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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi wrapped up his major press conference this morning, and the news was pretty much what we heard yesterday. Draghi announced the formation of the OMT, or Outright Monetary Transactions. It’s an unlimited sovereign debt purchase scheme for those countries which submit to giving the ECB a vote on their [...]

The details of the European Central Bank bond purchase plan have been leaked to Bloomberg, and they confirm perhaps the worst fears of how this program would be managed. As I’ve been saying all along, Mario Draghi was faced with a dilemma. He needed to act to save troubled sovereigns in Europe like Spain and [...]

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 [...]

We have another week where the speeches at a national convention won’t be the most important in the context of the world economy. The European Central Bank meets this week amid high expectations that they will take action to finally arrest the unusually large bond yield price spikes from troubled Eurozone sovereigns like Spain and [...]

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 [...]