European finance ministers have yet to make any decisions on the Greek bailouts. In general they have to choose whether or not to continue funding the country’s borrowing and on what terms. Will they forgive another portion of Greek debt (this is unlikely)? Will they allow the country a reprieve from meeting EU budget targets [...]

With all the talk of elections and realignments and the like, it’s good to know that there’s still some things out there you can depend on. Like Greek politicians ignoring the people as well as economic reality and cutting their budget once again. Lawmakers in Greece have narrowly backed a fresh round of austerity measures, [...]

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 [...]

Markets in the US and Europe rose today on this Financial Times story, suggesting that Spain would submit to a bailout request. The stabilization of sovereign debt yields in Spain as well as the anti-austerity forces threatening the political class raised hopes that Spain would not take this step. And it’s still a very dicey [...]

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 [...]

The Spanish economic minister said at the London School of Economics yesterday that his country did not need a bailout, and the conditions attached to it. Given that they have already produced austerity measures for the latest budget, I’m not sure that this totally matters. They are effectively agreeing to the conditions without agreeing to [...]

Yesterday, protests in Spain led to clashes with police. Today, a general strike in Greece also led to clashes with police. Greek police have fired tear gas to disperse anarchists throwing petrol bombs near Athens’ parliament on a day-long strike against austerity measures. Clashes erupted during the first trade union-led action since a conservative-led coalition [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]