The European Sting is Your democratic, independent and top quality political newspaper specialized in European Union News. Unique Features: iSting & Harry Sting
Next Tuesday 22 January, the Economic and Finance Ministers Council (ECOFIN) is expected to meet in Brussels. As a main item in its agenda has being tabled the Financial Transactions Tax (FTT). So far only 11 EU member states out of the 27 have agreed to go through with it. The 11 participating EU countries are […]
The European Sting is monitoring very closely what is happening in Britain over the burning issue of the country’s relations with the European Union. The possibility of holding a referendum about a possible exit is developing into a deeply splitting issue. Prime Minister David Cameron seems cornered in his own party by the group of […]
The European Parliament adopted yesterday tougher rules for the issuance of creditworthiness ratings on governments and private businesses by the relevant agencies. Obviously the new legislation was voted in relation with and aims to set new restrictions on the activities of the three largest of them, namely Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch IBCA. But […]
Yesterday, José Manuel Durão Barroso, President of the European Commission, speaking in a farewell ceremony to honour the Cypriot Presidency of the European Union during the second half of 2012, made clear that the Commission has made the creation of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) for the EU banks as its utmost priority and will […]
The European Commission does not spare big words and photographic opportunities for Commissioners, whenever launching a new initiative or securing political agreement for a regulation. And they are doing this all the time. It seems like they spent all their energy and resources in conceiving new rules on everything. And of course they always need […]
It’s really unbelievable how easily some European Union Commissioners sidestep the hot issues and make speeches about trivial themes or focus on aspects of secondary interest. Take for example Algirdas Šemeta, the EU Commissioner responsible for Taxation and Customs Union, Audit and Anti-fraud. In a speech entitled, “Making progress on European Tax Policy: Towards more […]
Either the British conservatives have lost any sense of reality or they think that reality has to accommodate their problems. This time it was George Osborn, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who said that the European Union has to change or Britain will leave the club. For one thing being a British he knows very […]
Only hours had passed, after Olli Rehn, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for Economic and Monetary Affairs early in the morning of Friday 11 January in Brussels had accused France of doing little to regain its lost competitiveness, and in Paris during the same afternoon three labour unions agreed with employers on a package deal […]
The European Commission published an announcement on Thursday 10 January to inform us all, “Where the European Commission’s humanitarian aid will go in 2013”. A lot of people went through the text and what they got was just general information on how much money will go to a number of Sub Saharan African countries.Only one […]
No doubt the screams, mainly coming from English language media, economists and commentators about the possible dissolution of Eurozone have now subsided and only some late comers in the league of those who have bet on Eurozone’s destruction still try to salvage their wrecks, by predicting catastrophe. On the other side of the fence those […]
The European Central Bank lent but in reality handed over yesterday 9 January a total amount of €77.7 billion to a number of Eurozone banks, under an arrangement called Main Refinancing Operation (MRO) at the negligible interest rate of 0.7% for a duration of 7 days. This is however the upper side of the iceberg. It’s […]
It’s very annoying or probably preposterous to watch the European Commission playing with peoples’ misery. How else can one explain, that the executive arm of the EU after having observed in its yearly review on “Employment and Social Situation in 2012”, that living conditions in Europe have become unbearable for a fast increasing part of […]
The European Commission through the most competent lips of its member, Michel Barnier, responsible for Internal Market and Services rushed to endorse the new unbelievably generous concession to banks all over the developed world. This time it was the Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision (GHOS), the oversight body of the Basel Committee on […]
Business activity in Eurozone has being deteriorating for the past nine months. Last December however the PMI, index which measures this phenomenon, gave the first indications that the bottom of the dreadful U curve is now behind. In detail, the Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for the industrial sector, being drafted on data over the demand […]
The European Investment Bank (EIB) is one of the long-term lending institutions of the European Union and it is owned by its Member States. It makes long-term finance available for sound investments in the real economy, in order to contribute towards EU policy goals. Its creditworthiness measures almost exactly the degree of trust that financial […]
The oldest Swiss bank was forced to temporarily shut down its US subsidiary yesterday, after its lawyers accepted that it has being helping at least 100 American citizens to avoid taxation. The bank Vegelin, of St Gallen, established in 1741 is accused by the US tax authority, the famous IRS, that it has directed those […]
The new political stalemate in Portugal – after the President of the country send the 2013 government budget to the high court questioning its constitutionality – casts again doubts over Eurozone’s ability to manage the austerity policies needed, to secure a viable politico-economic path. In more detail, yesterday Wednesday 2 January, the Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva, […]
All the major media of the world announced that as from yesterday 1 January 2013 the European Union has a new Treaty on Stability Coordination and Governance, known as “the fiscal compact”, which aims at imposing fiscal discipline in the Eurozone area, plus any other EU country wishing to join.Theoretically, the ultimate goal of the […]
In 2012, Eurozone not only managed to effectively counter its double-faced, credit and sovereign debt crisis, but also convinced the global financial community, that the single European currency is probably the safest deposit of value. The world responded positively by voting the euro at the region of 132 American cents. A fair price, to keep […]
Pharmaceutical firms in Europe have an awkward relation with their customers. The truth is that their selling prices and product licencing are directly or indirectly controlled by the buyers, that is governments, or government control health insurance schemes, offering almost free health services to citizens. As everybody knows governments are not only able to influence […]
The almost three centuries old Baltic Exchange is a private and closed platform, where around 60 shipping brokers based mainly in London are contributing voluntarily their cargo prices. On the base of those contributions the Exchange publishes benchmark freight price indexes for a round number of 70 sea routes and vessel categories. The indexes are […]
That the German cars are gas guzzlers is a fact beyond reasonable doubt, not because they are badly engineered, that they are not, but simply because they are usually powered by engines of many thousands of cm2 cylinders. Those powerful Mercedes, BMWs, Porsches, Audis and even Volkswagens produce hundreds of PSIs, but at the same time they […]
Two major Chinese providers of mobile phone equipment, Huawei Technologies Co. and the smaller ZTE Corporation, according to a Wall Street Journal report are under scrutiny by the European Commission, for allegedly offering their products at dumping prices. This report is still unconfirmed by the EU authorities. Its wording though is very carefully chosen by […]
Antitrust EU Commission services have an excellent record in identifying, monitoring, substantiating with facts and finally punishing cartels and dominant position abuses. This last week two concrete cases stand witnesses to that.Protecting consumers In the first case the European Court of Justice rejected an appeal against a General Court’s decision, which had upheld almost completely […]
If we believe what is written in the Treaties, in the European Union everybody is equal and the same flag of democracy waves above the heads of all. But wait a moment. What was that, some English writer, one George Orwell, said in his novel, the Animal Farm? Ah yes, that some are more equal […]
Over the past few years higher education tuition fees have skyrocketed all over the European Union. Last year thousands of British university students took it to the streets of London and the other major cities protesting against the planned increases of tuition fees. Incidentally, this really huge protest movement gave Scotland Yard the opportunity to […]
The European Commission is famous for its practice to generously subsidise a large number of NGOs, which have been created almost exclusively for this purpose. That is, to swallow money from the European taxpayer and in return offer their tribune to Commissioners and other EU dignitaries to be exposed to media. This is a well-known […]
On 29 November 2012 the European Council decided to give the Commission ‘the green light’, to start trade negotiations with Japan, aiming at the conclusion of a Free Trade Agreement between the two sides. As Sting has already noticed the EU has embarked over the past few years on a huge operation, to conclude FTAs with […]
The major breakthroughs in the hot sector of energy all over the Old Continent materialised on national level, and on many occasions despite the Brussels directives. For example the North Gas Corridor, supplying Germany with huge quantities of Russian gas and increasing the overall dependency of the European Union on Russian energy resources, was not […]
Despite the commonly recognised urgent need for more infrastructure projects aiming at interconnecting transport, energy and telecommunication networks in the 27 EU member states, clumsy inter-institutional cooperation between the main EU bodies, namely the European Commission, The Parliament and the Council, threatens to deprive such projects from already available resources. In this respect it was […]
A regular criticism neo-liberal economist pen down against the European Union is that Europe is not competitive enough. They blame for that the high EU standards of social protection and the strict labour legislation. They fail to see however that the Eurozone and even the entire European Union, is highly competitive in the crucial sector of […]
Motor vehicles have being for decades the easy target of many forms of taxation, especially in post WWII Western Europe. Taxes on acquisition, on ownership, on motoring, on licences are but a few. The initial idea behind, in the minds of politicians who supported the imposition of taxes on cars, was that private ownership of […]
It’s not the first time that the European Union leaders are divided between the paymasters and the receivers. However during their last Summit of Thursday and Friday 22 and 23 November the 27 heads of states and governments were divided in more than three groups and left the conference room blaming each other, for […]
