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By Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute.
The question of fiscal sustainability looms large at the moment – not just in the peripheral nations of the eurozone, but also in the UK, the US, and Japan. More restrictive fiscal paths [...]

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In another blow to a quick resolution of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, reports are surfacing that multiple banks may have arranged swap contracts with Greece to hide their fiscal shortfalls. Bloomberg is now reporting that up to fifteen banks may be involved.
The debt concealment story started two weeks ago when news of swap contracts [...]

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This post originally appeared at Global Economy Matters.
The Eurozone’s current problems are not mainly a result a of profligate and reckless spending of government resources in the Eurozone periphery [1]. Even Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has begun to forcefully push this argument arguing that the real source of the malaise is the steady build up [...]

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This is a post by Edward Hugh, who also blogs at Global Economy Matters.

“If you don’t fully understand an instrument, don’t buy it.”
To the above advice from Emilio Botín, Executive Chairman of Spain’s Grupo Santander, I would simply add one small rider: Don’t sell it either, especially if you are a national government trying to [...]

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Well, it isn’t only my German economy Q4 call, or my Japanese economy one which look OK right now, this Italian one also now seems very much to the point.
In fact, as I suspected it might, the Italian economy went back into contraction mode in the last three months of 2009.
Italy’s economy shrank by 0.2 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Marshall Auerback here again.  A lot of good questions surrounding my piece on the euro. Many of them seem to revolve around the issues of why the euro gets weaker when national governments deficit spend, and the issue of whether my proposal is legally compliant with the Treaty of Maastricht.  On the latter point, I [...]

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See also FT.com – Berlusconi assaulted at Milan rally

Here is yet another post from early last year which presages all of the problems we are seeing today. As I have often written, the fake recovery is just an attempt to paper over these problems. It won’t work. Where Ireland, Switzerland, Austria or the Baltics were front and center in February 2009, Greece, Spain and Portugal are now. But don’t think those other problems have gone away. As with Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, contagion spreads to the weakest link – which either passes the test (usually with external aid) or collapses. And then it’s on to the next weakest link. That’s how crises work. This one is no different.