Well, it might appear that my smug headline in the post below may not have been so appropriate after all. At least I find the news from the FT today that Eurozone members, headed by France and Germany, are considering to set up an internal IMF type fund very significant.
(from the FT)
Germany and France are [...]

In a week when the Greek leadership declares it a historic moment for the European Union that the ailing country has agreed to swallow an additional austerity plan which, so far, seems to have calmed markets it would almost be too much to continue picking on the Eurozone. Yet pick I am going to nonetheless [...]

It is a well known dictum in the context of economic analysis that you have to distinguish between stocks and flows and how focus on one instead of the other lead to misguided analysis. It is the same with growth and levels with the former defined as the growth from one period to another in [...]

The Eurozone’s current problems are not mainly a result a of prolifigate and reckless spending of government resources in the Eurozone periphery [1]. Even nobel laureate Paul Krugman has begun to forcefully push this argument arguing that the real source of the malaise is the steady build up internal Eurozone imbalances. I only conditionally agree. [...]

GDP releases are, by nature, lagging indicators and thus do not say a whole lot on the current momentum in the economy. Moreover, the immediate attention span when it comes to the Eurozone remains, and rightly so, focused on the situation in Greece (and Spain) and what plan exactly that is to emerge from the [...]

Paul Krugman has blogged an interesting analysis of the anatomy of the recent economic crisis in Europe (link).
Europe’s difficult macroeconomic situation in the aftermath of the financial and economic crisis has exacerbated rising fiscal deficits and public debt alongside strong deflationary pressures. These pressures were triggered by the highly negative output gap – the difference [...]

The Economist published a very lucid analysis (link) of the recent macroeconomic instability in the Euroarea, following the outbreak of Greek debt crisis (link) and disappointing quarterly data on GDP growth (link):
Barely had the ink dried on a statement by European leaders supporting Greece in its struggle to finance its debts when more bad news [...]

Paul De Grauwe published a very good article (link), discussing the macroeconomic origins of the current debt crisis in Greece.
“The period 1999-2009 has been organised in periods of booms and busts: the boom years were 1999-2001 and 2005-07; the bust years were 2002-04 and 2008-09.
One observes a number of remarkable patterns.

First, private debt increases much [...]

I shall openly admit that I have always found the exact role of the rating agencies a bit odd in the global financial system. I mean, do we really need them to tell us which bonds are good and which are not? I am not sure and what is more; rating agencies sometimes, if not [...]

This piece was written before Christmas and will appear in the first 2010 edition of the Forex Journal. The data covers the market up until mid December.
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Old Maid is a card game where the simple task is to avoid holding a given card (often the queen of spades) at the end. Even in the company [...]