Despite the market jitters of last Friday, which were triggered in part by the recognition that the odds of Greece reaching a deal with its creditors are far lower than had been widely assumed, Greek-related coverage has ratcheted down, even as Greece seems certain not to get any funds released in the April 24 Eurogroup meeting and is very likely to miss the end of April deadline for getting its reforms approved by the Troika and Eurogroup.
Read more...Nobel Prize winner Robert Merton and Arlin Muralidhar have charged ZIRP and QE happy central banks with economic malpractice.
Read more...A Greek default does not mean an inevitable Grexit. But even in the event of a default in the Eurozone, the costs to Greece of staying in the Eurozone are set to rise.
Read more...A new politics organized around scapegoat economics appeals to voters by promising to “protect” them from austerity policies.
Read more...The orthodox German view of the Eurozone crisis gets shellacked at an important INET panel.
Read more...Just like the Bank of England hired Mark Carney from Canada, maybe our central bank, the Fed, should hire Elvira Nabiullina from Russia?
Read more...Greece’s crisis is a public debt crisis enabled by membership in the Eurozone. The Baltic crisis was a private sector property bubble crisis.
Read more...Yves here. I’m not as negative about “bad banks” as Don Quijones is. He does mention the positive result in Sweden, and I hope Swedish Lex will pipe up in comments to add more insight. But the Spanish case is a horrorshow and others in Europe are troubling.
Read more...Greece has decided to up the ante in its negotiations with the Troika. The open question is whether the latest move, the press leak via Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph that Greece will miss its April 9 payment to the IMF so that it can continue to make pension payments, and has started to make plans to issue the drachma, are game-changers that Greece hopes they will be.
Read more...One of the things we’ve stressed is that the Greek government’s repeated claims that it is submitting an anti-austerity reform package is untrue. The Greek government committed to achieving a fiscal surplus of 1.0 to 1.5% and has separately said it will always run a fiscal surplus. We have stressed that running a fiscal surplus is an economic dampener, and is even more damaging in a severely depressed economy like Greece.
So what has Greece done? It has submitted a reform package that it says will meet an even higher fiscal surplus target.
Read more...When sanctions were imposed and tightened against Russia, and oil prices plunged, conventional wisdom in the US press was that the Russian people would not tolerate a decline in living standards and therefore Putin’s days were numbered. In fact, Putin’s approval ratings rose and even most of his opponents in the Moscow intelligensia fell in behind him. Some analysts pointed out that sanctions seldom succeed and were unlikely to work on Russia. That view has become more prevalent as Russia has proven to be less dependent on oil revenues than widely assumed and Russia’s foreign currency reserves have stabilized.
Read more...Don Quijones describes Rajoy’s record of misrule and how the major parties are jockeying in advance of its almost certain unraveling.
Read more...The Greek government continues to climb down substantively on its promises of resistance to the dictates of its creditors as time pressure intensifies.
Read more...Why Greece’s bank run, and the risk of a banking system collapse, gives the ECB the whip hand over Greece.
Read more...Why the proposed Ukraine bond restructuring is a geopolitical matter, part of the US push against Russia via Kiev, and not mere high finance.
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