During his speech at the European Parliament today, Prime Minister Tsipras, exposed a common argument heard very often from his national and international supporters: he accused the international creditors of the fact that their loans only served to payback (German and French) banks, rather than help the Greek people. (“The money that was given to […]
EU
A Debt Buy-Back Is Bad for Greece
According to FT Deutschland (quoted by Eurointelligence) on Saturday EU ministers agreed on a mix of measures, including buyback of Greek debt with EFSF money, tapping ECB and national central banks profits on Greek bond purchases and lowering interest rates on bilateral loans to Athens. These buybacks are beneficial to creditors (now mainly EU and […]
Moody’s Moods (on Italy)
In a recent report on the Euro Area Periphery, the rating agency Moody’s makes the point that the implementation of structural reforms by the euro area’s periphery countries have achieved improvements, although have not yet fully resolved the external imbalances that developed in these countries prior to the crisis. The report also says that the […]
A Spread Fixing Scheme: Monti’s Pyrrhic Victory?
from voxeu.org Together with Mario Balotelli, Mario Monti was heralded in Italy for bashing Germany at the recent EU Summit. In the latter case, the satisfaction stemmed for achieving an explicit mandate for the EFSF/ESM to “stabilize” yields differentials by intervening in the primary and secondary market. Yet , as in the case of Italy’s ephemeral […]
Il Fiscal Compact e le Elezioni in Europa.
Figura 1 Figura 2 Il recente (bell’) articolo di Francesco Daveri su lavoce.info sostiene due principali tesi. La prima è che le recenti elezioni in Europa mostrano una tratto comune: la rivolta di ampi settori dell’elettorato, soprattutto in Francia, Grecia, ma anche alle amministrative italiane e tedesche, contro la (auto) condanna all’austerità permanente voluta dalla […]