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For a long time now the European Union is accused by the rest of the world for the severe austerity and recessionary economic policies it follows, also imposing them on crisis stricken euro area member states like Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal. This is so despite the fact that the Eurozone economy as a whole […]
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 […]
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 […]
Last Monday, the Greek government scheduled an early Presidential election before the end of the year, which according to the constitution is to be held in the Parliament. If the Parliament proves unable to elect a new President of the Republic (180 votes are needed in a house of 300) a new legislative election must […]
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 […]
The agenda of the Economic and Finance Ministers’ Council (ECOFIN) of 15 November in Brussels is very heavily loaded. The ‘Taxation of savings incomes’ and the ‘Revision of the Anti-Money Laundering Directive’ may be major issues, but the first reading of Commission’s proposal for the creation of the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) will haunt […]
Last Friday 8 November, the European Central Bank (ECB) published its opinion on the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) and Fund, fully supporting the European Commission’s position on their enactment, needed to accomplish the European Banking Union. The opinion is in direct contrast with the positions held by Germany, because it contains the following three essential […]
What Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, said about the uncertainties that an eventual new hair-cut of the Greek state debt may trigger doesn’t exclude this possibility. She stressed that it may set off a “domino effect of uncertainty” and scare off possible investors. But the country has already performed a voluntary hair-cut on the privately […]
In yesterday’s Eurogroup, Eurozone’s policy setting council, the 17 ministers of Finance had two important items on their agenda; IMF’s recommendations for the European economy under Article IV Consultation with the Euro Area, and the approval of the next loan trance to Greece. On both accounts the opinion of Germany weighed a lot. In this […]
In an inspired speech last Friday, in Helsinki the European Commissioner Michel Barnier, speaking at the 4th Annual Economic Forum, made crystal clear that the Commission has not abandoned the target of a strong and effective European Banking Union. He stressed that “We cannot have a genuine Economic and Monetary Union without a Banking Union”. […]
The leadership of the European Central Bank took yesterday a step back from its strong presence in the public discussion over the depth and the strength of the under construction European Banking Union (EBU) and more precisely the single bank resolution authority. Both its President and Vice President Mario Draghi and Vítor Constâncio had very […]
In a rare but not quite unexpected move, the German Federal Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble has reportedly wrote a letter to his colleague, the Federal Minister of Economics Philipp Rösler, proposing that their two ministries cooperate in supporting the Eurozone countries under distress. To do this, he tells his government fellow, they should use […]
Once more the world got together in the G7 group of the industrialised nations and asked Germany to spend more in order to help the rest of the Eurozone and the globe start growing again. The last time was in Washington during the Spring Conference of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, where […]
After Dr Wolfgang Schaeuble, the German minister of Finance stated that it was a fair decision by Brussels to give France two more years to straighten up its fiscal accounts, the climate in Eurozone has changed from winter to spring. Up to now Paris was at odds with Berlin over the severe austerity policies imposed […]
The Eurogroup, the crucial European decision-making body, regrouping the 17 EU ministers of Finance of the countries using the euro, which has led the south of Europe to the worst economic recession after WWII and introduced the haircut on bank deposits, the until this week most secure financial asset, is an informal forum, who’s decisions […]
Monday’s night statement by the Eurogroup President, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, on Cyprus was the perfect field for a full PhD research, on the way decisions are made in the European Union. The problem is that until some years ago this kind of decision-making when wrong, and it usually was, had negative consequences only on subsidies paid […]
Eurogroup’s decision to impose a haircut on all bank accounts held in Cypriot banks, even on balances bellow the until today “theoretically” guaranteed benchmark of €100,000, may become a boomerang for the entire Eurozone and will certainly set the island once more on fire. Who is to say that this will not have a devastating […]
The Italian political stalemate which threatens the financial stability of this country and risks to shake the Eurozone through the contagion effect, has not prompted Germany to relax its tough position vis-à-vis the euro area debt crisis and the severe austerity measures favoured by Berlin. As a matter of fact, Wolfgang Schaeuble, the German minister […]
Dr Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Federal Minister of Finance insisted yesterday that Cyprus is not a “systemic” member country of Eurozone. Given that Schäuble expresses authentically and exclusively the paymaster Eurozone and all country bailout programme in the euro area, the plan to save Cyprus from the blunders of its own banks, will be quite […]
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