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This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum. Author: Kenneth Rogoff, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics, Harvard University & Ross Chainey, Digital Media Specialist, World Economic Forum The financial crisis of 2008 may have started in the US banking sector but it […]
After Grexit and Brexit that have both been haunting the European Union for quite some time, and will continue doing so in the foreseeable future, Brussels seems obliged to ponder Poloust that is kicking Poland out. The country is steadily sliding to rightwing coercion, under the leadership of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a rampant populist, authoritarian and […]
Trump’s America and Europe are obviously at odds. The question is how far this division will go? Unquestionably, it’s the new tenant of the White House who fuels this unseen before confrontation between the Atlantic allies, attached by a time cherished bonding that has politically and economically shaped the world as we know it so […]
Italy, after Greece, is now the next target of the archetypical Teutonic aggressiveness, aimed this time at making the life difficult for Paolo Gentiloni the new Prime Minister. The problems Rome has with the country’s banking system are being exaggerated and used by Berlin to either pave the road leading outside the euro area or […]
The teleconference of the EuroWorking Group which took place yesterday is the forerunner of the extraordinary meeting of the Finance Ministers of the Eurozone on May 9 where Greece’s programme review is about to be discussed. The outcome was, as expected, disappointing regarding the agreement between the two sides on the package of basic and […]
Eurozone’s Finance Ministers convened in Luxemburg two days ago and proposed that Greece should immediately focus on the necessary reforms in order to be able to cope with the third bailout programme. Both sides (creditors and Greece) agreed that Greece will have to implement the 48 prerequisites- measures that will unlock the next much needed tranche […]
The Lethal Deferral of Greek Debt Restructuring Written by Yanis Varoufakis ATHENS – The point of restructuring debt is to reduce the volume of new loans needed to salvage an insolvent entity. Creditors offer debt relief to get more value back and to extend as little new finance to the insolvent entity as possible. Remarkably, […]
Only a few days after the Calais migration incident, a new shipwreck just 10 miles off the coast of Libya caused the death of 25 people while there are still 200 people missing out of the 600 who were on board. The European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, Dimitris Avramopoulos in a common […]
Is Eurozone strengthened after the Greek deal? At first reading the answer is a straightforward ‘yes’ because the other option, the Grexit, the exit of the country from the euro area, would have reversed the theoretically irreversible participation in the monetary zone. According to the Treaties, on which the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of […]
On 9 July this newspaper predicted that the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was adamant about keeping his country in the Eurozone. In order to do this the Sting foresaw that he was prepared not only to pay a dear price for a third bailout scheme (April 2010, June 2012 and July 2015) financed by […]
It was last month, on 25 June 2015, that the ETUC Youth Committee in collaboration with the European Youth Forum organised a rather stimulating conference at the European Economic and Social Committee called “Quality jobs creation for young people: what, how and when?” The Sting was there, attended the conference with interest and at the end made a […]
Greece is obliged by today or the latest tomorrow Friday morning to submit to its Eurozone partners a new program with more severe austerity and deeper reforms, if the country wants to stay in the Eurozone. Alas, this is exactly the program the Greeks rejected last Sunday in a referendum. In case the Athens proposal […]
The worst moment in the history of Eurozone took place on 07 July 2015 in Brussels. The common currency union leaders decided that the moment has come to kick Greece out. Although nobody had the guts to officially announce it yesterday the leaders of the 18 Eurozone countries together with Juncker’s Commission made just yesterday […]
The imperative economic realities for the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will not be altered noticeably after his crushing win in yesterday’s referendum. His ‘no’ (OXI in Greek) option marked an overwhelming victory meaning that the Greeks rejected the latest offer from the country’s creditors. To be reminded, during the past five months the Greek […]
Alexis Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minister, his government and their depressed country are now in real dire straits. This is a much worse position than in any time during the last five years, a period in which Greece repeatedly faced total collapse and was rescued by a troika of creditors (the European Union, the European […]
The Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his governing left wing SYRIZA party, cornered between its populist rhetoric for greener grass and the realities of the dragging on negotiations with the country’s creditors, called for a referendum next Sunday 5 July without a clearly defined question, denying to exactly clarify where the ‘yes’ or the […]
Once upon a time there was a beautiful historical country that used to be part of the European Union. It became the 10th country to join the block in 1981 and was evolved ever since to become a pole of stability and growth in the Balkan region and serve crucial geo-strategic interests in the Mediterranean. The introduction in the […]
“The boy who cried wolf” is a famous Aesop’s fable having a boy Shepherd calling the village for help too often just for the fun of his. Of course after many false alarms when the village came to help the boy for nothing, soon they just ignored his next calls. We also all remember the bitter […]
The next meeting of the Finance Ministers of the Eurozone (Eurogroup) is convening tomorrow and the main topic will be the Greek deal with the three institutions. However, the fact that the negotiations haven’t yet reached an accord from both sides makes the agreement very unlikely. That is the reason why the European leaders are preparing […]
The world is moving forward full speed ahead and the Greeks seem to be the heavy anchor that has not been effectively lifted. This time though it is nothing about the glass of the negotiations being half empty or half full, as the eurosceptics or the pro-Europeans would normally say. The glass broke last Wednesday […]
Greece is running out not only of time but also luck. The country’s economy has been pending in limbo for the past four months, exhausting all its resources to survive the financial suffocation that the European Central Bank has imposed following the political orders by Berlin, Paris and Brussels, violating the bank’s “independent” role in the European […]
Today is the day that Alexis Tsipras meets Vladimir Putin in Moscow to discuss about business and trade under a spiritual Easter atmosphere for the “Orthodox brothers”. The date of this summit was strategically decided to be this week, in order to put some pressure, at least this is what the Greeks believe, to the European leaders-creditors who […]
It has been one long month since the Greek deal on the Eurogroup of 20 February where Greece and the rest of the Eurozone agreed to give to the former a four-month extension of the loan agreement. However, the Greek government does not seem to cooperate with the three institutions (ECB, IMF, EU) to actively and urgently […]
Written by Camilla Crovella, member of the Eustory Alumni Network and Spotlight Europe The European reality has always been crossed by threats of division and secessionisms due to its cultural and political diversity which constitutes both its weak point but also the basis for building its strength. One of these aspects, which has remained a […]
Paris, Washington and Brussels categorically reject the idea of a Grexit, while Berlin is still loudly insisting that the Eurozone can weather at a cost Greece’s secession. Behind closed doors though, the German decision makers are also not at all sure about that. Greece’s exit from Eurozone has lately become the talk of the town […]
Today everyone’s eyes are fixed on the extraordinary Eurogroup meeting which is taking place in Brussels. This is simply put one of the most important gatherings in the Union’s history because one of its member states is under the “dilemma” of staying within the Eurozone by signing an extension agreement or exit and face imminent bankruptcy. […]
Today is really the D-Day for the Greek matter. After a couple of moves in this grand chessboard, checkmate is just unavoidable. Today we are likely to reach a point without return where nobody will be able to save Greece from collapse and the Eurozone from breaking down. It is the great final round and […]
It’s clearly a very bad moment for Europe; unfortunately much worse than our wise European leaders can grasp. The Greek issue is inescapably bringing to the surface the political incompetence of many key figures in Brussels and beyond. Dijssebloem and the peer were never prepared for the Greek stubbornness; most likely they were never ready to […]
After Wednesday’s Eurogroup where Greece’s Minister of Finance, Yanis Varoufakis, “agreed to disagree” with his European counterparts, Grexit enthusiasts had a reason to celebrate in the evening. However, they did not count for the modern Hercules, Alexis Tsipras, who came tieless to his first EU Summit yesterday in Brussels but with plenty and trendy new […]
So it is like this. In politics you need to be a sheer opportunist. You have to grab every inch of opportunity available to polarise your electorate and get your message through. Britain’s Prime Minister Cameron, an old fox in UK politics, knows how to do this very well. Yesterday the annual conference of the British Chamber of […]
More than a week has passed since the Greek elections and the main European markets, except for the Greek one, do not seem to be influenced to a great extent by the victory of the left-party SYRIZA. The attempt of the Greek Prime Minister to calm down not only the markets but also the European […]
Every now and then a Eurozone crisis breaks out lately. This means two things: either the common currency project is too fragile or too many people don’t believe in it. Or both. Eurozone strong as a rock Well, to begin with, there is not one shadow over Eurozone’s “fragility”. The fact that we are still standing after […]
It’s quite astonishing to watch the German Parliament, the Bundestag, voting on Friday 30 November, with the overwhelming majority of 473 deputies in 584 present, saying yes to a third in a row aid programme for Greece, while all the major media insist, that the public opinion in this country is against any help Berlin should […]
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