German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Athens today, facing some, shall we say, determined protests. Apparently seven thousand riot police protected Merkel on this trip, and for good reason. I think “image problem” is a bit of an understatement. Merkel, for her part, said she sympathized with Greek suffering, which for some reason failed to mollify [...]

We have a little schizophrenia happening in Germany. On the one hand, they lead Europe in demanding that Spain ask for their bailout already. Michael Meister, a top aide to Angela Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union party, said that Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy “must spell out what the situation is,” and he warned [...]

Mario Draghi has boosted global stock markets and sent many commentators cheering for his elimination of tail risk from Europe. However, he also subverted the democracies of multiple countries in Europe, according to those wild-eyed liberals at CNBC. With its OMTs the ECB is setting politicial pre-conditions (the often-used buzz word “conditionality”) for executing monetary [...]

It appears the European Central Bank is ready to pick a fight with Germany over their resistance to saving the Eurozone economy through monetary means. Writing in the German newspaper Die Zeit, ECB president Mario Draghi espoused a viewpoint basically contradictory to the German reserve at using monetary tools to stop cascading bond yields in [...]

This EU summit scheduled for tomorrow (yes, just add that to the calendar with the Supreme Court ruling and the Holder contempt vote) has all the earmarks of a disaster. First, technocrats released a sovereignty-destroying proposal that would combine all of the worst elements of a fiscal union, not solving the growth imbalance problem while [...]

I mentioned earlier that the “Big 4″ leaders – of Germany, France, Italy and Spain – were meeting today in advance of a big EU summit next week. That meeting has adjourned, and the leaders announced they would push for a stimulus package of 130 billion euros. But even the initial reports of this shows [...]

European leaders met in Brussels yesterday, and even going in it was clear that the countervailing forces, exemplified most by Germany and France, would not come to any agreements. And that’s just how it turned out: A major rift has opened up between Germany and France for the first time in 30 months of euro [...]

Most of the leaders of the free world are meeting at the G8 Summit today at Camp David, and it sounds like the event has the look of an intervention where the other heads of state try to sit Angela Merkel down and convince her to reverse the austerity policies that are crushing European economies [...]

Alexis Tsipras of the front-running far-left Syriza party in Greece said that continuing on the current path of EU-enforced austerity would send the country to hell. His top rival, Antonis Samaras of the center-right New Democracy party, said that Greece risked a “nightmare” if they didn’t adhere to the agreed-upon reforms and found themselves outside [...]

You can feel the heat being turned up on Europe. Greece is in the middle of what the Guardian has called a bank jog. In the 10 days since the elections which led to a political stalemate, a caretaker government, and new elections, Greek depositors have removed €3 billion from their banking system. It’s not [...]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande met yesterday in Berlin, in what was kind of an awkward summit. But they did appear united on one point: that Greece must keep their promises and stay in the Eurozone. Both spelt out their concern that Greece should remain a full member of the common [...]