The Irish and the Greeks are, in many ways, very different people. And yet, caught up in the Euro Crisis, their fortunes have become too close for comfort.
Read more...Yves here. This piece by Bill Black not only does a great job of kneecapping some typically poor MSM reporting, but it’s also valuable as a high-level overview of the insanity of European economic policies.
Read more...Russian President Vladimir Putin might have had a field day listening to Obama’s Brussels speech threatening more economic sanctions, except he was otherwise engaged.
Read more...The notion of Eurozone fragility is no longer an active worry among investors and pundits. Is this increased optimism warranted?
Read more...What do the Catholic Church and the Eurozone have in common? More than one thinks
Read more...Monetarism began it’s rise to world prominence in the ever-conservative Bundesbank in 1974. But it would be the government of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, elected in 1979, that would truly launch monetarism in central banking. After Thatcher’s monetarist experiment undertaken between 1979 and 1984 every economics student would be taught to recite the various monetary aggregates by heart for at least a decade or two.
This is what accounts for the monetarist bent we see in the economists of the last generation. Basically any economist trained between roughly 1980 and 1995 would be heavily exposed to monetarist dogma. And only those that read alternative accounts of money creation — namely, the theory of endogenous money — would be fully immunised. This explains, for example, why certain economists that champion Keynesian policies — like Paul Krugman — actually speak in monetarist tones.
Read more...Dave here. In case you were thinking that the Great Game was obsolete or something. Needless to say the referendum passed, this was written slightly before the release of the results. By Nick Cunningham, a Washington DC-based writer on energy and environmental issues. You can follow him on twitter at @nickcunningham1. Cross-posted at Oil Price. […]
Read more...“We have to fight corruption in order to build a new model of more sustainable and fairer growth.”
These laudable words came from the least likely of mouths – that of Francisco González, CEO of Spanish banking giant Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA). González was speaking at the bank’s annual shareholder meeting, held last week in Bilbao.
BBVA is Spain’s second biggest bank with operations in more than 30 countries including the U.S., China, Argentina, Columbia and Mexico. It has about 107,000 employees, 47 million customers worldwide, a million shareholders and now, it seems, a moralizing CEO.
Read more...Few have it quite as bad as the tenants of a growing number of social housing projects in Spain who are finding out their new dodgy landlords hail from Wall Street.
Read more...To many, the answer to the specter of Russian natural gas dominance is clear: unleash America’s natural gas abundance and displace Moscow. But will that work?
Read more...We live in a world built on such an overkill of 24/7 propaganda and misinformation that some of it easily slips by. Especially when the topic is the Ukraine.
Read more...Yves here. This post is useful because the issues Varoufakis raises are orthogonal to most of the discussion in the English language press over Ukraine.
Read more...Yves here. A tongue-in-cheek article in the Financial Times, Putin putting Europe in its place, written from Putin’s viewpoint, concluded:
Read more...“As to your plans for emergency economic aid for Ukraine, this is an excellent plan. They could use the money and I’d rather not shell out myself. Incidentally, to save time why not make the cheques payable to Gazprom?”
How we learned to stop worrying and love the IMF….
Read more...ves here. This Real News Network interview with Yilmaz Akyuz, formerly the Director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), describes how the problems that produced the financial crisis have morphed into new, no less troubling problems. One key part of this discussion focuses on how China has adapted to its considerably smaller trade surplus, and why having Germany as the new excessive exporter poses new perils to the global economy.
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