 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
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.
In the first round of the presidential election in Cyprus on February 17, Nicos Anastasiades, the center right presidential candidate, won 45.5 percent of the vote, setting up a final round against Stavros Malas from the communist AKEL party of the incumbent president, Demetris Christofias. Malas garnered 27 percent of the vote. The new frontrunner [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In a hopeful development for Europe’s struggle to stabilize its economy, Irish voters last week endorsed the proposed Fiscal Compact Treaty by a resounding 60.3 to 39.7 majority. For all the nonsensical predictions of a grass root rebellion against austerity across the continent, the striking thing in Ireland was not just the acceptance of fiscal [...]
A chimera has entered the minds of some Irish commentators concerning Ireland’s options if it votes to reject the new Euro Area Fiscal Treaty, which calls for sweeping commitments to maintain budget balance, in a referendum that has been scheduled by the Irish government. Unlike a rejection of a regular EU Treaty, an Irish no [...]
In the first week of March, the euro area experienced the biggest sovereign debt restructuring in history and the first ever triggering of sovereign credit default swaps (CDSs) for an industrialized country. Yet nothing happened after these events struck Greece. It was a market non-event that was fully anticipated. For the often maligned euro area [...]
The modern specter that has gone through Europe, the specter of a complete economic and financial collapse of the euro area, has at last lifted. Much work remains to be done, but the excessive and to some extent ideologically driven gloom of just a few months ago has dissipated recently, as the deployment of the [...]
Henry Kissinger once said that while "the illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer."1 Perhaps this is why it took the European Central Bank (ECB) until this week to begin buying up Italian and Spanish bonds in the euro area secondary bond markets. The ECB’s initial hesitation stemmed from its understandable reluctance [...]
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 [...]
The outcome of the euro area meeting last week was far more substantive than expected, even if one takes into account that the expectations had been at rock bottom. Not only did European Union (EU) leaders demonstrate how they intend to prevent peripheral defaults, they also gave us an idea of their longer-term solutions for [...]