Euro

Christopher Caldwell on the euro and the damage it wrought.

The nation-state reconsidered.

People have been forecasting the end of the euro since the currency came into being in the late 1990s. Yet the euro has survived five sovereign bailouts—including three successive ones of Greece (the continent’s most troubled economy)—and two bank rescues aimed at Spanish and Cypriot banks. The…

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on July 3.

Flushed with the success of its five-year effort to restore prosperity to Greece, Brussels’ eurocrats have turned their attention to Italy, and ruled that the country’s famous buffalo mozzarella need not be made with fresh milk: powdered milk will do just fine. So Italy will have to repeal a 1974…

We should “stop thinking about the economy as being in a perpetual crisis” commented Charles Plosser, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, after the government announced on Friday that the private sector added 267,000 jobs in January, and that upward revisions to November and…

On April 5, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt did it right here in the White House. On August 15, 1971 Richard Nixon came back from Camp David and did it. On September 22, 1985, Ronald Reagan went to the Plaza Hotel and did it.

The Scrapbook tends to avoid inductive reasoning—that is, drawing a general conclusion from specific examples—because any good polemicist can cherry-pick his anecdotes. But some recent tidings from Bratislava, in Slovakia, have tempted us to wander down Inductive Lane.

Recall how improbable it seemed that the tiny nation of Greece might bring down the Euro and cripple the world's financial mechanisms?  And, then, the story – if not the danger – seemed to fade away.  Well, it now appears that the even more insignificant island of Cyprus may provide the spark. As…

Growth is the summum bonum of economic policy. Tough to arrange at home: stimulus packages don’t work very well, and monetary policy produces lots of fiat money but not very many jobs. The solution: export-led growth—the other guy will buy so much of your goods and services that your economy will…

Elections can turn on many things; some of them beyond the abilities of mere spin doctors to manipulate. There are at least two very large possibilities looming over this year's presidential election: a possible Israeli attack on Iran and the failure of the Euro. According to one report, the Obama…

The Economic Times reports: 

Debtors of the world, unite—you have nothing to lose but your IOUs!

A phony peace is unlikely to end much better than a phony war. When the European Central Bank (ECB) poured a total of $1.3 trillion in cheap three-year funding into the continent’s financial institutions, that’s what it got. Sure, it beat the alternative. Lehman part deux was staved off yet again.…

Martin Taylor, chairman of Syngenta and a former chief executive of Barclays, has written a thought provoking article about the perilous state of the European economy in the Financial Times. He observes that while most of the world is quick to blame bankers, the problem is also that European…

Last week Germany reclaimed its status as the leading power in Europe. In the two years since it became apparent that Greece was, essentially, bankrupt, there have been dozens of emergency meetings of the countries that use the common European currency, the euro. Most of the euro-using states…

"A man attending a wife-swapping party without his wife.” So a very annoyed French negotiator at the latest European summit characterized British prime minister David Cameron’s refusal to trade the future of his nation’s financial center for the approval of the 26 other members of the European…

A lot of intelligent money people think this is make-or-break week for the euro. They say that by Friday, December 9, either there will be a path toward resolution of Europe’s debt crisis, or events will accelerate toward a breakup of the single currency. One such is Morgan Stanley analyst Arnaud…

There are good days and bad days, but even on the good days the abyss is never too far away. The eurozone’s dangerously original mix of innovation, incoherence, and unaccountability makes it difficult to identify a single event that could finally push it over the edge. But, with confidence already…

Standard & Poor’s warning that no less than fifteen eurozone states, including Germany, could lose their AAA credit rating has been met with howls of protest from leading German politicians. The general secretary of the Social Democratic party (SPD), Andrea Nahles, described the Standard and Poor’s…

Joel Gehrke: "Tina Brown: Professor Obama 'doesn't like his job'"

Washington Post: No health care rationing here. Move along.

London

A doctor ignored by a smoker won’t celebrate if lung cancer strikes. Britain’s euroskeptics are generally too worried about the consequences of the Eurozone’s thoroughly predictable crisis to submit to the temptations of I told you so. Well, most of them are. The United Kingdom may be outside the…

Financial Times: "Europe is now leveraging for a catastrophe"

Rupert Murdoch: "The Steve Jobs Model for Education Reform"

Spectator: "The great euro swindle"

With the debt ceiling debate behind us, now might be a good time to get back to the biggest problem currently facing the world economy: the eurozone. While the European debt crisis may have slipped off Americans' radar screens in the past weeks, its significance has not diminished.

Billion by billion by billion, showdown by argument by ultimatum, Greece’s latest bailout is being put together by those who run the eurozone. The country’s finances are so bad, and its prospects so poor, that even the new $159 billion rescue package announced on Thursday will (assuming it comes…

Megan McArdle: "Euro in Crisis: Is the Italian Domino Falling?"

Although Greek prime minister George Papandreou survived a vote of confidence last night, meeting the conditions required by the IMF for the disbursement of another tranche of aid to its ailing economy, parliament will have to pass another austerity package later this month.

A spectre is haunting Europe​—​the spectre of the disintegration of the eurozone. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectre: German chancellor and French president, the Brussels eurocracy and the bonus-laden bankers. Let the ruling classes tremble. The…

It has been easy to snicker in recent weeks at the politicians who designed the euro, which appears on the verge of collapse after a decade as the common currency of a dozen countries in the European Union. Last May, the continent’s finance ministers put together a $145-billion package to bail out…

"You won’t find a lot of Keynesians here,” explained one German economic policymaker in Berlin in September. That will not be news to anyone who has spoken to his counterparts in Washington. In their view, Germany is a skulker, a rotten citizen of the global economy, the macroeconomic equivalent of…