The election of François Hollande in France and the outcome of the Greek elections are evident examples of the growing anti-austerity reaction in Europe. And France and Greece are not the only examples. The Dutch Government had to resign recently after the populist right-wing party removed its support to a proposed austerity package, which included [...]

Keynes teaches us that we should not slow down growth in periods of already sluggish growth! Last year ended with an EU Summit and 2012 started as 2011 ended. At the beginning of January Merkel and Sarkozy met in Berlin and at the end of the month we will again have another summit. It seems [...]

How long will Germans be made guilty in a Platonian cave haunted by shadows of the past? In the last couple of weeks all over Europe a sentiment of Germanophopia appeared and this even amongst political friends. Comments like “If the Euro fails, the EU will disintegrate. And you, our German friends, will miss the [...]

Those who have seen the recent movie Contagion are aware how terrible this is when necessary precautions have not been taken in time. Let us be clear, the “crisis-beast”, or the financial markets have already been very successful in their contagion strategy. We have seen last week that two democratically elected Euro-zone governments, Greece and [...]

Yesterday the President of the European Council announced the postponement of the long overdue Eurozone summit which was due to take place next week. I am wondering if the Belgian Council President is now using Belgian practices of non-decision making and postponing. We all know that Belgium is now more than 16 months – since [...]

9/11 changed the world. This is what most of the comments made this week-end stipulate. The world seems to have shrunk in many ways in the last decade. It goes without saying that we still suffer the consequences: thousands of innocent people killed at 9/11, the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, the wave of violence [...]

The current crisis almost brought us to a dead end – certainly more evident in the US and Europe than perhaps in the other continents. But nevertheless the situation is frightening. Europe seems to be crumbling; the sovereign debt crisis threatened the whole European project. In Spain, in Britain and elsewhere the youth no longer [...]

Le Monde published an interesting article on 14/07/2011 how international hedge funds are speculating with European sovereign bonds. They are making enormous profits with the spreads and the reevaluated nominal values. Ten years Greek bonds are available on the (second) market at 50% of the nominal value. The interest rate for these bonds is more than [...]

Newspapers all over Europe, political observers and politicians are gloomy of late.  For example Le Monde’s headline tells us that Greece has another 10 days to avoid the worst. The Financial Times published in a post by Gideon Rachman that a political union cannot fix the Euro! Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung argues that the German taxpayer [...]

In the last few months so many comments have been very negative about the performance of Europe. But let us be affirmative and not vicious. It should be very clear that the stereotypes of the European Union are not legitimate. On the contrary, the European integration process is a story of success. 67 years after [...]

Even before the next hearing on Friday this week, the allegations against the head of the IMF are obviously challenging for the future of the IMF and, in the international press, discussion continues over possible successors of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  However, we should be aware that the question of the successor would have been in any [...]

Portugal negotiated without much noise its bail-out deal with the EU and the IMF. Portugal will receive €78 billion in loans, including up to €12 billion for the banking sector. The loans will span until 2013, after which Portugal is expected return to the markets to finance it. The interest rate Portugal will pay on [...]

The Group of 20 Finance Ministers and Central Bankers who met last Friday in Washington took only a small step towards monitoring “international economic imbalances” among the world’s leading trading nations. They agreed on a set of so called “indicative guidelines” with which to measure those imbalances and to strengthen coordination in order to avoid [...]

Last week in New Delhi I had talks with politicians, journalists, diplomats and scientists on Indo-European relations. Europe is seen as an example of successful integration! India is looking with great interest towards Europe.

Last week in New Delhi I had talks with politicians, journalists, diplomats and scientists on Indo-European relations. Europe is seen as an example of successful integration! India is looking with great interest towards Europe.  Compared with the critical reflections on Europe, published yesterday by the outstanding German philosopher Juergen Habermas Süddeutsche Zeitung, this is a [...]