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 [...]

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 [...]

France has announced a massive redistributive tax program which would send the top tax rate soaring and increase taxes broadly on the top 10% of society. French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has said that nine out of 10 citizens will not see their income taxes rise in the new budget. He has confirmed that there [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]