The European Sting is Your democratic, independent and top quality political newspaper specialized in European Union News. Unique Features: iSting & Harry Sting
The technical teams of the European institutions are now discussing the Greek proposal which was approved yesterday evening by SYRIZA’s governmental council and submitted to the institutions minutes before the deadline in order to have a final agreement at tomorrow’s Eurogroup. The fact that the Greek government has come up with a more professional and […]
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 deadline of the 4-month extension that the Greek government had received on February 20 just expired today. However, the Greek government and particularly the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on a last moment decision to return to the negotiating table sent a letter to the institutions only hours before the expiration of the bailout programme. […]
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 election outcomes in Spain and Poland last week were enough to cause even more uncertainty and turbulences to the already shaken European economy. The European leaders and especially Germany is facing another thorn while they struggle to come to a deal with Greece, which focuses on the austerity policy that is constantly followed by the […]
The Greek government and particularly the Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is currently looking at a deal with the creditors but is facing both interior and exterior “enemies”. Mr Tsipras had extensive talks yesterday in Athens with the government’s officials in order to inform them about the negotiations’ progress. The Finance Minister of Greece – “pop star”, […]
The Greek government found a very last-minute solution to pay its debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that was only due yesterday. However, it was last Thursday when Yanis Varoufakis was appearing to be optimistic about Greece’s situation and the overall negotiations with its creditors while attending the European Business Summit (EBS) 2015 where the […]
The move by Alexis Tsipras, the Greek Prime Minister, to reshuffle its negotiating team will certainly ease the tense in Brussels but is not going to bring the desired deal. The main thorns for unlocking the next tranche are the “red lines” of the Greek government and its anti-austerity policy. Greece is struggling to pay wages […]
The wounds the Ukrainian civil war has inflicted on Europe have now stopped bleeding and if not begun healing at least they claim no more fatalities. The Minsk II agreement is holding well and the Europeans, most of them, have made clear to the Americans that there is no chance of starting a new war […]
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 […]
The frantic search of the Greek government – pressed at home by an accelerating bank run which culminated last Friday with €1 billion withdrawals in a few hours – to achieve an agreement with its Eurozone partners ended up in an almost total retreat of Athens in front of its creditors. The Greek minister of […]
This week the new Greek government started faltering on all accounts. The young Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who got elected on 25 January under a populist banner to change everything in this crisis stricken nation, proposed Prokopis Pavlopoulos for President of the Republic, an old fox representing the corrupt and incompetent political system which governed […]
It was last Tuesday when Peter Praet, Member of the Executive Board and chief economist of the European Central Bank (ECB), reported to two Belgian newspapers that there is limited risk of price deflation in the euro area. The Economic Sentiment Indicator (ESI) in the euro area and in the EU gained momentum after four […]
Six years after the Western financial system collapsed under its immeasurable greed for easy money expressed as an insatiable thirst for risk, the American and European banks and governments are 30% deeper in debt. Few of them can duly repay without major problems of the most dangerous political kind. It is even more alarming that […]
On the 5th of June, the European Central Bank (ECB) decided not to fully deploy all the tools of Quantitative Easing (QE) programme, which showed that the ECB is not yet ready to risk everything in order to deal with low growth and inflation rates. Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) […]
The European Commission (EC) paid out €500 million to Ukraine on Tuesday, a financial support to be the first loan tranche of the second Macro-Financial Assistance (MFA) programme of the EU. While the crisis in Ukraine is still raging and the need for economic reforms is more crucial than ever, the EU is adding to International […]
Once more, the International Monetary Fund, with its latest issue of World Economic Outlook, comes back to criticizing Eurozone’s low inflation rate calling it, a ‘key downside risk’ to global growth. Last week IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde had also singled out Eurozone as the dark growth spot in the developed world threatened by super […]
Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, speaking in Washington DC last Wednesday 2 April stressed that the world economy, in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008-2012, faces a long period of slow and sub-par growth, “well below the solid, sustainable growth that is needed to create enough jobs and improve […]
During the last few days, Eurostat, the EU statistical service, has produced disappointing data on the Eurozone economy. Last week it was a fall of the volume of retail sales in December by 1.6%, compared to November. Also in December last year compared with December 2012 the retail sales index decreased by 1% in […]
During the last two days, Friday and Saturday, of this year’s Davos gathering of the rich and powerful, an intense debate about Eurozone’s inflation or rather deflation, divided once again the Old Continent between Germans and…anti-Germans. Ollie Rehn, the Finn European Commission Vice-President and Commissioner responsible for finance and the euro, said that the currently […]
In the latest issue of its World Economic Outlook (WEO), which was published yesterday, the IMF raises the tone of criticism against Europe. It’s again the risk of deflation and the projection that “economic slack will remain high”, the two axes which constitute the cutting edge of criticism of North America against Eurozone. The latest […]
Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of IMF, is not renowned for her social concerns and sensitivities. Yet, while speaking last week at the National Press Club, in Washington DC, about “The Global Economy in 2014”, among other important policy proposals for the world to exit the era of the “seven weak years”, she didn’t forget to […]
Yesterday Eurostat confirmed that the euro area inflation rate for December was down to 0.8% from 0.9% in November, dangerously approaching the negative part of the graph. The announcement coincided with IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde’s warning that weak growth in Eurozone is now also threatened by deflation (continuously falling prices leading to real economy […]
Weak growth is threatened by deflation in the developed world, while emerging markets have to overcome the financial turbulences that lie ahead, due to forthcoming restrictive monetary policy by the US central bank, the Fed. This is what IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said yesterday, speaking at the National Press Club in the U.S. capital. […]
Yesterday, Klaus Regling, the Chief Executive Officer of the European Financial Stability Facility and Managing Director of the European Stability Mechanism, went to the European Parliament and was questioned by MEPs, about the anti-crisis role and operations of the ‘Troika’, a construction made up by the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the International […]
The European Parliament launched an investigation on the functioning and the legitimisation of the troika, made up by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The three institutions between them undertook to bail out, guide and audit the economies of four Eurozone member states which reached a point of no […]
When the ‘troika’, made up by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund was atypically formed first in spring of 2010 to bail out and audit Greece, its widely advertised purpose was to inflict an internal devaluation on this country. Later on the troika undertook to perform the same task […]
Yesterday’s development, with half the Ukrainian government under deputy Prime Minister Serhiy Arbuzovin in Brussels to discuss and possibly sign the Association Agreement with the EU, in exchange of more financial aid of the order of at least €18 billion, is a clear sign that the country is really in dire straits. Last week President […]
Yesterday’s Eurogroup was devoted rather to the…IMF than to the burning issues of Eurozone, like bank recovery and resolution and deposit guarantee schemes. Probably the reason for this change was that Reza Moghadam, the IMF’s European Department director, was present and his main criticism of Eurozone’s economy was that it suffers from “weak banks and over-indebted […]
OECD is not like the IMF. The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, unlike the International Monetary Fund doesn’t chew its words, when it comes to the economic prospects of the global economy. The reason is that its mandate obliges the Organisation to effectively protect its 34 member states from the dangers lurking ahead, by […]
On the political level, the European Commission and the IMF have been warning Germany for months now about its inextricable over stretched internal fiscal and incomes double consolidation. Now the Commission comes back with an excellent economic paper, which employs a structural multi-country model and assesses the negative impact of fiscal consolidation measures undertaken in […]
IMF – World Bank’s annual meetings and the G20 Finance ministers and central bank governors gathering in Washington D.C. this weekend proved two things; first that the world is more divided now, in the aftermath of the financial crisis and second and more important that the labouring millions of the globe in developing and […]
