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levels of private and public debt, domestic and foreign, are still too high, and continue to rise as a share of GDP, owing to slow or negative output growth. This means that the issue of medium-term sustainability remains unresolved.

At the same time, the loss of competitiveness has been only partly reversed, with most of the improvement in external balances being cyclical rather than structural.

The euro is still too strong, severely limiting the improvement in competitiveness that is needed to boost net exports in the face of weak domestic demand.

a continuing credit crunch, as undercapitalised banks deleverage by selling assets and shrinking their loan portfolios.

The larger problem, of course, is that progress toward banking, fiscal, economic and political union, all of which are essential to the eurozone's long-term viability, has been too slow.

all imply that banks will have to focus on raising capital at the expense of providing the financing needed for economic growth.

Moreover the ECB, in contrast to the Bank of England, is unwilling to be creative in pursuing policies that would ameliorate the credit crunch.

Meanwhile, austerity fatigue is rising in the eurozone periphery.

And bailout fatigue is emerging in the eurozone's core.

But the eurozone's political strains may soon reach a breaking point,

Italy faces no immediate threat for as long interest rates remain low. The country will be able to muddle through for a while until some political or economic shock will force a decision one way or the other.

Meanwhile, the single largest constraint on the resumption of eurozone growth is not fiscal policy – which is broadly neutral at present across the single currency area – but the continued failure to clean up the banks. The growth rate of loans to the non-financial sector turned negative in 2009, showed some intermittent improvements, only to then deteriorate again last year.

The monetary and banking data are telling us that the economy will teeter on the brink of zero or low growth for the foreseeable future because the financial sector is not supplying the economy with sufficient funds to expand.

Banking union could help, but only if it were to break the relationship between banks and sovereigns and clean up the balance sheets.

“He’s helping us think about what is one of the greatest challenges of our time, how to deal with what feel like friendly monopolists,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who studies Internet policy and antitrust. “Amazon, Google and the others give us all this stuff for free or lower prices, so we love them, but are they dangerous in ways we don’t always see?”

In the 2002 paper with Jean-Charles Rochet, Mr. Tirole defined two-sided markets, or markets that “get both sides on board” by charging more to one set of customers in order to increase demand by others.

In the tech industry, it explains why Google, Facebook and Twitter offer their services free – the more people who use them, the more advertisers they can attract. Likewise, Amazon lowered the price of its new phone to 99 cents in part because smartphones succeed when they have a lot of apps – and developers won’t want to build apps for Amazon’s phone unless a lot of people are using it.

For regulators, tech companies have been a riddle in part because they do not follow the behavior of typical monopolies: Many do not charge for their products, and companies that offer entirely different products are nonetheless competitors. For instance, Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, argued in a speech on Monday that Google’s biggest competitor in search is Amazon and in mobile is Facebook — even though neither one is a search engine.

For consumers, the costs include absorbing advertisers’ ad spending by paying more for their products, being tracked and shown personalized ads, and giving up privacy.

our end-users do not internalize the impact of their purchase on the other side of the market.”

The ECB’s Outright Monetary Transactions programme was instrumental in reducing Spanish government bond yields. This alleviated the Spanish fiscal position, but did not make it sustainable. The continuing unsustainability of the Spanish government debt has to do with two factors: First while r (the interest rate) declined, g (nominal growth) remained much lower in Spain than in the UK. The latter was due to the deflationary forces in the Eurozone – themselves a result of excessive austerity and the absence of currency depreciation (which was made possible in the UK thanks to the expansionary monetary policies of the Bank of England).

"There's no risk to Polish clients," PGNiG spokeswoman Dorota Gajewska said, but added that it was forced to suspend its so-called "reverse flow" transfers to Ukraine.

The move caused the Russian ruble to plunge to another record low against the dollar on Thursday.

"It also can be seen as a kind of response to EU sanctions, targeting the smaller EU members in Moscow's former sphere of influence, not its larger Western partner." "But it's a risky policy, as it further undermines Moscow's credibility in Western Europe. It's not the best idea: either you're a reliable supplier of gas or you're not," he said.

To be sure, one can reasonably argue that austerity in the eurozone has been excessive, and that fiscal deficits should have been much larger to sustain demand. But only governments with access to market finance can use expansionary fiscal policy to boost demand.

Had Greece not received financial support in 2010, it would have had to cut its fiscal deficit from more than 10% of GDP to zero immediately. By financing continued deficits until 2013, the troika actually enabled Greece to delay austerity.

Of course, Greece is not the first country to request emergency financing to delay budget cuts, and then complain that the cuts are excessive once the worst is over. This typically happens when the government runs a primary surplus. When the government can finance its current spending through taxes – and might even be able to increase expenditure, if it does not have to pay interest – the temptation to renege on debt intensifies.

The practical problem for Greece now is not the sustainability of a debt that matures in 20-30 years and carries very low interest rates; the real issue is the few payments to the IMF and the ECB that fall due this year – payments that the new government has promised to make.

This is sheer nonsense. Does anyone in their right mind think that any country would willingly put itself through what Greece has gone through, just to get a free ride from its creditors? If there is a moral hazard, it is on the part of the lenders – especially in the private sector – who have been bailed out repeatedly.

They were in charge of the regulatory leniency that permitted the banks in their jurisdictions to engage in lender forbearance (extend and pretend/delay and pray) and to overstate the fair value of their assets.

To avoid the cyclical stagnation in the eurozone turning into secular stagnation, four policies are required.

The second measure is a temporary fiscal stimulus (say 1 per cent of eurozone GDP per year for two years, concentrated in the countries with the largest output gaps, that is, in the periphery), which is permanently funded and monetised by the ECB.

this will be a reminder that the most important asset of central banks – the present value of future seigniorage profits – is off-balance sheet.

Finally, to achieve debt sustainability for the eurozone sovereigns, radical supply side reforms are required that boost the growth rate of potential output to at least 1.5 per cent in Italy, Portugal and other sclerotic countries.

Ultimately, Wolf’s outlook is not optimistic. With stasis in Frankfurt, the only thing that will kick the ECB into action will be another crisis, this time a deflationary one. Pre-emptive action seems off the cards. “This ‘Waiting for Godot’ kind of policy strikes me as wrong conceptually and wrong practically, but I can’t envisage anything else happening.”

About a fifth of the European Union’s supply of natural gas flows through Ukraine. Ukraine itself imported from Russia 63 percent of the natural gas it consumed in 2012, producing the remaining 37 percent domestically, according to the United States Energy Information Agency.

American, European and Chinese regulators have put in effect energy-efficiency rules that phase out the use of incandescent bulbs. Big multinationals that make light bulbs like Philips, Osram and General Electric have responded by embracing light-emitting diodes, which use one-fifth of the electricity of incandescent bulbs and half the electricity of fluorescent bulbs.

Many Chinese producers also have a poor and worsening reputation for quality, which may hurt them in the long term.

The industry, for instance, is highly segmented.

Lighting accounts for about 6 percent of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases, and LEDs have the potential to steeply reduce them.

Prices have fallen by nearly half in the last year for low-end, low-wattage LEDs made in China, and by 15 to 20 percent for the higher-wattage versions made elsewhere, buyers and manufacturing executives said.

“We do not buy Chinese LEDs,” said Mike Pugh, the procurement director at Xicato in San Jose, Calif., a large provider of indoor lighting systems for retailers and hotels. “We just can’t take that chance.”

Xicato instead buys LEDs from multinationals like Cree of Durham, N.C.; Philips Lumileds, based in San Jose, Calif.; and Osram Opto Semiconductors of Regensburg, Germany.

Three-quarters of China’s electricity still comes from burning coal, which contributes to severe air pollution as well as global warming.

She earns $500 a month plus medical benefits and free food and lodging in an air-conditioned dormitory where employees sleep four to six i

the solar and LED industries in China received huge loans at low interest rates from state-owned banks following directives from Beijing