» European Markets

Good Morning.  So apparently a Greek deal has been reached for 130 billion euro. Honestly this is the type of report that is quite frankly going to be denied by the time I write this post. There are a number of open items apparently in the deal including the biggest. There is no PSI (private sector...

It looks like Greece will get its debt restructuring, which presumably delays its collapse by a few months. So now the spotlight shifts to the other functionally bankrupt eurozone countries which have no choice but to demand the same deal. Portugal, by general consensus, is next in line. It hasn’t...

One of the interesting things about being in Hong Kong is that I get to see the weekend edition of the Financial Times 12 hours early. And the headlines were not all that pleasant. As I promised last week, we will cast our eyes to Europe and ponder what is in store for Europe for the year and the ...

Europe’s underlying problem is not budget deficits or even unsustainable debt.  These are mainly symptoms.  The real problem with Europe is the huge divergence in costs between the core and the periphery – in the past decade costs between Germany and some of the peripheral countries have di...

Over the course of the last three years the two primary forces that have moved financial and economic markets are trends in inflation and central bank balance sheets. Currently, global stock markets have two major tailwinds at their backs which may lead to the consensus being wrong again. Most marke...

Bond action in the Eurozone has modestly picked up (yields steady or falling) since the ECB’s 3-Year LTRO program – Long Term Refinance Operation. However, European banks still do not trust each other, not even for overnight lending. Instead, banks park all available funds with the ECB, ...

Greece has been out of the spotlight for a couple of weeks, which means it’s past due for another market-rattling announcement. And sure enough, today we find out that its economy is shrinking even faster than expected: Greece Apparently Even Worse Off Than Realized, Hitting Euro, Stocks This fle...

Europe’s leaders have convened another summit meeting that will, they promise, put all the break-up speculation to bed once and for all. But the ideas that were floated pre-meeting are, um, logically challenged. Consider this excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal article: The Pitfalls of Merko...

Within a couple of days German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy will present their “Grand Plan” to save Europe to a formal hearing on EU debt. Their plan is on the death-bed already, but it does not officially die until formal votes in May as noted in Eurozo...

Please consider the ass backwards Measures to Stimulate Bank Lending in the EMU. The European Central Bank may announce a range of measures tomorrow to stimulate bank lending, said three euro-area officials with knowledge of policy makers’ deliberations. Options on the table include loosening co...

It is now common to use the term bazooka when referring the actions of governments and central banks as they try to avert a credit crisis. And this week we saw a coordinated effort by central banks to use their bazookas to head off another 2008-style credit disaster. The market reacted as if the c...

How many European bankers does it take to change a light bulb? That’s a joke in search of an answer, but EWI’s European analyst Brian Whitmer explained five months ago that the “light bulb moment” was coming — that’s the time when most people would clearly recogni...