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Officials have been trying to come up with some way to avoid the weekend referendum in Iceland but it looks likely those efforts have been in vain.  Polls show that nearly three-quarters of the Iceland voters will reject the deal that parliament had approved that would pay the UK and the Netherlands 3.9 bln euros [...]

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This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
“Doom-mongers” – the Economist tells us – “are licking their wounds”. And why exactly are they licking their wounds? Well for two years now (apparently) they have been telling us that “the struggle to save the lat’s peg to the euro was bound to end in [...]

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I am back from a week in Mexico.  And here in DC there are still mountains of snow on the ground. Here are some links I picked up on yesterday on my way home.
Cheers.
Edward
PS. – the article from Worthwhile Canadian Initiative is another disappointing one.  I told you on Thursday that the fallacies of composition [...]

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This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
Hard on the heels of yesterday’s Latvian GDP numbers we now have news that Estonia’s economy shrank at the slowest annual pace in a year at the end of 2009 as a modest recovery in exports and one-time stock-building helped offset the impact of the continuing [...]

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There are a lot of interlocking threads in the Greek saga. One consistent theme that ties all of the different threads together is the fragility of complex systems. In our globalized and complex world of finance and banking, every major actor has  innumerable ties to other major actors such that devastating collapses in one entity [...]

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This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
Well, as we say in English, it never rains but it pours. Latvia, which has had the deepest recession of all 27 European Union member states, contracted by nearly 18 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009, when compared to the same period a year [...]

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This comes via the FT:
Latvia’s prime minister has warned Swedish banks they risk choking off recovery in the Baltic state’s crisis-hit economy unless they resume lending.
Banks such as Swedbank and SEB, which dominate the Latvian market, have reined in credit as they struggle to contain rising bad loans amid the deepest recession in the European [...]

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This comes from Bloomberg News:
Estonia is set to meet its goal of adopting the euro in 2011 because of the Baltic country’s work on fulfilling fiscal requirements, European Union Economic Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said.
“It is quite possible that Estonia will be in the euro by 2011,” Almunia told the European Parliament in Strasbourg late [...]

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The last I had heard about a prospective Gulf currency union came yesterday morning in a note by Marc Chandler who is the Chief Strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman’s FX group.  He indicated that he was more optimistic about a Gulf currency union on the than a Latin American one on the eve of a [...]

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The Irish government announced draconian spending cuts of 6 billion Euros in order to stave off a debt crisis in the worst modern-day downturn in the nation’s history.  Even so, Irish government bond yields have been rising relative to German government bond yields, the benchmark for the Eurozone.  Over the past five years the spread [...]