Tsipras imposes more austerity on insolvent Greece; plans to win new early election soon

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 […]

Greece’s Tsipras: Risking country and Eurozone or securing an extra argument for creditors?

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 […]

ECB’s €1.14 trillion again unifies Eurozone; Germany approves sovereign debt risks to be pooled

The long-awaited move of the European Central Bank finally came yesterday afternoon. Mario Draghi announced from ECB’s Press room in the Frankfurt tower that the Eurosystem, the central banking system of the euro area, will purchase bonds issued by governments and other European institutions at a rate of around €60 billion a month. Obviously the […]

Poor Greeks, Irish and Spaniards still pay for the faults of German and French banks

Government deficit decreased substantially in the third quarter of last year and reached -3.1% of the GDP in Eurozone. This is just one decimal point away from the 3% benchmark, set by the Treaty of Maastricht and the strict EU economic governance Regulations (the famous ‘two’ and ‘six’ packs). The gap between government income and […]

The fatal consequences of troika’s blind austerity policy

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 […]

How the Irish people were robbed by banks, the Commission and their own government

In 2007 Ireland’s sovereign debt was 25% of the country’s GDP. After the financial crisis – and €140 billion later – in 2012 it reached 120% of the GDP at €190bn. Yet the Dublin government this week celebrated the Irish ‘exit’ from the EU-ECB-IMF troika’s surveillance programme, that brought the 4.5 million people nation to […]

Summer pause gives time to rethink Eurozone’s problems

The United States Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew on his way back to Washington from the G20 meeting in Moscow made a stop-over in Athens on Monday to meet the Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. Probably this is not major news. However, what Lew said under the Acropolis about his encounter with the German […]

Why the ECB suddenly decided to flood banks with money?

It was not a coincidence that the Governing Council of the European Central Bank  suddenly decided unanimously last week to further relax its monetary policy promising more and cheaper loans to all banks, exactly at a time when the US central bank, the Fed, is about to start calling back the trillions of dollars it […]

Europe rethinking its severe austerity policies

  During the past few weeks there is a noticeable change of climate in Brussels towards a more relaxed attitude over economic policies. On Monday the President of Eurogroup and minister for Finance of Holland, Jeroen Dijsselbloem asked in a letter his 16 colleagues in view of their Luxembourg meeting, to reduce the sovereign debt […]

Why the West supports the yen’s devaluation and Japanese over-indebtedness

While the ministers of Finance of seven major industrialised countries making up the G7 council agreed pompously last weekend that monetary devaluations should not be used as a home economy revitalisation tool, Japan doing exactly that got a pat on the back and was  given the green light to continue on the same path. The […]

Germany hides its own banks’ problems

The insistence of the Brussels, Berlin and Paris authorities that Cyprus is a special case and the rest of the Eurozone banking system is safe, has only superficial value. Markets do not believe that. It’s not only that the Greek, Italian or even the Spanish banking systems are in deep trouble. The problems are not […]