Because they devalued the forint this summer, so everything is now about 7% cheaper.
Well, they didn’t actually devalue it. No. I mean, that would imply there had been a… devaluation. Ha ha, how silly. No, what happened was that the Bank of Hungary moved the band in which the forint was [...]

In case you were wondering about the Portuguese economy a recent OECD survey tries to steer you in the direction and although the OECD are undobtedly right in many of their observations the case of Portugal also mirrors how being a member of the Euro does not necessarily help you to achieve those honourful demands [...]

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 [...]

Do you want to save the Euro? Well one idea for how to do it has been proposed by University of Missouri-St Louis history professor John Gillingham: reissuing the 12 national currencies that were replaced with just one, while at the same time retaining the euro as a parallel currency that finds its market value [...]

Yes we are really, aren’t we. Especially if we are called Arcelor, or Danone, or Endesa, or Eni, or Enel, or Banca Antonveneta or Pekao. And what these champions have in common, and it is this which sets them so much apart from their footballing equivalents, is not the ability to win anything, but [...]

Yes gentle readers, les jeux sont faits. Italy has entered the election season, and this time the game is for real. The outcome of this election, and the decisions which are subsequently taken will be important not just for Italy, but for the whole EU, and the stakes are not small ones: the whole [...]

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 [...]

Am I being a little harsh with Jean Claude-Trichet? Perhaps, it is a hard (if not impossible) job he has on his hands. And in this post I did try hard to think about credible arguments in favour of the recent rate rise.
New arrival on the European economics blogging scene Claus Vistesen argues that [...]

The general impact of the French riots is, I feel, being ably covered by others here, what I am curious about is how financial markets reach their opinions. According to headlines in many newspapers, the euro is falling aginst the dollar as a result of what is happening in France (or see here). This [...]

Bloomberg this morning has a review of the pros and cons of Marty Feldstein as Alan Greenspan’s successor. One thing they don’t touch on is what the implications might be of having someone at the head of the US Federal Reserve who is pretty much convinced the Euro can’t work.
“Marty has something of [...]