Greece Should Get To Work

The meltdown in Greece of last April exposed not just the economic weakness of this particular South European state; uncertainty about public finances was suddenly abound throughout the European Union. A multibillion euro rescue plan necessitated unprecedented efforts to guarantee the stability of the common currency. German chancellor Angela Merkel even warned that the very […]

Saving the Euro

Bending the rules of euro management, European leaders and finance ministers agreed to an unprecedented effort to guarantee the stability of the eurozone with loans adding up to nearly $1 trillion (or €750 billion) this weekend. In spite of the multibillion euro rescue package previously pledged to Greece, investors continued to worry about the unsound […]

Meltdown in Greece

The crises in Greece sends shockwaves around the world and inspires recriminations everywhere.

Compromise on the Greek Question

The compromise which European leaders reached last week on aiding Greece may struck many foreign observers as evidence of the EU’s ineffectiveness at settling its internal discord, but it was in fact a minor victory for “President” Herman Van Rompuy and his campaign for greater economic governance from Brussels. Van Rompuy, former prime minister of […]

Euro Resentment Demands New Rules

Euroskepticism is abound anew. Where previously economist Paul Krugman argued that Greece could have weathered its fiscal crisis if it had retained its own currency, Judy Dempsey reports that Germans are increasingly nostalgic for their Deutsche Mark. “For Germans,” writes Dempsey, “the mark was more than just currency.” It represented the country’s postwar recovery, the […]

Just How Much Debt Are We In?

After The New York Times revealed on Saturday that Wall Street banks helped Greece keep its mounting debt off the books for many years, Edward Hugh at A Firstful of Euros explains how shady financial constructions allowed several European governments to hide part of their financial trouble. Eurostat, the EU’s agency for statistics, has been […]

Europe’s Uneven Recovery

Europe’s massive deficit spending is finally catching up with it. As Stefan Theil writes for Newsweek, markets reacted sharply this week “after rating agencies downgraded the public debt of Greece and warned about the outlook for several others.” With a deficit running at over 12 percent of GDP, Greece runs a serious risk of becoming […]