We had an entire “foreign policy” debate last night without one mention of the Eurozone, as if this has not been the main headwind for the global economy over the past year. There’s a fallacious belief that the crisis has eased, relating this to the reduction in budget deficits throughout the membership, as if reducing [...]

The EU wrapped up its summit, and the major policy announcement was an agreement for a single Eurozone bank regulator, a step on the road to common depository insurance. This is a couple years off, and leaders announced that no country would be able to get bailout funds for its banks until the regulator was [...]

The EU will hold one of its regular summits, and the participants are all patting themselves on the back because they don’t believe they have an immediate near-term crisis to deal with. Except they do. That crisis isn’t about whether or not Spain will accept a bailout (the Spanish government is reluctant, because they would [...]

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 Nobel Peace Prize for 2012 has been awarded to the European Union, in what the Nobel Committee describes as a kind of lifetime achievement award for keeping Europe mostly out of war with one another since 1945. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2012 is to be awarded [...]

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde has been in the “stop the austerity” camp for a little while now, but this was perhaps her most explicit statement yet on the policy that’s gradually killing off Europe’s economy. Ms Lagarde, IMF managing director, cautioned against countries front-loading spending cuts and tax increases. “It’s sometimes better to have [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Greek government submitted a draft budget for next year that would only further increase the pain and suffering directed at the population, despite depression conditions. But the European leaders determining whether the fresh austerity plan is good enough to meet their conditions want even more pain, in the form of deeper wage cuts. First, [...]