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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
On June 5, the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) issued their convergence reports on Latvia, declaring that it is ready to adopt the euro starting on January 1, 2014. The announcement marked the decisive turning point by the European Union, even if several formal steps remain for the next month. Latvia will [...]
The Irish deal with the European Central Bank (ECB) and other European central banks to relieve the huge Irish debt burden resulting from the bank bailout four years ago has arrived even faster than predicted here. This is good news. The Irish government can now avoid the €3.1 billion promissory note payment due at the [...]
On January 31, the Latvian parliament gave final passage to a law applying for adoption of the euro. The vote was 52 to 40. The Latvian government will now submit an application to the European Union in February, and the European Commission will then prepare a report assessing whether Latvia is ready to join the [...]
In recent months, it has looked as if all the major nominally independent central banks in advanced economies are committed to, or seriously contemplating, intervention in the markets to lower the value of their currencies. Excluding commodity exporters like Canada, Australia, and Norway, everyone is on board—except the European Central Bank (ECB). Since September 2011, [...]
Everywhere you look, the survival of the euro seems to be an idea whose time has come. In France, a limited measure of progress occurred when the country’s social partners agreed to some labor market reforms. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party lost a German regional election, with no dire consequences for its commitment to save the [...]
The political agreement reached early on December 13 by Europe’s finance ministers makes it highly likely that legislation establishing a Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) with the European Central Bank (ECB) at its center will be enacted in March 2013. This is a big European success, high up on what was the range of possible outcomes. [...]
Despite his cultivated image of “Mr. Normal,” President François Hollande of France remains an enigma on the European policy scene. What kind of socialist president will he be in the next five years? At a time when the euro area crisis has gradually forced leaders and policymakers to undertake overdue structural reforms, which have mired [...]
Note: This post is based on the author’s paper “Asia’s Changing Position in Global Financial Reform” presented at the joint conference “Asian Capital Market Development and Integration: Challenges and Opportunities” co-organized by the Asian Development Bank, Korea Capital Markets Institute, and the Peterson Institute, in Seoul on October 24, 2012. Before 2007–08, most global financial [...]
The euro area’s efforts to stabilize its financial picture got a boost from several developments in the last week, as the effects of the outright monetary transactions (OMT) announced last summer by the European Central Bank (ECB) continues to take hold. At the European Union Council, for example, leaders confirmed their political commitment to a [...]
Waiting for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to ask for lending assistance to Spain is enough to make you ask: Where are the bond vigilantes when you need them? The verbal intervention by Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), on July 26, followed by the ECB’s new Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) program in [...]