No, of course not. Today, we live in a currency zone that, despite everything, is significantly more stable than where the dollar or yen are used. The euro has brought growth and prosperity to Europe.
Bringer of Prosperity or Bottomless Pit?: Top German Economists Debate the Euro - SPIEG... - 0 views
-
-
Actually, the euro was a mistake with particularly serious consequences. A monetary union requires its members to pursue the same policies and be similarly productive. The so-called convergence criteria were meant to ensure that this would happen. But -- as the dramatic developments in Greece are now showing -- they didn't.
-
Unfortunately, our fears have become a reality. The monetary union was launched with real self-deception.
- ...14 more annotations...
Mario Draghi Cannot Save the Euro - Bloomberg - 0 views
-
Once you have understood that the ECB does not necessarily stand behind euro-area government debt, it is hard to disabuse yourself of the notion.
-
A broader question is what, if anything, Draghi might achieve with a looser monetary policy.
-
The euro area has many problems, including a lack of competitiveness in the periphery, chronically poor growth in countries such as Portugal and Italy, deeply damaged public finances in Greece and Spain, and a labor force that’s not mobile enough to go where the jobs are. Which of these could be resolved by reducing interest rates across the board?
- ...4 more annotations...
Crisis Swirls in Kenya, and Politicians Reward Themselves - New York Times - 0 views
-
Still, some say legislators have lost touch with the poor districts they represent. Per capita income is about $463 a year, which nobody here would expect a lawmaker to survive on. Minimum wage is $924 a year, still far too little, in most Kenyans' view, for someone taking care of the nation's business. But the base compensation that legislators earn is about $81,000 a year, tax free, plus a variety of allowances and perks, which can effectively double their take-home pay. That means those public servants earn more than most Kenyan corporate executives and outstrip the salaries of many of their counterparts in the developed world.
Sub-Saharan Africa's Subprime Borrowers by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Hamid Rashid - Projec... - 0 views
-
Taking the lead in October 2007, when it issued a $750 million Eurobond with an 8.5% coupon rate, Ghana earned the distinction of being the first Sub-Saharan country – other than South Africa – to issue bonds in 30 years.
-
Nine other countries – Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Angola, Nigeria, Namibia, Zambia, and Tanzania – followed suit. By February 2013, these ten African economies had collectively raised $8.1 billion from their maiden sovereign-bond issues, with an average maturity of 11.2 years and an average coupon rate of 6.2%. These countries’ existing foreign debt, by contrast, carried an average interest rate of 1.6% with an average maturity of 28.7 years.
-
So why are an increasing number of developing countries resorting to sovereign-bond issues? And why have lenders suddenly found these countries desirable?
- ...9 more annotations...
The Eurocrisis Can Easily Flare Up Again - Seeking Alpha - 0 views
-
It is clear for all that they will also have to swallow cuts, but for this to take place, politicians have to break promises, the ECB has to break the law, and the IMF has to do something rather unprecedented. None of this is easy, to put it mildly.
-
Recently, there was a new EU/IMF/ECB 'agreement' that won't fare any better.
-
Basically, we're lending Greece more in order for it to keep the appearance that it is servicing and paying of the debt.
- ...8 more annotations...
The Limits to ECB Policy - The Euro Crisis - WSJ - 0 views
-
Although it has yet to be implemented or even clearly delineated, the mere threat of an ECB bond-buying program, which is what the OMT boils down to, has been enough to drive down yields and reopen the fixed-income markets to the single currency’s struggling sovereigns.
-
Those in employment don’t want their salaries to adjust downwards and insist on maintaining regulations that protect them from competition from the unemployed. Impossible to justify regulatory barriers to entry remain in many employment sectors (such as French rules that make becoming a ski guide almost as onerous as it is to get a pilot’s license).
-
ultimately, politicians will have to make the decisions on whether the euro zone can be saved by choosing to accept either inflation or massive, and unlimited, cross-border transfers or painful unwinding of past excesses through internal devaluation and restructuring.
Op-Ed Columnist - The Making of a Euromess - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
No, the real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites — specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment.
-
Consider the case of Spain, which on the eve of the crisis appeared to be a model fiscal citizen.
-
But with its warm weather and beaches, Spain was also the Florida of Europe — and like Florida, it experienced a huge housing boom. The financing for this boom came largely from outside the country: there were giant inflows of capital from the rest of Europe, Germany in particular.
- ...9 more annotations...
'Run For Your Lives': Printing Money with the IMF - SPIEGEL ONLINE - 0 views
-
Most European leaders have nothing against using the central bank's reserves as a source of financing, as became evident at the Cannes summit. Important politicians like European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and French President Sarkozy proposed making IMF "special drawing rights" available
-
It appears that the euro crisis is approaching its endgame. Many promises made when the common currency was introduced have already been broken. The initial stipulation that only stable countries be allowed in, for example, quickly proved illusory once Italy and Greece were accepted.
-
German taxpayers were also promised that they would never be held liable for the debts of other countries in the euro zone. But then came the first and second bailout packages for Greece and the European bailout fund.
- ...1 more annotation...
Five lessons from the Spanish cajas debacle for a new euro-wide supervisor | vox - 0 views
-
just the three most problematic Spanish cajas (Bankia, CatalunyaCaixa and Novagalicia) have had capital deficits (to be covered partly or fully by the taxpayer) of €54 billion – over 5% of Spanish GDP, a larger amount than what Spain will have to request from the European rescue funds.
-
governance played a critical role in the development of the Spanish crisis. In the Spanish case, the supervisor, confronted with powerful and well connected ex-politicians decided to look the other way in the face of obvious building trouble.
-
There is no intimation by anyone of outright corruption in the Banco de España supervisory role, and given the professionalism of the institution it is unlikely that there was any.
- ...13 more annotations...
Europe Can't Handle the Euro - 0 views
-
When leaders of the 11 nations that agreed to combine their currencies gathered in January 1999, they predicted great things: the single currency would shift global portfolios to euro assets, depressing the value of the dollar relative to the euro, and the new eurozone would be a strong player in the global economy, reflecting the size of an integrated European market. Instead the euro plummeted, Europes economy remains weak, and unemployment is more than twice the U.S. level.
-
The ECB will eventually be judged not by its words but by whether it achieves low inflation and does so without increasing cyclical unemployment. I am not optimistic about either part of this goal.
-
The ECB must make monetary policy for "Europe as a whole," which in practice means doing what is appropriate for Germany, France and Italy, the eurozones three largest countries. Last year demand conditions in those countries were relatively weak, while demand conditions in Spain and Ireland were very strong. That meant a monetary policy that was too expansionary for Spain and Ireland, causing a substantial acceleration of their inflation and threatening their competitiveness.
- ...7 more annotations...
"The Euro's Latest Reprieve" by Joseph E. Stiglitz | Project Syndicate - 0 views
-
Like an inmate on death row, the euro has received another last-minute stay of execution. It will survive a little longer. The markets are celebrating, as they have after each of the four previous “euro crisis” summits – until they come to understand that the fundamental problems have yet to be addressed.
-
Europe’s leaders have finally understood that the bootstrap operation by which Europe lends money to the banks to save the sovereigns, and to the sovereigns to save the banks, will not work.
-
Likewise, they now recognize that bailout loans that give the new lender seniority over other creditors worsen the position of private investors, who will simply demand even higher interest rates.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph
- ...12 more annotations...
Euro crisis deepens as time starts to run out for Spain's banks and regions | Business ... - 0 views
-
But the shortcomings of the agreement have once again undermined renewed confidence in the eurozone and sent the bond yields of several countries higher, including Spain and Italy.
-
The Spanish government said a predicted rise in GDP next year of 0.4% had proved optimistic, and the economy would suffer another year of recession.
-
Regional governments deliver the key parts of the welfare state, including health, education and social services.
- ...7 more annotations...
Why Is Zambia So Poor? And Will Things Ever Get Better? - 0 views
-
Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day, 14 percent have HIV, 40 percent don’t have access to clean drinking water. Almost 90 percent of women in rural areas cannot read or write. Name a category—schools, health care, environment—and I’ll give you statistics that will depress the shit out of you.
-
For more than 150 years, the only reason to come to Kitwe—to Zambia, really—was the copper.
-
Most of the buildings in Kitwe, the roads, the health clinics, the schools, were built by the national mining company
- ...25 more annotations...
What If We Never Run Out of Oil? - Charles C. Mann - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
In most cases, mining tar sands involves drilling two horizontal wells, one above the other, into the bitumen layer; injecting massive gouts of high-pressure steam and solvents into the top well, liquefying the bitumen; sucking up the melted bitumen as it drips into the sand around the lower well; and then refining the bitumen into “synthetic crude oil.”
-
Economists sometimes describe a fuel in terms of its energy return on energy invested (EROEI), a measure of how much energy must be used up to acquire, process, and deliver the fuel in a useful form. OPEC oil, for example, is typically estimated to have an EROEI of 12 to 18, which means that 12 to 18 barrels of oil are produced at the wellhead for every barrel of oil consumed during their production. In this calculation, tar sands look awful: they have an EROEI of 4 to 7. (Steaming out the bitumen also requires a lot of water. Environmentalists ask, with some justification, where it all is going to come from.)
-
To obtain shale gas, companies first dig wells that reach down thousands of feet. Then, with the absurd agility of anime characters, the drills wriggle sideways to bore thousands of feet more through methane-bearing shale. Once in place, the well injects high-pressure water into the stone, creating hairline cracks. The water is mixed with chemicals and “proppant,” particles of sand or ceramic that help keep the cracks open once they have formed. Gas trapped between layers of shale seeps past the proppant and rises through the well to be collected.
- ...13 more annotations...
American trade policy: How to make the world $600 billion poorer | The Economist - 0 views
-
American trade policy How to make the world $600 billion poorer
-
Reasonable estimates say that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) could boost the world’s annual output by $600 billion—equivalent to adding another Saudi Arabia. Some $200 billion of that would accrue to America.
-
And the actual gains could be even larger. The agreements would clear the way for freer trade in services, which account for most of rich countries’ GDP but only a small share of trade. Opening up trade in services could help reduce the cost of everything from shipping to banking, education and health care. Exposing professional occupations to the same global competition that factory workers have faced for decades could even strike a blow against the income inequality that Mr Obama so often decries
- ...3 more annotations...
The iEconomy - Nissan's Move to U.S. Offers Lessons for Tech Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Japanese and other foreign companies account for more than 40 percent of cars built in the United States, employing about 95,000 people directly and hundreds of thousands more among parts suppliers.
-
The United States gained these jobs through a combination of public and Congressional pressure on Japan, “voluntary” quotas on car exports from Japan and incentives like tax breaks that encouraged Japanese automakers to build factories in America.
-
The government could also encourage domestic production of technologies, including display manufacturing and advanced semiconductor fabrication, that would nurture new industries. “Instead, we let those jobs go to Asia, and then the supply chains follow, and then R&D follows, and soon it makes sense to build everything overseas,” he said. “If Apple or Congress wanted to make the valuable parts of the iPhone in America, it wouldn’t be hard.”
- ...2 more annotations...
Russia shuts four McDonald's restaurants in Moscow - MarketWatch - 0 views
-
Russia shuts four McDonald's restaurants in Moscow
-
To be sure, Russia has shut only four out of 435 McDonald's outlets across the country and said the move was temporary, pending further checks.
-
McDonald's in April closed its three restaurants in Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula that Russia annexed a month earlier, citing "the suspension of necessary financial and banking services." Those restaurants remain closed. At the time, a Russian nationalist politician called for all McDonald's outlets to be closed and for demonstrations outside restaurants.
1 - 18 of 18
Showing 20▼ items per page