Euro

Category: Eurozone 2013

  • The French Squeeze

    There are signs that the economies in the eurozone are picking up in various ways. Recent figures of the ECB on Target2 (the capital account of the eurozone countries within the ECB) show remarkable signs of improvement. The claims of the triple-A countries Germany, Finland and the Netherlands on the problem countries are going down.…

  • The European crisis explained in two graphs

    Guest contribution by Ricardo Paes Mamede (Assistant professor at the Department of Political Economy of ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon) A long book is probably too short to explain the European crisis in full length and depth. However, the essential causes of this crisis can be grasped with two simple ideas. 1) The sovereign…

  • Why Economists Should not always Ask for Centralisation

    Many say that the eurocrisis is not about the euro but about financial markets. Whatever the precise cause: it seems to be a purely economic crisis. Of course, the financial sector was a motor behind the crisis, but there have been other drivers too. National conditions – such as high private debts, corruption and inflexible…

  • Europe – Absent?

    This is my first entry in the Eurozone 2013 blog. Based in Berlin, in the following months I will comment on the steps taken by EU leaders to reform the Eurozone from the German capital, and will include my observations on the German euro debate. As it happens, the German President, Joachim Gauck, has just…

  • The European Periphery: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

    The strategy of the Portuguese government in the context of the current crisis, which is essentially aligned with the prescriptions of the ECB-EC-IMF troika, revolves around two axes that, indeed, were also typical of the policy packages implemented in the global south from the 1980s onwards: stabilisation, which in this case refers to slashing public…

  • Euro crisis: a View from Lisbon

    In my first contribution to this blog, I would like to start with outlining what I’ll set out to do in the coming months. The readers of this blog will be quite familiar with the ‘orthodox’ account of the current crisis in the eurozone: profligate public spending by governments in the European periphery, which need…

  • Dijsselbloem as Eurogroup President – Curse or Blessing for the Netherlands and the Euro?

    Finding suitable chairpersons for EU meetings is extremely difficult.  Since ‘presidents’ can be politically quite threatening they should preferably come from small countries. They should be rather gullible and non-threatening people. As our euro notes prove, the EU has no shared values and that makes chairing particularly difficult. The design of the euro notes was…