Markets in Italy are freaking out today, mainly because of the pronouncement of one man, Silvio Berlusconi. The former Prime Minister plans to run for office yet another time, and Mario Monti, the current caretaker leader, has resigned, setting up new elections probably in February.

An anonymous Spanish government official announced what is obvious to anyone perusing bond yield statistics: they don’t need to request a formal bailout from European authorities. Spain is feeling less pressure to seek European financial aid in the short term because its state borrowing costs have dropped since the European Central Bank announced its offer [...]

Joe Weisenthal points out something I’ve been noticing ever since the European Central Bank announced its bond-buying program. It turns out this worked far too well for the ECB’s taste. They wanted to use the prospect of bond-buying as a spur to get Spain and perhaps Italy to agree to a strings-attached bailout, so they [...]

This refusal on the part of Spain to request a bailout, and the nasty conditions that would follow, so the European Central Bank can put its bond-buying program into motion, has really frustrated those trying to stage-manage Europe. The credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s, in league with these forces, downgraded Spanish debt to increase [...]

Spain released its austerity budget today, and it focuses on cuts to social spending much more than any tax increases. Government ministries saw their budgets slashed by 8.9 percent for next year, as Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s battle to reduce one of the euro zone’s biggest deficits was made harder by weak tax revenues in [...]

Rumors are rampant today that Spain will accept a rescue program from the EU, which would pave the way for a bond-buying program from the European Central Bank to commence. This could merely be part of the pressure campaign on the Spanish government to request the bailout and submit to the conditions. Spanish bond yields [...]

Banks are making more off mortgages than ever before, refusing to pass on lowered interest rates from federal policy, including the purchase of trillions in mortgage-backed securities by the Federal Reserve, to consumers. This isn’t really the enigma that the New York Times’ Dealbook makes it out to be. It’s simple collusion. Nobody offers 2.8% mortgage rates, so nobody gets them. As a result, the spread that banks capture on their mortgages widens.

My hopes that the European Central Bank’s composition of a contingency plan in the event of high yields in places like Spain would be enough to keep those yields low doesn’t appear to be working out. The Spanish 2-year bonds have started to rise, from under 3% to around 3.5% in just a few days. [...]

A German constitutional court has allowed the new European bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), to go forward, with only one condition that appears surmountable. The European Union breathed a huge sigh of relief Wednesday after a German court ruled Berlin’s approval of taxpayers’ cash to aid its deeply indebted neighbors was not unconstitutional, [...]

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 [...]

So how did the principals react to the European Central Bank’s conditional bond purchase scheme? Well, the German press went nuts but that’s to be expected. More interesting was the reaction of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. As you may now if you’ve been following my stories on this subject, the idea behind the ECB [...]