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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Yesterday I noted what a consequential week this would be for the European economy, as the European Central Bank prepared to make its decision on how to deal with soaring bond yields in Italy and Spain. ECB President Mario Draghi let some of the cat out of the bag yesterday, hinting that the central bank [...]

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 [...]

The Wall Street Journal has more confirmation that the European Central Bank will consider rate targets to keep the spreads on bond yields manageable for its member states. The central bank wants to help bring down government financing costs through targeted purchases of government bonds, while preserving their flexibility to change course when needed and [...]