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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.
A few weeks ago Reuters reported that the French finance Minister, Pierre Moscovici, fell asleep during the final late night negotiations over the Cypriot bank bailout on March 24. It apparently fell to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director, Christine Lagarde—a former French finance minister herself—to wake him up. No doubt the grueling round-the-clock [...]
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 [...]
Industrial policy, in which governments seek to support certain industrial sectors, has made a comeback. It has attracted new respectability with the economic rise of China. Justin Lin, the recently departed World Bank chief economist, has made the intellectual and empirical case for industrial policy. The essence of his industrial policy is to identify comparative [...]
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 [...]
Olivier Ferrand, the founder of French think tank Terra Nova, died an untimely death on June 30, 2012 in the South of France, where he had just been elected deputy for the district of Marseilles North-East. He was 42. Olivier founded Terra Nova in 2008 as a nonprofit organization that publishes recommendations on topical economic, [...]
As Europe’s growth prospects take a beating, critics of austerity seem to be riding high. In France, the Socialist Francois Hollande seems poised to be elected president on a wave of protest over record high unemployment in the euro area. Meanwhile, the fiscally hawkish Dutch government has fallen victim to its own rhetoric, after failing [...]
Like a majority of my Excel-equipped compatriots, I did a bit of post-election math, and what strikes me most about the first round of the French presidential elections on April 22, 2012 is the similarity to the 2002 results if you look at political voting blocs instead of individual candidates: Left: 43.8 percent (2012) vs. [...]
On March 2, 25 European Union members signed their long-discussed fiscal compact, the treaty committing them to balance their budgets in the future, paving the way for national ratification of the compact before January 2013. Most analysts expect the compact to be ratified in most countries. But a few signs of doubt have emerged over [...]
When Mario Draghi delivered his first prepared public remarks as president of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt on Nov. 8, he provided several clues about the coming eight years. Conscious of taking charge in the midst of the bank’s and the euro area’s first major financial crisis, he dwelled first on monetary policy, [...]
The euro area sovereign debt crisis is gradually turning into the best thing that has happened to European Union politics and European economies since the launch of the Single Market in the mid-1980s. The crisis has shattered the fake ten-year political and economic equilibrium between core and periphery countries that followed the initial shock of [...]