Share
This is just in from the FT:
Germany recorded a budget deficit of 3.3 per cent of gross domestic product last year, one point more than the most recent forecasts, but still well below the level for most of Europe’s larger economies.
According to the figures released by the Federal Statistical Office on Wednesday, it is the [...]

Share
Yves Smith and I received a tip at the weekend from a friend who reads the German press regularly about credit default swaps (CDS) on Greek government debt. Read Yves’ piece based on that article here. Below is mine.
Previously, I had mentioned the CDS exposure of the hapless German Landesbanks (banks owned by the individual [...]

Share
The Dutch have now also signalled a firming opposition to a bailout of Greece, adding to the chorus of voices in Germany which are categorically against such a move.  While I had previously said some sort of support could be forthcoming, most of the recent press coming from Germany and the Netherlands is quite categorical.  [...]

Share
Claus Vistesen here with a first post on Credit Writedowns.
GDP releases are, by their very nature, lagging indicators and thus do not tell us a whole lot about the current momentum in an economy. Moreover, the immediate focus of attention in the Eurozone remains, and rightly so, the situation in Greece (and Spain), and what [...]

Share
This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
A new kind of battle is going on out there at the moment. In what must surely be a new twist to the old dialectic of blow against blow argument, a combination of the internet age and sophisticated data management software is adding an additional and [...]

Share
The following is a post by Marc Chandler, head of Brown Brother Harriman’s Currency Strategy Team. For more of BBH’s currency views, visit the website here.
We have argued that the EU faces a horrible dilemma.  One horn is the moral hazard inherent in support for a profligate agent, while not necessarily putting a firewall around [...]

Share
The EU is working feverishly to solve the Greek sovereign debt crisis. Yesterday, in an article in the German-language Financial Times Deutschland, CDU/CSU Bundestag Fraktionschef Michael Meister (the equivalent of Nancy Pelosi in America) said that all options to ‘aid’ Greece were being considered including bilateral aid. Bilateral support now seems off the table because [...]

Share
In my view, there is little chance the Germans are going to allow the EU to ride to the rescue of the Greeks. All of the bailout chatter does not really consider the domestic political constraints in Germany.
First, a bit of quick background.  Germany was traumatized by two world wars and an intervening period [...]

Share
This is a post which was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
“British or German taxpayers cannot finance the failures of others,” German Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, according to the Associated Press. “Solidarity also means everybody adheres to common rules.”

France is not working with Germany [...]

Share
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 [...]