We are possibly entering end game territory in the coming months. The news from bond markets about Greece resembles bulletins about Alpine peeks, not sovereign debt priced within reasonable parameters. Greek three-year bond yields jumped to over 22 per cent this week. Such surreal yield levels are pricing in the restructuring option to [...]
A mechanism of continuous restructuring and forced savings for the Euro zone Since its conception, the European Union has always been about reconciling seemingly irreconcilable positions among its members. In the current environment of the peripheral euro debt crisis, there is one such deadlock on the question of how dearly should the so-called peripheral euro [...]
Sylvie Goulard - Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe On the basis of the report[1] by the high-level group, chaired by Jacques de Larosière, last year the Commission tabled a package consisting of the creation of a European Systemic Risk Board, under the auspices of the European Central Bank, dealing with [...]
Godfrey Bloom – Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group The concept of financial regulation across 27 countries most of whom have no experience of financial services is not just flawed but dangerous. The United Kingdom, yes the City of London, is the only world class centre for financial services in the European Union. This is [...]
Pervenche Berés – Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament The supervisory package currently under consideration and based on the conclusions of the de Larosière group constitutes an important step ahead. However, further steps will be needed for the future structure of EU supervision if we want to avoid [...]
Nikolaos Chountis – Confederal Group of the European United Left – Nordic Green Left After the stock market and oil crisis in 1970s, the world economic system in general, and the financial system in particular, were based on three “pillars”: a) the collapse of the fixed exchange rates system, b) the internationalization and liberalization of [...]
Rodi Kratsa-Tsagaropoulou – Group of the European People’s Party The end of this decade coincided with an enormous financial crisis, whose epicentre was the financial sector. Many would argue that all the mess that was brought forward because of the globalization of the markets could have been avoided, or at least its effects been mitigated, [...]
Set a point of no return, move past it, don’t worry about public opinion and let the details take care of themselves”. This is how Chancellor Helmut Kohl summarized the strategy that led to Maastricht and EMU. A policy well disliked by the German public that was unwilling to sacrifice the Deutschmark for the sake [...]
When Prime Minister Zapatero announced a few weeks ago their plan to reduce the Spanish budget deficit, he said that the main problems of the Spanish economy are a 20% of unemployment rate and an 11.2% rate of public deficit. He was wrong again. Deficit and unemployment are not the problems but their consequences. [...]
It was already in the early 1990s when Nikiforos Diamandouros and Nikos Mouzelis, two eminent Greek scholars, were writing about the conflict between two dominant political cultures in Greece: the ‘underdog’ culture (notably a pre-democratic culture favouring clientelistic networks of power, bearing a strong imprint of the Orthodox Church and its anti-Western world view, with [...]
