesting, since the French political system has been much more laggard than the German one in implementing reforms. That is why I place emphasis on the demographic differential.

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Tony Blair inched home to a historic Labour third term in the UK last week. But looking at the changing tempo of the British economy over the last couple of months, you could be tempted to ask: was this a case of ‘just in time’ electioneering?
At the present time there seems to be a general [...]