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Folkomröstningen 2003 - EU-valet 2009

Bildt - Calmfors - DN - Expressen - Gennser - Isobel Hadley-Kamptz - Hakelius - Carl B Hamilton - Mattias Lundbäck - Nils Lundgren
Stefan Löfven - Johan Norberg - Göran Persson - Reinfeldt - SvD - de Vylder - Wetterberg - Wohlin

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Draghi - Otmar Issing - Martin Wolf - Wolfgang Münchau

Stabilitetspakten - Finanskrisen - Vacklande tidigare Ja-sägare - Junilistan


Medborgare mot EMU

Europaportalen

Peak Oil
Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs has drawn attention to the 'overlooked' issue of dwindling oil reserves coupled with rapidly growing and unprecedented global demand
EurActiv 16 January 2008

Rolf Englund blog,
om EMU

Senaste nytt är nu här

Senaste nytt är nu här

Reinfeldt låter som en ny-hooverist om eurokrisen
Reinfeldt leder ett parti och en regering som vill ansluta Sverige till Euroland.
Därför kan han, lika lite som andra EMU-kramare, inte erkänna att det är något fel på tanken på att bunta ihop, slå samman, länder som Tyskland och Grekland, Irland, Spanien och Sverige i något som liknar ett Gross-Jugoslavien.
Rolf Englund blog 11 augusti 2011
Mycket Viktig Artikel, hoppas jag

The risks of what Sir Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, on Wednesday referred to as
the “unimaginable and unmentionable”, by which he meant a disorderly breakdown of the euro,
are high and getting worse.
Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph 10 Aug 2011

Detta är skälen till att jag betraktar euron och EMU som ett felkonstruerat system.
Det som nu händer var väntat av oss euro-motståndare, valutarisken byttes ut mot en kreditrisk. Det var också anledningen till engagemanget på motståndssidan i den svenska euro-omröstningen, även om vi inte såg precis hur illa det skulle gå.
Villy Bergström har varit vice Riksbankschef. Han är socialdemokrat, Avanza bank 8 augusti 2011

The euro: How Europe’s grand dream went sour
David Marsh, MarketWatch Aug. 10, 2011

In the end, Issing suggests the current policy is not merely unattractive from a policy standpoint, it is also doomed to fail.
That is not an anti-European British minister speaking, it is a founding father of the single currency with a deep attachment to the European project.
FT, Brussels blog, 9 August 2011

Politikerna inom EU har inte vågat diskutera det fortsatta ekonomiska samarbetet med befolkningen.
Det kan hota eurons framtid
säger Niklas Bremberg, forskare i statsvetenskap vid Stockholms universitet
DN 9 augusti 2011

On Wednesday Mr Sarkozy summoned members of his government back from holiday for an emergency meeting
In a statement after the two hour meeting in the Elysee Palace in Paris, Mr Sarkozy said France’s pledge to reduce the budget deficit from last year’s 7.1 per cent to 3 per cent by 2013
“will be kept whatever the evolution of the economic situation”
.
Financial Times 10 August 2011

Efter en rad nödutryckningar har attityden från EU:s sida varit att marknaden inte förstått att krispolitiken varit mer än tillräcklig.
I EU drar de politiska viljorna i olika riktningar, vilket understryks när Tyskland nu säger nej till att stödköpa spanskt och italienskt.
SvD-ledare 9 augusti 2011

Angela Merkel face a revolt among supporters over the deal they agreed last month with their 16 eurozone partners
Financial Times August 9, 2011

Slithering to the wrong kind of union
This time the consequence would be to threaten the collapse of the most successful project of economic integration in the history of mankind.
Otmar Issing, Financial Times, August 8, 2011

Alla EU-hatare går med rosiga kinder, självbelåtna leeenden och säger: "Vad var det vi sa, nu brakar det samman. Det här är folkets protest mot eliten." Och så får man stå där och skämmas medan EU-motståndaren tittar på en med en blick... med vetskapen att de alltid får rätt
Stephan Mendel-Enk, Metro, 3/6 2005
Jonas Sjöstedt är den i "Nej till EU"-gänget som behärskar blicken bäst. Han behöver inga argument längre. För att vinna folkomröstningar och tv-debatter behöver han bara blicken och sin förmåga att väsa "EU är på väg att utvecklas till en suuuperstat".

"Det gäller bara Grekland", Mycket fiffigt, Too clever by half,
men allt var fel från början
Rolf Englund blog 2011-07-22

Det börjar likna Cataclysm, banne mig
Rolf Englund blog 4 augusti 2011

If you want to know how the EFSF could implode all of a sudden,
Eurointelligence 29 July 2011

"Det gäller bara Grekland", Mycket fiffigt, Too clever by half,
men allt var fel från början
Rolf Englund blog 2011-07-22

How much closer a union?
Deeper “transfer union” and issuing joint Eurobonds
Charlemagne, The Economist print July 30th 2011

Samuel Brittan about
Christian Saint-Etienne, La fin de l'euro (The End of the Euro)

The agreement included new aid for Greece that embraced bondholders,
prompting Fitch Ratings to say it will put a default rating on Greek debt.
Bloomberg 22 July 2011

Even after Friday’s rebound, the FTSE-Eurofirst 300 banks index is 20 per cent below its February peak
and 66 per cent below its pre-crisis high. German banks index trades at only 0.4 times book value (lower than Greek banks)
from a lame 0.65 times book in the summer of 2009, just after the worst of the financial crisis.
FT Lex 22 July 2011

So what's the EFSF then?
Emma Rowley, Daily Telegraph 22 July 2011

One step back from the abyss
Will it be enough? Of course not.
Stephanie Flanders, BBC Economics editor, 22 July 2011

For Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, this is all a big step towards the creation of a “European Monetary Fund” and, indeed, of a European "economic government".
Charlemagne, The Economist, July 21st 2011

statement by eurozone leaders
www.consilium.europa.eu

Banks across Europe are braced to take as much as 17 billion euro ($24.5 billion) of writedowns on their holdings of Greek sovereign debt within a matter of days. Auditors have argued that the banks must take the hits now, given that almost any scenario for dealing with Greek sovereign restructuring will impair the value of their bond holdings.
Financial Times via CNBC 22 July 2011, 12:45 AM ET

Banks will reduce Greece’s debt by 13.5 billion euros by exchanging bonds and “potentially much more” through a buyback program still to be outlined by governments,
said the Institute of International Finance, a Washington-based group representing banks.

Bloomberg

"Det gäller bara Grekland", Mycket fiffigt,
Too clever by half, men allt var fel från början

Rolf Englund blog 22 juli 2011

Reaktionen auf Griechenland-Paket
Der Spiegel 22 Juli 2011

It appears that the eurozone is forcing Greece into a selective default.
As part of such a package, short-term Greek debt will be more or less forcibly converted into long-term debt.
But the problem of the eurozone is not Greece, or some other small country on its periphery.
The existential danger is the rise in market interest rates of Italy and Spain, two large countries in the eurozone’s core.

Wolfgang Münchau, FT, 21 July 2011, Updated at 15.00 London time

Eurozone agrees new Greek bailout
In Germany, Commerzbank climbed almost 9% and Deutsche Bank rose 3.6%,
while in France Societe Generale and Credit Agricole gained about 6%.

German and French banks are the biggest holders of Greek debt.
BBC 21 July 2011

STATEMENT BY THE HEADS OF STATE OR GOVERNMENT OF THE EURO AREA AND EU INSTITUTIONS
A draft of the proposal document has been leaked from the eurozone summit in Brussels
Daily Telegraph 21 July 2011, 2:40PM BST

1937! So demand will be depressed in both crisis and non-crisis economies;
this will lead to a vigorous recovery through … what?
Paul Krugman, July 21, 2011, 11:51 AM

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, in an article in the Financial Times, is also telling that fiscal union is "necessary".
He recognised that a Conservative chancellor urging closer European integration was a huge change of direction.
Gavin Hewitt, BBC Europe editor, 21 July 2011 09:38 GMT

Daniel Hannan about illelgal eurobonds
Such a scheme will be expensive: it’s hard to see it costing less than a trillion euros.
Most serious of all, it will be illegal.
Article 125 of the European Treaty could hardly be clearer:
“The Union shall not be liable for or assume the commitments of central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of any Member State.”
Rolf Englund blog 21 juli 2011

The eurozone is a modern version of the gold standard
with the expectation that long and painful adjustment processes in deficit countries would unfold without a systemic crisis.
Miguel Carrion, Eurointelligence 19 July 2011

Sarkozy:
The only ones, who totally lack all solidarity, are the Germans.
The German egotism is criminal.
Trichet position easy if you are preparing retirement

Merkel and Sarkozy “listened” to the views of Trichet, the statement said
without saying whether Trichet, who opposes any Greek default, shares their agreed stance.
Bloomberg, July 21, 2011 4:00 AM GMT+0200

The accord between the two most powerful states in the euro zone
will be presented to a crisis summit in Brussels on Thursday starting at 1100 GMT
Reuters 21 July,12:46am EDT

Germany and France reach Greek accord
Germany and France appeared to settle their differences late on Wednesday
Financial Times, July 21 2011,12:03 am

Eurobonds are the only answer to Europe’s crisis
Mario Monti, former European commissioner, Financial Times 20 July 2011

Time is running out for salvaging Greece and, beyond it, Europe’s shared currency, the euro.
Thursday’s emergency summit meeting looms as a Lehman Brothers moment.
New York Times editorial 20 July 2011

Svenska Dagbladet om EMU
från Svegfors till PJ Anders Linder

Rolf Englund blog 21 juli 2011

The eurozone is not a single nation state, yet it has some of the elements and institutions of a nation state.
Inside a nation state, transfers occur between rich and poor regions. In fact, this is one of the key reasons for having a national budget
But such transfers have never seemed remotely possible inside the European Union, because there is insufficient “community spirit” to make them politically feasible.
Gavyn Davies, FT blog July 20, 2011 11:30 am

Euroledarna rådvilla som nakna kejsare
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Rolf Englund blog 20 juli 2011, 22:35

With Italian and Spanish debt yields ever higher, Thursday’s emergency summit offers perhaps the last chance to address it.
If a credible and comprehensive plan to do so does not result, the hour of the euro may well have passed.
FT, Lex, July 20, 2011 12:05 pm

Italian Finance Minister compared Germany and its small-minded Chancellor to a first-class passenger on the Titanic.
When the ship hits the iceberg, everybody goes down together
Rolf Englund blog 20 juli 2011

In an added sign of mounting anxiety ahead of a European Union summit meeting on Thursday,
borrowing from the European Central Bank rose sharply Tuesday,
indicating that many banks were having trouble raising money on open markets.

New York Times 29 July 2011

Ingen kurs för euron
Merkels regering vet inte vad den vill.
Gräl, misstag och opportunism präglar bilden.
DN ledarsidan signerat Gunnar Jonsson 20 juli 2011

It looks like Jean-Claude Trichet and the financial markets have scared the European negotiators,
who will tonight narrow down their list of options into a single proposal for European leaders to rubberstamp at their meeting tomorrow.
the favourite now seems to be a bank levy, imposed in such a way that it would raise the desired €30bn over three years.
Eurointelligence 20 July 2011

Ny EU-skatt fel lösning på grekiskt slöseri
Karl Sigfrid (M), SvD Brännpunkt 20 juli 2011 kl 04:45

French President Nicolas Sarkozy was to meet Merkel on Wednesday in Berlin
U.S. President Barack Obama spoke with Merkel on Tuesday.
CNBC 20 July 2011, 3:32 AM ET

Om EMU:s föregångare, den s k Werner-planen
ur boken "Vår framtid i Europa" av Jan Brännström, Rolf Englund och Claes-Henric Siven
1971, för 40 år sedan, tänk vad tiden går

European officials are considering a tax on financial institutions
according to an EU paper obtained by Bloomberg News.
The one-page document,

dated July 16, lays out three ways to construct a Greek rescue that includes the involvement of private companies.
Bloomberg, July 19, 2011, 6:23 PM EDT

Stephanie Flanders, BBC Economics editor:
But how, exactly, would the euro break up?
Rolf Englund blog 20 juli 2011

The entire point of stress tests is to identify problem banks so they can be closed or recapitalized, and the resulting transparency is supposed to reduce the chances of panic.
' But since Europe's regulators still won't test for the effects of a sovereign default on banks, this year's results—like last year's—won't stop the crisis of confidence in the continent's financial system.
Wall Street Journal 19 July 2011

“Some call it a selective default, some call it a rollover, some call it a debt exchange, some call it a re-profiling. But obviously no one in their right mind accepts that Greece is going to repay on time in full.”
From New York Times

Either a deal is at hand and the town’s leading journalists don’t know about it – or we’re still a long way off with just 48 hours to go.
Financial Times Brussels Blog is betting on the latter
July 19, 2011 9:59 am

A meeting of euro zone leaders on Thursday will not be the final step in the resolution of Greece's debt crisis
"There are other necessary steps to take and not one spectacular result that will solve all problems,"
she /German Chancellor Angela Merkel/ said at a joint news conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
CNBC 19 July 2011, 9:23 AM ET

"When the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI (1190-1197), demanded money and men for his projected crusade,
Alexios III (of Byzantium) humiliatingly complied by introducing a nex tax, the infamous Alamanikon or "German tax".
A History of Greece, Nicholas Doumanis

Some are now openly advocating political union as the solution to the crisis.
The former EU Commissioner Emma Bonino was refreshingly candid when I met her in Rome last week.
She believes that a United States of Europe is the answer. She accepted that political union would have to be put to the voters.
Gavin Hewitt, BBC Europe editor, 18 July 2011

Det är kostnadsläget, stupid.
Mohamed El-Erian, Pimco, och Tomas Lundin, SvD Näringsliv, är ense
Rolf Englund blog 19 juli 2011

The euro zone's strategy for dealing with its members' fiscal problems is in tatters,
and it is far from certain that its leaders will be willing and able to come up with a more successful alternative when they meet Thursday.
If they don't, the currency area won't survive
Wall Street Journal 19 July 2011
Very important article, of course

It will help if Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Trichet end their increasingly pointless squabble over private sector involvement in a Greek debt relief package.
But it will not transform Greece’s prospects for escaping from its debt trap, and it will not touch the heart of the matter
– that Europe faces not a mere liquidity problem in a small, sun-kissed Mediterranean state, but a systemic crisis of its monetary union.
Financial Times editorial 18 July 2011

This could even involve a country taking a sabbatical from the eurozone
in order to regain the policy flexibility needed to restore competitiveness
Mohamed El-Erian, Pimco, Financial Times 15 July 2011

Greklands skulder (andras fordringar) skall skrivas ned med 648 miljarder kronor
Det är väl bra att man skriver ner Greklands skulder. Men det betyder att andra förlorar 648 miljarder kronor.
Hur kul är det? Rolf Englund blog 18 juli 2011

Kanske har europeiska ledare inte längre möjlighet att påverka händelseförloppet.
Men i stället för att bara titta på går det att förbereda folk.
En "avvecklingskommission" kan diskutera möjliga scenarier om valutaunionen helt eller delvis går om intet.
Det är också en form av ansvarstagande.
Expressen-ledare 15 juli 2011

Officials in Germany's Finance Ministry are analyzing several models for paring down Greece's debt burden to a more tolerable size. This would involve relieving the country of roughly €70 billion (SEK 648 milljarrder) in debt.
Der Spiegel 18 juli 2011

Jens Weidmann (43) ist seit 1. Mai Präsident der Bundesbank
Click
See also: Otmar Issing

Eurobonds som garanteras av alla medlemsländer
I förlängningen ligger en gemensam finanspolitik och politisk union.
Ska eurozonen räddas måste samtidigt konkurrenskraften i Sydeuropa höjas.
Tomas Lundin, SvD Näringsliv 18 juli 2011

Europe’s political leadership has been, and still is, committing a category error in its approach.
This is not a crisis of a small country at the edge of the eurozone. Nor is this a crisis brought on by rating agencies or speculators.
This is a systemic crisis of a monetary union that refuses to be a fiscal union.
Wolfgang Münchau, Financial Times 18 July 2011

Five years ago, I was among those who argued that the probability of a collapse of the eurozone was close to zero.
Last year, I wrote it was no longer trivial, but small.
I now would put the odds of a break-up of the eurozone at 50:50.
As I argued last week, a eurozone bond is the only solution to the crisis.
Wolfgang Münchau, Financial Times 18 July 2011

A modest proposal
The eurozone can in theory still be saved, if two sets of conditions are fulfilled;
if the leaders of Germany, Austria, Finland, and the Netherlands accept fiscal union and a common pooling of debt, and can persuade their parliaments and courts to ratify such a revolution.
Given that these sovereign diets will not efface themselves lightly, the wise course is to prepare for an orderly break-up of monetary union.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 17 July 2011

I have explained in detail to the Heads of State and Government and to the finance ministers,
on several occasions, that, if a country defaults, we will no longer be able to accept its defaulted government bonds as normal eligible collateral.
Trichet Handelsblatt

How to save the eurozone
No country can be expected to generate huge primary surpluses for long periods for the benefit of foreign creditors
Burdens on Greece, Ireland and Portugal comparable to the reparations’ burdens Keynes warned about in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
Lawrence Summers, Financial Times, 18 July 2011

How to save the eurozone
In short, the approach of lending more and more from the official sector to countries
that cannot access the market at premium rates of interest is unsustainable
Lawrence Summers, Financial Times, 18 July 2011

Italian public debt has been an accident waiting to happen
This is not because recent budgetary policy has been irresponsible.
Instead, it is because Italy has become trapped by two intractable problems
– a high public debt ratio of around 120 per cent of GDP; and a chronically weak rate of GDP growth,
due to its increasingly uncompetitive production sector.

Gavyn Davies, FT blog 17 July 2011

How to save the eurozone
Teaching investors a lesson is a wish not a policy.
US policymakers were applauded for about 12 hours for their willingness to let Lehman go bankrupt.
Lawrence Summers, Financial Times, 18 July 2011

A question (to which I don’t have the full answer):
Why are the interest rates on Italian and Japanese debt so different?
As of right now, 10-year Japanese bonds are yielding 1.09 %; 10-year Italian bonds 5.76 %
Paul Krugman, July 16, 2011

Trichet reiterated that the ECB will not accept as collateral bonds from a nation that defaults.
“Naturally the Europeans can manage the issue,”
“It is not a question of technique. It is a question of will and determination.”
Bloomberg 17 July 2011

Om unionen ska överleva på sikt krävs en bättre demokratisk förankring än i dag
Alltför länge har EU framför allt varit ett samarbete mellan ländernas regeringar.
Ministrarna och regeringscheferna åker till Bryssel för att förhandla och lösa gemensamma problem.
Men var finns folket, de politiska diskussionerna och den fria press som granskar det som sker?
Annika Ström Melin, Signerat Dagens Nyheters ledarsida, 16 juli 2011

The endgame for Europe is approaching — and much faster than anyone expected
Italy’s bond market turbulence means the EU faces an immediate decision:
political union or scrap the euro
Anatole Kaletsky, The Times, July 13 2011

Habsburg, SvD och Det första världskriget
- Den Europatanke som var så självklar för efterkrigstidens stora européer känns tyvärr i dag, i skuldkrisens och migrationsdebattens EU, som alltför avlägsen och svårgripbar.
- Robert Schumann, Jean Monet och Otto von Habsburg var alla djupt märkta av det förra århundradets långa kedja av katastrofer. Det skriver SvD i en välskriven ledare av Gustaf Almkvist i dag den 16 juli 2011.
Rolf Englund blog

Soon the euro zone may well have to expand the EFSF and allow it to issue jointly guaranteed “Eurobonds”.
It is not a pleasant option. But the alternative could be the end of the euro.
The Economist print editorial, July 14th 2011

What EU leaders once ruled out — a default by a euro-zone nation — has firmly entered the sphere of the possible
Top euro-zone politicians, engaged for months in a string of meetings that have failed to bring agreement on how to provide more aid to Greece, are trying furiously to stamp out the flames of contagion licking at Italy and Spain
Wall Street Journal 14 July 2011

In Europe, politicians are dealing with the legacy of a utopian project
which requires a degree of solidarity that their peoples do not feel.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 12 July 2011

Göran Persson: Vi går mot en europeisk federation
"Om vi vill behålla euron måste vi koordinera skattepolitiken i Europa.

Vi går mot en europeisk federation.
Det kanske ligger 30 år bort, men det är inte lång tid när vi talar om den här typen av stora förändringar"
Dagens Industri 14 juli 2011

Moody’s cuts Ireland to junk
The more politicians talk about private-sector participation for Greece,
the greater the risk of a downgrade for Ireland and Portugal.
Eurointelligence 13 July 2011

The eurozone might be on the verge of a fiscal cum financial crisis that destroys not just the solvency of important countries
but even the currency union and, at worst, much of the European project.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 12 July 2011

For Euro Zone, It's Euro Bonds or Else
Markets in Europe are being hit hard by fears that the debt crisis will spread to Italy,
which is regarded as too big to rescue. German media commentators say the time has come to
stop the piecemeal bailout efforts and to make the member states share liability for their debt
- via euro bonds

Der Spiegel 12 Juli 2011

Der Euro steht vor der ultimativen Zerreißprobe.
Falls sich die 17 Regierungschefs der Euroländer am Freitag treffen, geht es nur um eine Frage:
Überlebt unsere Einheitswährung?
Die ehrliche Antwort ist: Wir haben eigentlich keine Alternative!
Bildzeitung 12 Juli 2011

Europas ledare möts och pratar, men någon ordning på eurokrisen får de inte.
Röran på finansmarknaderna fortsätter och gäller inte bara Grekland.
Räntetrycket hårdnar även på Italien och Spanien.
DN-ledare signerad Gunnar Jonsson, 13 juli 2011

DN skriver och Svenska Dagbladet tiger om eurokrisen
Rolf Englund blog 13 juli 2011

Analysföretaget Gavekal skriver i ett marknadsbrev att ”den italienska stormen” hotar euroområdets grundvalar.
Med tanke påd en italienska obligationsmarknaden storlek (1.600 miljarder euro,
motsvarande 14.700 miljarder kronor) är det ett test EMU måste klara”, skriver Gavekal.

Viktor Munkhammar DI 13 juli 2011

Friday emergency summit meeting
The acknowledgement of a possible Greek default marks a potential turning point
It came after two days of meetings in Brussels, and against the fierce opposition of the ECB,
which fears that such an occurrence could unleash further turmoil in financial markets and spread contagion
Financial Times July 12, 2011 9:56 pm

A vicious circle at the heart of the eurozone
An excellent article, as so often by
John Plender, Financial Times 12 July 2011
Highly Recommended

Some of Europe's biggest banks are taking steps to shore up their defenses
should the debt crisis spiral out of control

and one or more countries leave the euro zone
Wall Street Journal 13 July 2011

The risk is that what started in Greece
could ultimately reach Portugal, then Spain and finally Italy
John Plender February 2 2010

Politicians cannot contemplate the alternative of sovereign default because
that would put the whole European banking system at risk.
John Plender, Financial Times 12 July 2011

UK and the euro:
Norman Lamont, David Marsh and Charles Kennedy
What was being said in the UK at the birth of the currency, and if the currency can survive
. BBC video 12 juli 2011

DN Special:
Kronan hade inte skuggan av en chans
Norman Lamont, "Yes, but we use common sense"
1996-11-01

Very funny, Do Read!
Debt Crisis Lost in Translation. Until Now
"Ministers reaffirmed their absolute commitment to safeguard financial stability in the euro area."
Means: Thanks for hanging around until midnight, but we really haven't got anything to tell you.
Silvia Wadhwa, CNBC Europe Reporter, 12 Jul 2011

Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan on UK role in euro bailout
BBC video 18 May 2011

German banks have launched a stinging attack on the imminent publication of highly detailed information about their holdings,
claiming these could worsen the sovereign debt crisis
Financial Times 11 July 2011

Not so tender trap
In extreme circumstances, a country can get into a “debt trap”,
in which the interest rate on its borrowings exceeds the growth rate of the economy.
Britain has the benefit, unlike Italy, of being outside the euro and
therefore is not locked into an inflexible monetary policy.
The Times editorial 12 July 2011

It seems that quite a number of observers have forgotten what Emu is, and what it is not.
Financial aid from other EU countries or institutions that amounted, directly or indirectly, to a bail-out would violate EU treaties and undermine the foundations of Emu.
Such principles do not allow for compromise.
Once Greece was helped, the dam would be broken. A bail-out for the country that broke the rules would make it impossible to deny aid to others.
Otmar Issing, February 15 2010

For the record
In the absence of a policy response, the eurozone’s financial system may implode within a few days.
Eurointelligence 12 July 2011

The good ship Eurotitanic might maneuver around the tiny ice cubes that are Greece and Portugal,
but it is headed straight toward two huge icebergs: Italy and Spain, the third and fourth largest euro-zone economies.
Irwin Stelzer,director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, WSJ 11 July 2011

A group of far-sighted statesmen, inspired by the vision of a United States of Europe, recognised that this ideal could be approached only gradually, by setting limited objectives, mobilising the political will needed to achieve them and concluding treaties that required states to surrender only as much sovereignty as they could bear politically.
That is how the postwar Coal and Steel Community was transformed into the EU – one step at a time, understanding that each step was incomplete and would require further steps in due course.
George Soros, Financial Times 11 July 2011

Griechenland könnte laut dem weltweit führenden Versicherungsmakler Aon ein Bürgerkrieg drohen.
Risiko für eine „Revolution, einen Staatsstreich oder einen Bürgerkrieg“ als „hoch“
Griechenland liegt damit gleichauf mit Algerien, Bahrain und Iran.
Schlechter sind nur Libyen, Ägypten und Somalia.
Bild-Zeitung 10 Juli 2011

"en viss default"
"Första tecknet på att Euro-gruppen kastar in handduken"
Banker kan tvingas betala för Greklandskrisen
Ekot 11 juli 2011

A spokesman for Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, denied that senior officials would discuss the state of Italy’s finances
But another official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said Italy would probably be on the agenda
New York Times 11 July 2011

Germany must now be willing either to buy or guarantee Spanish and Italian debt,
and in doing so to cross the Rubicon to fiscal and political union,
or accept that EMU must break up with calamitous consequences for German foreign policy.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 10 July 2011

Daniel Hannan
Eurosceptic MEP

EBU ett allt större hot - "The only solution is a eurozone bond"
Rolf Englund blog 11 juli 2011 i anledning av Wolfgang Münchau

Från EMU till EBU
"a comprehensive solution to the euro zone's financial and institutional weaknesses"
Rolf Englund blog 10 juli 2011

Financial Secretary to the Treasury Mark Hoban, MP and Jack Straw, a former foreign minister, about Greece and the euro
EU Observer 21 June 2011

Man undrar vad EU:s grundare, som var fast beslutna att få ett slut på det Europa där stormakterna bekrigade varandra i allt blodigare krig, skulle säga om dagens EU.
Unionen håller på att bli ett slags monster som växer okontrollerat i alla riktningar.
EU håller på att bli ett överhetsprojekt där en liten privilegierad elit berikar sig själv.
Carl Rudbeck, Sydsvenskan 27 juni 2011

EU är ett fantastiskt och unikt experiment med demokrati på en helt ny nivå.
Aldrig tidigare har det funnits en demokratisk union mellan enskilda stater och medborgare på detta vis.
Därför är det också av mycket stor betydelse för det europeiska samarbetet, och alla dess medborgare, att demokratin är en demokrati fullt ut.
Europaparlamentariker Olle Schmidt (FP), 7 juli 2011

Despite the brave efforts of their governments and people,
few serious economists now deny that Greece, Portugal and Ireland will, at some stage,
need a big reduction in the amount of debt they owe or a large cut in the interest rate that they have to pay.

The Times, editorial, 7 July 2011

The cost of insuring Italian debt rose sharply after the country’s trusted Finance Minister became linked to a corruption scandal
There would be huge repercussions if Italy was badly affected because its economy makes up 16.7 per cent of eurozone GDP, compared with 2.4 per cent by Greece and 1.8 per cent by Portugal.
The Times 9 July 2011

Det talas mycket om europeiskt samarbete. Men låt oss kalla saker vid deras rätta namn.
Den europeiska valutan och Europaparlamentet handlar om någonting annat. Drömmen är att fusionera.
Historiskt har demokratins institutioner byggts parallellt med nationalstaterna.
Det nya är att demokratin skall byggas vid sidan om, ovanför eller till och med i motsats till nationen.
Carl Hamilton i Aftonbladet 1999-06-10

Portugisiska och grekiska bönder vill helt enkelt inte att nogräknade tyskar och svenskar i demokratisk ordning reformerar, det vill säga lägger ned, deras jordbruk.
Carl Hamilton i Aftonbladet 1999-06-10

UniCredit plunged suddenly and investor concerns regarding Italy's sovereign debt and contagion risk escalated.
UniCredit shares were briefly suspended after dropping over 6%
WSJ 8 July 2011

Jean-Claude Trichet said European leaders have failed to grasp the importance of improving economic governance
The Parliament wants to introduce more automatic consequences against countries failing to address their deficits and debt.
Member states say they have negotiated as far as they can go and have submitted a proposal to Parliament for final approval.
Parliament refuses to accept the proposal as final.
WSJ 9 July 2011

EU genomför fördragsändring i smyg, med hjälp av Reinfeldt
Rolf Englund blog 8 juli 2011

Democratization Can't Save Europe
Democracy needs the kinds of conditions that do not exist in Europe today.
The Need for a Centralization of Power
Herfried Münkler, Der Spiegel 8 juli 2011

EU:s ledare har nu enats om huvuddragen i en krishanteringsmekanismen där euroländer som behöver stöd kan få lån
För att inrätta det nya systemet krävs en ändring i EU:s fördrag.
Att öppna för ändringar riskerar att utlösa nya krav på ändringar i andra delar av grundlagen.
Lösningen är att använda en förenklad procedur för ändringar och infoga två meningar i det gällande fördraget.
Det innebär inte att mer makt flyttas från EU-länderna till EU:s institutioner och därmed undviks nya, mångåriga diskussioner och folkomröstningar runt om i EU.
Riksdag och Departement

Toppmötet kommer vidare att besluta om en ändring av artikel 136 i fördraget i enlighet med det beslutsutkast som Europeiska rådet enades om i december – detta för att även fördraget ska bana väg för inrättande av ESM.
Statsminister Fredrik Reinfeldt, EU-nämnden, Onsdagen den 23 mars 2011

Exorcising Lehman Ghost
Hours before Moody’s raised Greece’s default risk to 50 percent
the ECB president gazed at the symbol of unity used by the Holy Roman Empire’s founder and 30 of his successors.
The next day, Trichet called for “historical perspective” when addressing the turmoil afflicting Europe’s common currency.
Bloomberg 8 July 2011

Trichet says leaders can’t repeat the mistakes made by U.S. officials when they let Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. fail.
“No credit event, no selective default, no default,” he said at a press conference in Frankfurt yesterday.
Bloomberg 8 July 2011

The ECB has a total exposure to the troubled economies in excess of 400 bn euro.
The capital and reserves of the European System of Central Banks is only 81 bn euro
Gavyn Davies, Financial Tmes July 7, 2011

The EU authorities are attempting to muzzle free opinion, threatening Fitch, Moody’s, and S&P with vague retribution
Currency unions switch exchange risk into default risk
Agencies totally failed to signal the inherent dangers of EMU a long time ago
They handed out AAAs like confetti
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 7 July 2011

Eventually, governments pursuing ever more austerity
with little or nothing to show for it throw in the towel.
WSJ 8 July 2011

The ECB’s worst nightmare
Queues outside banks
Gavyn Davies, Financial Tmes July 7, 2011

For Europe's elite, the idea of a country leaving the euro is anathema. And that will push them towards shouldering Greece's debt.
But that will only really be possible if the eurozone takes a giant leap towards economic union, and that can only be underpinned by a major shift towards political union.
Gavin Hewitt, BBC Europe editor, 5 July 2011

Jan Kees de Jager, the Dutch finance minister
wants to force participation of private bondholders, irrespective of what the rating agencies say.
“I think we have to accept that a voluntary contribution is unrealistic... If a mandatory contribution from the banks leads to a short-term and isolated rating event, that is not so bad, because Greece cannot go to the credit markets anyway now or in the near future.”
Eurointelligence 8 July 2011

Europe Should Learn From Uruguay
In the 1990s he headed the advisory committees of international banks that negotiated debt-restructuring agreements for Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay
Bill Rhodes, CNBC 7 Jul 2011

East Germany Was and Is Greece
More than 20 years later, the former East Germany is still an economic backwater, with unemployment rates double what they are in the west of the country.
WSJ blog July 7, 2011

Möte på torsdag mellan Frankrikes nye finansminister Francois Baroin och hans tyske kollega Wolfgang Schäuble
Målet är att en fjärdedel ska komma från privata eftergifter, men kreditvärderare har hittills sågat alla förslag.
Förutom grekiska banker är det främst tyska och franska banker som via obligationer i portföljen är exponerade mot den grekiska skuldkrisen.
DN/TT 7 juli 2011

Annie Johansson är den som Centerpartiet helst vill se som ny partiledare
Om drygt en vecka fyller Annie Johansson 28 år
Svenska Dagbladet 7 juli 2011

Wolfgang Schäuble, German finance minister, said a rethink was needed
as talks about “a quantifiable private-sector contribution... had produced no result”
Financal Times, 6 July 2011

Greece, Portugal and Ireland
Most economists, in fact, any serious observer of the situation,
says there will be no solution without a major reduction in the debt of the governments in trouble
The only question is whether private investors will bear the loss or European governments will
Stephanie Flanders, BBC Economics editor, 6 July 2011

Can Greece learn the economic lessons Argentina missed?
By Robert Plummer Business reporter, BBC News 28 June 2011

Greece, Ireland and Portugal
The rescues are failing
Financial Times editorial 6 July 2011

Moment of truth for the eurozone
Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 5 July, 2011

Nice, sort of, chart of Youth Unemployment
Sverige mellan Frankrike och Rumänien
The Economist 5 juli 2011

For a vision of how the Greek debt meltdown is going to end, look no further than the International Monetary Fund's post mortem into a similar crisis that came to a head almost exactly a decade ago - Lessons From The Crisis In Argentina.
Originally published in October 2003, this policy review document was signed off by a then relatively unknown IMF official called Tim Geithner, now the US Treasury Secretary no less.
Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph, 4 July 2011

Lessons from the Crisis in Argentina
Prepared by the Policy Development and Review Department
Approved by Timothy Geithner, October 8, 2003

S&P and Moody’s
"likely a default under our criteria", Moody’s "will only comment on a scheme, once it has been decided"
not a Brady bond. It is a rollover plan
Eurointelligence 5 July 2011

Grekland, Persson och Jens Henriksson
Det blir inte bättre av att det blir sämre
Rolf Englund blog 5 juli 2011

S&P said this morning a French plan to allow Greece to voluntarily change the terms on some of its debts when they come up for repayment would, "likely amount to a default under our criteria".
Daily Telegraph 4 July 2011

Skulle Grekland brännmärkas med "default" av S & P eller Fitch kan den grekiska skuldkrisen förvärras snabbt.
Bedömare befarar en akut likviditetskris på kreditmarknaden långt utanför Greklands gränser, som när Lehman Brothers gick omkull 2008
DI 4 juli 2011

Der Spiegel har blivit Europas ledande EMU-kritiker
Rolf Englund blog 4 juli 2011

Herman Van Rompuy lät till pilgrimsmusslorna cirkulera en flott broschyr på 14 sidor med bilder av Europeiska rådets nya högkvarter som skall stå färdigt om tre år.
Han vill kalla det ”Europa”.
Broschyren kostade knappt en miljon, bygget kostar drygt två miljarder kronor
Rolf Gustavsson, SvD 2 juli 2011

Within just five years, the Greeks want to cut spending by the equivalent of 17 percent of their total GDP in 2010.
Similar Measures Would Crush German Economy
Applying this to Germany would amount to a savings goal of €425 billion -
a gigantic sum that would mean the complete collapse of the German economy
Der Spiegel, 1 July 2011

The Greek rollover pact is like a toxic CDO
By Wolfgang Münchau, Financial Times 4 July 2011

This isn't just a mortgage or housing crisis.
At the center of this still-unfolding disaster is the collateralized debt obligation, or CDO.
Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, December 10, 2007

”Mordet på EU-expressen”
”Vem dödade Europa?” frågade historikern Neil Ferguson i Newsweek
Han jämförde spelet runt den kraschande euron vid en Agatha Christie-deckare
Katrine Kielos, ledare Aftonbladet 30 juni 2011

Greece and Portugal would recover more quickly if they left the euro, devalued,
and then made credit available for private sector led growth.
John Redwood, Telegraph, 3 July 2011

Greece’s austerity plan looks doomed to fail.
It does too little to prevent the epic folly of Greece’s railways and other ruinous schemes.
It will screw down too hard on ordinary Greeks, with new taxes, spending cuts and a rushed privatisation scheme.
And it will almost certainly condemn Greece to recession, strife and an eventual debt default.
The Economist print June 30th 2011

Grekisk stötesen
De 17 euroländernas finansministrar gav grönt ljus för den femte delutbetalningen av nödlånet till Grekland. En utbetalning på sammanlagt 12 miljarder euro, nästan 110 miljarder kronor.
Nu fortsätter arbetet med att skapa helt nytt stödpaket till landet, ett paket som troligtvis kommer att bli ungefär lika stort som det första på 110 miljarder euro eller cirka 1 000 miljarder kronor
Ekot 2 juli 2011

Specter of Years of Stagnating Wages Haunts the Globe
Median male real US earnings have not risen since 1975
Average real Japanese household incomes after taxation fell in the decade to mid-2000s
And those in Germany have been falling in the past 10 years.
Chris Giles, Financial Times, 28 Jun 2011, via CNBC

Grekland
Ett land i en sådan situation - välbekant för svenska politiker som överlevt sjuttiotalet - har två utvägar.
Den första är att devalvera, dvs sänka värdet av den egna valutan. Det innebär att korrigeringen tas upp i växelkursen. Exporten gynnas, importen fördyras.
Den andra är att ta korrigeringen i produktion och sysselsättning. BNP faller, arbetslösheten ökar.
Grekland hör inte hemma i eurozonen.
Nils-Eric Samdberg, Kristianstadsbladet 30 juni 2011

EU-momsen och 10 miljarder kr mer till EU ger kvinnokamp mellan Birgitta Ohlsson och Cecilia Malmström
Media 1 juli 2011

The plan seems to do too little to help Greece, and too much to help the banks.
The Economist print June 30th 2011

Jeffrey Sachs, Grekland och Persson
Inte ens Jeffrey Sachs har funnit den Holy Grail som skall få Grekland att, inom Euroland, återfå sin tillväxt utan D-ordet, Default.
Rolf Englund blog 1 juli 2011

Jeffrey Sachs och chockterapin i den fd monetära unionen Jugoslavien
"Professor Pelotard" blogkommentar 1 juli 2011

The difficulties facing the real economy, the contraction of bank credit in combination with ongoing capital flight and record unemployment, in particularly among young people, make Papandreou’s endeavors this week a herculean task. Greece’s social fabric and its economic stability are being challenged like never before since 1945.
Jens Bastian, Visiting Fellow for the Political Economy of Southeast Europe at St Antony’s College in Oxford, Eurointelligence 1 July 2011

Italien
Rome is expected on Thursday to approve an austerity drive worth up to 68 bn dollar in savings by 2014,
in a move aimed at reassuring the markets and its European partners on its fiscal discipline.
Financial Times 29 juni 2011

The EU must step toward fiscal and political union
Peter Mandelson, Financial Times, June 27, 2011

EU genomför fördragsändring i smyg
- Räddningsfonden (European Stability Mechanism, ESM) kräver en mindre ändring av EU:s fördrag.
Toppmötet i midsommarhelgen noterar att den fördragsändringen nu är färdig. Det skrev Mats Hallgren i SvD Näringsliv
Rolf Englund blog 30 juni 2011

Throughout the eurozone crisis the EU has insisted that Greece carry out the impossible in order to stave off the inevitable.
This approach cannot succeed indefinitely.
Lex, Financial Times, 29 June 2011

Stefan Fölster menar att en nedskrivning av Greklands skulder är oundviklig.
– Det är egentligen inte en Greklandskris utan en bankkris
Stefan Fölster intervjuad i Sv D Näringsliv 28 juni 2011

Det är en i Sverige vanlig uppfattning att det var Göran Perssons motsvarande nedskärningar som satte fart på den svenska ekonomin. Nedskärningarna räddade landet, tror många.
Det som satte fart på den svenska ekonomin var att kronan sjönk och dollarn steg när Carl Bildt hade gjort sitt misslyckande.
Rolf Englund blog 29 juni 2011

Were the Eurosceptics right?
Gavin Hewitt, BBC Europe editor, 22 June 2011

Man bör inte avfärda alternativet att landet lämnar valutasamarbetet.
Politisk prestige ska inte hålla kvar Grekland oavsett pris för landet eller eurozonen som helhet.
DN, huvudledare 30 juni 2011

"The euro is a very good thing and it's important that we keep it," he said. "It's good for the consumer and good for business." "The euro is fine.
It's not in crisis."
Joe Kaeser, chief financial officer of German industrial company Siemens AG

Eurobonds, bondage och Vägen till träldom enligt Hayek
Rolf Englund blog 23 juni 2011

Other countries have achieved the kind of permanent budgetary adjustment that the IMF is looking for in Greece,
but it is hard to find one that has done so without the benefit of a cheaper currency.

Stephanie Flanders, BBC Economics editor, 21 June 2011

The country owes about 325 billion euros and has an annual gross domestic product of about €225 billion.
Within two years, debt will rise to 160% of GDP, from 140% now, notes Lombard economist Charles Dumas.
Greece pays roughly 10% of GDP in interest costs alone and is staring at a likely third straight year of GDP contraction, says Dumas

A bondholder contribution was “always meant to be voluntary,” Merkel told a German Parliament committee today in Berlin.
She said no solution is possible without the support of the ECB, which warned that a compulsory role risked triggering Greek default and contagion.
Bloomberg 22 June, 2011

When an outcome is inevitable, it is necessary to plan for it.
A default is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for a return to economic health.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times 21 June 2011

The alleged case of a successful internal devaluation — that of Latvia
Could the Eurozone Break Up?
Possible Over a Five-Year Horizon

Nouriel Roubini via John Mauldin 18/6 2011

Satsa på en hästkur av samma kraft som Lettland!
Den Atenska smittan kan sprida sig och få förfärliga effekter
Från svensk horisont är det inte så mycket annat att göra än att hoppas
PJ Anders Linder, SvD 2 maj 2010

USA:s president och alla vi andra borde inte bekymra oss om Liran och Drachman
Rolf Englund blog 21 juni 2011

We are where we are because of the astounding arrogance and incompetence of the European political elite.
They cannot say they were not warned. Largely, but not exclusively, from this island, euro-sceptic economists waxed lyrical about the dangers of uniting so many disparate countries in a monetary union without real convergence or robust, common fiscal and political institutions.
They were vilified by the establishment, here and on the continent.
Roger Bootle, Daily Telegraph 20 June 2011

/Grekland skall/ sälja ut några statsägda bolag till privata intressenter, helst så många som ett stort bolag var tionde dag om kalkylen ska hålla.
På frågan om vad man då ska göra om Greklands parlament inte antar reformpaketet före månadsslutet, kunde Juncker inte svara, bara rycka på axlarna.
Teresa Küchler, SvD Näringsliv 21 juni 2011

Denmark’s central Governor Nils Bernstein has said he supports joining the currency.
“The next euro referendum shouldn’t be held until it’s clear that the answer will be yes, because otherwise it’ll be a long time before one can hold another vote on the matter,”
Bernstein said yesterday in an interview.
Bloomberg 21 June 2011

Dagens Nyheter och Svenska Dagbladet är pinsamma om EMU och Grekland
Rolf Englund blog 21 juni 2011

German Banks ask for state guarantees as a condition for private sector involvement
This is a quite a funny story.
The German banks are willing to share the pain for a second Greek rescue package but only it there are state guarantees,
Financial Times Deutschland reports, Eurointelligence 21 June 2011.

The real problem is political and cultural.
There is not a strong enough common political identity in Europe to support the single currency.
That is why German, Dutch and Finnish voters are revolting against the idea of bailing out Greece again – while Greeks riot against what they see as a new colonialism imposed from Brussels and Frankfurt.
Gideon Rachman, 20 June 2011

Recent public commitments stating the EU would ensure Greece remains solvent through next year were thought to be enough to secure the backing of the IMF
But amid continuing disagreement between eurozone countries over the terms of a new bail-out, IMF officials told the emergency gathering they needed firmer commitments before making the payment
Financial Times 20 June 2011

Germany's chancellor wants "a substantial contribution" from private creditors
who are due to be repaid some €64 billion by 2014.
If those creditors baulk but are nevertheless coerced into rolling over their loans, enter the credit agencies and the ECB, for both of whom a forced rollover is, dare we say it, a default.
Irwin Stelzer, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, WSJ 20 June 2011

- Man vill att det ska kallas frivilligt.
För om det inte vore frivilligt utlöses ett så kallat credit event, och det skulle få enorma konsekvenser,
säger Pär Magnusson, Royal Bank of Scotlands skandinaviske chefsanalytiker.
SvD Näringsliv 20 juni 2011

Why spend seven hours behind closed doors, only to decide to wait and see?
After seven gruelling hours in Luxembourg, which included a video conference with colleagues from G7 countries, the finance ministers of the 17 countries of the euro zone decided to delay until July the disbursement of €12 billion ($17 billion)
Charlemagne's notebook, The Economist June 20th 2011

Time for Plan B
How the Euro Became Europe's Greatest Threat
The currency union chains together economies that are simply incompatible.
SPIEGEL Staff 20 June 2011
Very Important Article

How can you revitalise Greece?
It hasn't really got any exports apart from olive oil and it
relied on a cheap currency in the past to encourage tourism
Andy Brough, fund manager at Schroders told CNBC. 20 June 2011

Threats are only worth making if those making the threats could actually carry them out
If this eurozone brinkmanship nudges the Greek parliament to reject the further budget squeeze, we'll be closer than is remotely prudent or sensible to a 1930s-style financial and economic disaster.
Robert Peston, BBC Business editor, 20 June 2011

Every intervention so far has pretended that the crisis is one of liquidity, which can be solved by making loans to the troubled banks and governments in question.
Since there has been no open admission of default or debt restructuring by any of the troubled nations, the banking sector has not been forced to write down debt and raise more capital.
Gavyn Davies, FT blog June 19, 2011

Fiffigheten är stor i Eurokrisen
I och med att det är likviditetsproblem, inte solvensproblem, kan bankerna och de andra kreditgivarna fortsätta att låtsas som om deras fordringar är OK och inte behöver skrivas ner.
Rolf Englund blog 20 juni 2011

Svenska Dagbladet, Nationalstaten, Kungen och Europas Förenta Stater
- I Sverige förekommer sällan något försvar för nationalstaten som koncept, annat än när man diskuterar ett tänkt Palestina eller Kurdistan.
Det skrev Svenska Dagbladet genom sin ledarskribent Per Gudmundson i dag den 19 juni 2011.
Rolf Englund blog

Nouriel Roubini has called this “fiscal union by stealth”.
Perhaps it is politically more feasible than a more open approach, because it is not sufficiently understood by the public,
Gavyn Davies, FT blog June 19, 2011

Eurokrisen:
När är en händelse som i Wien inte ett event?
Ett event som kan utlösa Credit Default Swaps?

Rolf Englund blog 19 juni 2011

Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the eurozone group of finance ministers said
Germany was "playing with fire" with a plan to involve private creditors in resolving the crisis.
His comments come as finance ministers prepare to meet in Luxembourg.
BBC 19 June 2011

The ratings agencies have all said this is almost certain to be considered a default.
Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy became the latest in a series of EU leaders to cite the so-called Vienna Initiative as a template for how private creditors might agree to roll over Greece’s debts.
The initiative was mainly a commitment by Western banks to keep capital in their subsidiaries in Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Latvia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and maintain loan volumes in those countries.
Wall Street Journal June 17, 2011

Could Greek default equal Lehman's bust?
Richard Quest explains if Greece defaults on its sovereign debt
CNN Video 17 June 2011

Det en grotesk idé att utse Christine Lagarde till ny IMF-chef
Hon är ju helt jävig! Eurozonen är i total kris och Frankrike och Tyskland måste finansiera en långvarig räddningsaktion delvis för att rädda sina egna banker.
Nils Lundgren 26:e maj 2011

Annie Johansson (C) ångrar ett politiskt beslut:
att hon röstade nej till att byta krona mot euro 2003.

Mars 2009, citerat på Rolf Englund blog 18 juni 2011

Baksidan av de massiva nedskärningarna är att ekonomin krymper,
vilket bara gör det svårare att betala skuldberget.

DN-ledare, signerad Gunnar Jonsson, 18 juni 2011

The bail-out strategy that rescued Europe’s peripheral economies is proving insufficient.
This threatens the whole project of European integration
The Economist print Jun 16th 2011

Tyskland och Frankrike har "funnit en lösning" i frågan om den privata sektorns deltagande i stödet för Grekland.
"Detta är ett genombrott" i frågan om obligationsinnehavarnas deltagande.
e24, 2011-06-17

Svenska Dagbladet åter i EMU-debatten!
Strukturreformerna är bra oavsett om de på sikt klarar av att blåsa tillräckligt liv i landet
Rolf Englund blog 17 juni 2011

Andes Borg å ena och å den andra sidan om eurokrisen
Ekot 17 juni 2011

French banks had the most exposure, at $65 billion
U.S. banks had total exposure of $41 billion to Greece by the end of 2010,
according to the latest figures, issued June 9, from BIS.
Market Watdch 16 June 2011

IMF has blinked in the battle over how - and when - to agree a second European rescue package for Greece.
It is now almost certain that Greece will get the official money it needs to stay above water a few more weeks
Stephanie Flanders, BBC Economics editor, 16 June 2011

June 19
“If the no confidence motion fails, the market reaction is just the beginning,” Charles Diebel, head of market strategy at Lloyds Bank Corporate Markets in London, wrote in a note.
“Then Armageddon scenarios come into play, which include default and potentially the whole contagion scenario plays out.”
Papandreou said he would announce his new lineup today and then call the confidence vote. Such debates typically take three days with the ballot at midnight,
making the vote likely on the evening of June 19
Bloomberg 16 June 2011

De stora pojkarna, stats- och regeringscheferna i Europeiska Rådet, Europeiska Unionens motsvarighet till Sovjetunionens Politbyrå, skall träffas den 23-24 juni. Men
deras finansministrar skall nu åter träffas den 19 juni,
en dag tidigare än planerat, förmodligen är tanken att de då skall ställa sig bakom Den Fransk-Tyska lösningen.
Rolf Englund blog 15 Juni 2011

Om en folkomröstning om euron hade hållits i maj i år skulle cirka
64 procent av svenskarna ha röstat nej och bara 24 procent skulle ha röstat ja.
Cirka 12 procent uppger att de är osäkra, enligt SCB
SvD 15 juni 2011

EU:s räddningsfond för krisländer måste byggas ut kraftigt. Det säger nu Nout Wellink, styrelseledamot i ECB.
EU:s kommande permanenta räddningsfond är tänkt att innehålla 750 miljarder euro, nästan 7 000 miljarder svenska kronor,
men Nout Wellink säger nu att fonden bör dubbleras, upp till 1 500 miljarder euro, eller runt 14 000 miljarder kr.
Ekot 16 juni 2011

The humiliation of Greece
Some say that Greece has become a protectorate of the EU.
Certainly the intervention from outside in Greece's internal affairs is unprecedented. The Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, flies off to meetings to learn the terms of his surrender.
Gavin Hewitt, BBC Europe editor 15 June 2011

The Nonsense of purely voluntary Bail-ins
Nouriel Roubini Eurointelligence 16 June 2011

The outcome will be a purely voluntary rescheduling,
which is a euphemism for “no rescheduling”,
as nobody in their right mind would voluntarily take up any exchange offer, and to the extent they do, the rating agencies, and everybody else, will conclude that they have been forced.
Eurointelligence 15 June 2011

The central problem is a standoff between bailout-shy politicians and instability-fearing central bankers.
The assumption has been that they would come to their senses and make a deal to forestall catastrophe.
But their little game of chicken souvlaki now threatens to jolt Europe and perhaps the world with a new financial disaster.

CNN 15 June 2011

European finance ministers will hold an emergency meeting on Tuesday in an effort to narrow differences over a €172bn ($247bn) rescue package for Greece.
FT 13 June 2011

Trichet vilseleder om EMU och USA
Rolf Englund blog 14 juni 2011

Without mentioning Greece directly, Ms. Merkel said
"we simply mustn't permit the uncontrolled default of a country."
Ms. Merkel compared the situation to the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
The repetition of "such a thing absolutely needs to be avoided," she warned.
Wall Street Journal 11 June 2011

"lack of discipline in countries such as Greece and Portugal was matched only by the build-up of asset bubbles in others like Spain and Ireland"
The muddle-through approach to the eurozone crisis has failed to resolve the fundamental problems of economic and competitiveness divergence within the union.
If this continues the euro will move towards disorderly debt workouts,
and eventually a break-up of the monetary union itself, as some of the weaker members crash out.

Nouriel Roubini, Financial Times 13 June 2011

Dagens Nyheters halvkvädna visa om Greklands skulder
Rolf Englund blog 11 juni 2011

"serious consequences"
Finance Minister Schäuble warned of the consequences of a Greek default.
"The situation in Greece, and hence in Europe, is serious," he said. He insisted on the importance of securing the next round of aid payments for Greece, worth €12 billion ($17.4 billion), which is due at the start of July.
"If this tranche is not paid out, there is an acute danger of a Greek insolvency, with serious consequences for the stability of the whole euro zone," he said.
Der Spiegel 10 June 2011

WarGames: Chicken-Race mellan Berlin och Frankfurt
“The central bank equivalent of nuclear deterrence: defy us and we will blow up the world”
Rolf Englund blog 10 juni 2011

Eurokrisen är alltså över? Fel.
Skulderna måste skrivas ned. Det är bättre att göra det
medan det finns några privata investerare kvar att dela notan med

DN-ledare 11 juni 2011

“We have to insist on the participation of the private sector,”
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told lawmakers in Berlin today,
ignoring warnings from credit-rating firms that his proposal to extend Greek debt maturities by seven years
would be deemed a default.
A working group set up this week is charged with indentifying
“a good solution for the involvement of the private sector that can and has to be supported by the European Central Bank,” he said.
Bloomberg, 10 June 2011

"There is no need for private-sector involvement," ECB executive board member Jürgen Stark told reporters
"I see it only as a political issue for political reasons, not for economic reasons."
Mr. Stark's opposition to any Greek debt restructuring echoed the position staked out by ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet
But Mr. Stark's remarks were more blunt, and suggested the ECB's antirestructuring position is so entrenched
that it can't compromise without seriously eroding its credibility.
Wall Street Journal 10 June 2011

When the European politicians who are managing the sovereign debt crisis bailed out Greece, Ireland and Portugal
they did not merely do something that exceeded their powers, they violated an explicit prohibition on such bail-outs.
Jamie Whyte, Financial Times, 8 June 2011

The German constitutional court in Karlsruhe said it would hold a hearing on challenges to last year’s Greece rescue package on July 5.
Financial Times 9 June 2011

New York Times dömer ut försöken att "vinna tid" genom nya pålagor på det grekiska folket
Rolf Englund blog 7 juni 2011

IMF's statutes stipulate that the organization can only lend a country money if it is certain that the state will be able to meet its payment obligations for the next 12 months.
The new report has now made it clear that Greece is not in a position to guarantee that, meaning that the IMF cannot transfer any more money
"The next disbursement cannot take place before this underfinancing is resolved," the report concludes.
This in turn means that Europe will have to come up with a new rescue package. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble estimates that Greece will need €90 billion /drygt 800 miljarder kronor/ to cover its funding needs between 2012 and 2014
Der Spiegel, 9 June 2011

European banks had $188 billion at risk from the government debt of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain
at the end of 2010, according to a report this week from the Bank for International Settlements.
European lenders held $52.3 billion in Greek sovereign debt, with German banks owning the biggest share
Bloomberg 7 juni 2011

ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet yesterday gave his first signal endorsing measures to encourage investors to buy new Greek bonds to replace maturing securities.
While Trichet said he’s against imposing losses on creditors, he indicated he’d approve of financial institutions maintaining their level of outstanding credit.
“That is not a default,” he said
“That is something the ECB would consider appropriate.”
Bloomberg 7 juni 2011

ECB has a total exposure of about 444 bn euros to 'struggling eurozone economies'
The bank is now "23 to 24 times levered" as a result of bailing out Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain.
Open Europe, 6 June 2011

Frankfurter Allgemeine;
Deutsche Banken bangen mit Griechenland

The irony of all this is that Germany would take the biggest hit if there was the private sector participation that Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble are always asking for.
Eurointelligence 7 June 2011

Ingredients of a European political union
The European Council will probably step back from the brink at its meeting on June 23-24, agreeing a new loan for Greece.
The alternative is a messy, disorderly Greek default in July.
And then they will have to do it again for Ireland, and for Portugal.
By 2014, the vast majority of Greek, Irish and Portuguese debt will be guaranteed by the other member states. What then?
Wolfgang Münchau, FT, June 5 2011

The global fallout of a eurozone collapse
Kenneth Rogoff, Financial Times 6 June 2011

Fy skam, fy skam, för ingen ville ha den
Rolf Englund blog i anledning av Rolf Gustavsson och invasionen i Normandie den 6 juni

Genom finanskrisen håller EU på att få den förstärkta ekonomiska samordning som politikerna avvisade vid toppmötet i Maastricht för tjugo år sedan.
Dagens generation politiska ledare kan tvingas ta sådana steg – för att rädda den gemensamma valutan.
Den förstärkta politiska sammanhållningen kan komma bakvägen, trots att ingen verkar vilja ha den.
Rolf Gustavsson, SvD 5 juni 2011

Delstaterna, eller förbundsländer som de heter i Tyskland, har en hög grad av självständighet. När det gäller att driva in skatter är de visserligen bakbundna av federala regler.
Däremot har det varit fritt fram att låna pengar. Det har de också gjort i enorm skala det senaste decenniet.
Flera av de tyska delstaterna är lika stora låntagare som några av Europas länder.
Ännu mer bekymmersamt för Angela Merkel är de tyska bankerna.
Andreas Cervenka, SvD Näringsliv 5 juni 2011

Today the French government is working overtime to make sure that a Sarkozy loyalist, the leader of his economic team — Finance Minister Christine Lagarde — becomes the next managing director.
Why do France and other euro-zone countries now care so much about who runs the I.M.F.?
Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the IMF, New York Times June 2, 2011

Om euron kollapsar
Marianne Björklund, DN, 4 juni 2011

Merkel följer folkets vilja
Kärnkraften har ingen framtid
Aftonbladet ledare, signerad Katrine Kielos, 2011-05-31

What happens when Greece defaults. Here are a few things:
Andrew Lilico, Daily Telegraph, May 20th, 2011

Pengarna "till Grekland" går till bankerna
Rolf Englund blog 4 juni 2011

Jag vill understryka att detta inte på något vis kan sägas vara någon ensidigt portugisisk lättsinnighet.
Kreditgivarna – främst tyska och franska banker – var lika glada att få låna ut som portugiserna var att få låna.
Klas Eklund i SEB-rapport 27 maj 2011

Gavin Hewitt, Europe editor, BBC, om Trichet:
In his vision, the crisis in the eurozone is an opportunity for a great leap forward towards ever closer union
Rolf Englund blog 3 juni 2011

The eurozone, as designed, has failed.
It was based on a set of principles that have proved unworkable at the first contact with a financial and fiscal crisis.
It has only two options: to go forwards towards a closer union or backwards towards at least partial dissolution. This is what is at stake.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 31 May 2011

“There is no crisis of the euro,” Mr Trichet declared
Speaking in Aachen, Germany, Mr Trichet called for a European Union that would be “a confederation of sovereign states of an entirely new type”.
FT 2nd June 2011

Säga vad man vill om Göran Persson, men få kan som han fånga ett auditorium. Och så är det fortfarande.
Solbränd, avspänd och med en och annan sedvanligt bitsk släng levererade den förre statsministern funderingar kring rapporten ”Makten i Europa”
Annika Ström Melin, Signerat, DN 1 juni 2011

Trichet, Karl den Store och Göran Persson hos SNS
Rolf Englund blog 2 juni 2011

Jean-Claude Trichet is apoplectic at the loose talk of debt restructuring.
The ECB’s president fully appreciates the real risks of contagion from a Greek debt restructuring to the rest of the periphery.
He also knows that all too much of the cumulative $1,000bn in sovereign debt of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal sits on the French and German banks’ balance sheets.
Desmond Lachmann, Financial Times May 30 2011

He also favors giving the European Union powers to veto the budget measures of countries
Trichet said governments should consider setting up a finance ministry for the 17-nation euro region
“Would it be too bold, in the economic field, with a single market, a single currency and a single central bank, to envisage a ministry of finance of the union?”
Trichet said in a speech today in Aachen, Germany.
Bloomberg 2 june 2011

While Europe is preoccupied with a possible restructuring of Greece's debt, huge risks lurk elsewhere
-- in the balance sheet of the European Central Bank.
The guardian of the single currency has taken on billions of euros worth of risky securities as collateral for loans to shore up the banks of struggling nations.
Der Spiegel 24/5 2011 with good links

Fast i skuldfällan - Grekland stramar åt men inget hjälper
EU:s och IMF:s krisrecept har prövats i ett år, men medicinen verkar inte.
DN-ledare 30 maj 2011

Officials warned, however, that almost every element of the new package faced significant opposition from at least one of the governments and institutions involved in the current negotiations and a deal could still unravel.
In addition, the European Central Bank remains opposed to any restructuring of Greek debt that could be considered a “credit event” – a change in terms that could technically be ruled a default.
Financial Times May 29 2011

Snaran dras åt kring Grekland
Grekland allt närmare utländsk tvångsförvaltning
Europeiska ledare förhandlar om ett avtal som kommer att innebära en oöverträffad intervention i Grekland ekonomi, med utländskt inflytande över skattepolitiken och privatiseringar i utbyte mot nya nödlån
DI 30 maj 2011

Co-Founder Of Reaganomics, Paul Craig Roberts:
"There Is Probably More Democracy In China Than There Is In The West"
not in Greece, not in Ireland, not in the UK, not here, the outcomes are always to punish the innocent and reward the guilty.
Youtube via Zerohedge 23 May 2011

Today, 30 May 2011, I claim to have invented the phrase
The Monnetanisation of Europe
Rolf Englund

Varför ingen har skrivit en avslöjande insiderskildring från Ja till euro-kampanjen 2003,
måste vara ett av de största mysterierna i svensk politik.

Katrine Kielos, Fokus, 27 maj 2011

Continental Drift
What is next for the Euro and for Europe?
BBC World Service Radio

Greek leaders meeting in Athens have failed to agree
on Prime Minister George Papandreou's new austerity plan.

Conservative leader Antonis Samaras rejected the measures,
saying they would "flatten the Greek economy and destroy Greek society".
BBC 27 May 2011

Grekland står nu på randen till statsbankrutt.
Detta efter att ledarna för landets politiska partier i dag har misslyckats att enas
om åtgärder för att lösa den akuta ekonomiska krisen.
Ekot 27 maj 2011

After the creation of the euro in 1999, European nations that had previously been considered risky, and that therefore faced limits on the amount they could borrow, began experiencing huge inflows of capital.
After all, investors apparently thought, Greece/Portugal/Ireland/Spain were members of a European monetary union, so what could go wrong?
Paul Krugman, New York Times, 22 May 2011

It’s now clear that Greece, Ireland and Portugal can’t and won’t repay their debts in full, although Spain might manage to tough it out
Paul Krugman, New York Times, 22 May 2011

Eurogroup’s Jean-Claude Juncker has just lobbed this hand grenade into the market place
IMF will only release the next tranche of its funding for Greece if the source of Greece’s funding needs over the next twelve months is clear. Which it isn’t.
Neil Hume, FT Alphaville May 26 2011

The first thing Silvia Huelves was told when she started studying architecture was that she should take up Chinese or Japanese - she was never going to build anything in Spain any time soon.
It wasn't criticism of her skills but a reflection on the state of the country, where the jobless rate among 16-24-year-olds is a staggering 45 percent and a construction sector slump caused nearly two years of recession.
CNBC 27 May 2011

"Eurokrisen ökar klyftan mellan folk och eliter"
Lissabonfördraget innebar ännu ett steg mot mer EU, som stora opinioner inte önskade sig
SvD-ledare 25 maj 2011

I dagens SvD skriver Claes Arvidsson om krisen i eurozonen och vrider händerna i ångest
I förbigående säger Arvidsson att det inte går att skylla på euron.
Ett sådant påstående är politiskt korrekt och anses därför inte behöva analyseras och ledas i bevis av ledarskribenter.
Och visst är det politiskt korrekt. Problemet är att det är ekonomiskt och statsvetenskapligt inkorrekt.
Nils Lundgren på ain blog "My correct views on everything", 25 maj 2011

The German constitutional court has almost no other choice than to rule that EU law was violated.
After all it was Christine Lagarde who told the Wall Street Journal recently.
“We have violated all rules of law because we agreed that we really wanted to save the eurozone.”
Eurointelligence 24 May 2011

Tusentals greker i fredlig protest mot sparplaner
De kom från alla håll och kanter till Syntagmatorget och ställde sig framför det grekiska parlamentet i Aten. Unga, gamla, föräldrar med barn i barnvagn och på axlarna.
Kravallpolisen var där som vanligt. Fullt utrustad med gasmaskerna på. Beredda att använda tårgas vilken sekund som helst på nytt. Men efter en halvtimma tog de av sig maskerna.
Ekot 26 maj 2011

Det allmänna stödet för EU förblev intakt, även om stödet för euron störtdök, utropar Sieps som en regeringens Bagdad Bob
Sieps var en gång en förhållandevis aktad organisation med viss akademisk prägel
Nu är budskapen mer i Gunnar Hökmarks anda
Rolf Englund blog 25 maj 2011

EU bör kunna dra tillbaka visumfriheten för medborgare i vissa länder om det plötsligt kommer många migranter därifrån.
Det här säger i dag EU:s ansvariga kommissionär Cecilia Malmström,

som anser att tusentals personer från Serbien och Makedonien har missbrukat EU:s visumfrihet
Ekot 24 maj 2011

“Events in Greece have brought the euro area to a crossroads:
the future character of European monetary union will be determined by the way in which this situation is handled.”

Jens Weidmann, Bundesbank president and European Central Bank governing council member, Hamburg, 20 May, 2011
Financial Times, Ralph Atkins, May 24 2011 22:35

Concluding remarks at the Banque de France / Deutsche Bundesbank Spring Conference on “Fiscal and Monetary Policy Challenges in the Short and Long Run”
Dr Jens Weidmann, President of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Hamburg 20 May 2011

Greklands regering antog ett nytt paket med utgiftsnedskärningar och försäljningar av statlig egendom
Regeringen söker nu rådgivare för försäljning av statens andelar i Hellenic Telecommunication, Public Power Corp och ett flertal ytterligare företag.
Dagens Industri 24 maj 2011

The Spanish people have finally found their voice. For over a week they have been occupying squares across the country to protest at unemployment. For 16- to 24-year-olds, 43% are without work.
What unites the protesters is a desire for a change, a sense that the "establishment has failed an entire generation". Having taken to the streets they might not accept further austerity if it was needed.
So Spain is once again troubling markets and officials. A weak government is caught between needing to enforce spending cuts and protesters demanding work.
Gavin Hewitt, Europe editor, BBC, 23 May 2011

The one person at the summit to speak positively about the euro's prospects isn't even in it – Sweden's pony-tailed finance minister Anders Borg
He'd like to join, he said, but recognised the likely cost to Sweden of full participation in the bail-out fund – some 6pc of GDP – makes it a political impossibility.
Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph, 23 May 2011

Merkel’s Christian Democrats shellshocked after Bremen elections
A disaster for Angela Merkel’s CDU. Coming in third behind the Greens is traumatic for the Christian Democrats
Eurointelligence 24 May 2011

Den europeiska byråkrati som Menasse imponeras av och som Enzensberger gisslar i EU-kommissionen har under senare år blivit allt mer förvaltande och allt mindre av den pådrivande motor som hyllas i retoriken.
Detta försvårar lösningen på den problematik som både Menasse och Enzensberger brottas med, nämligen den europeiska demokratiska kontrollen.
Rolf Gustavsson, SvD 21 maj 2011

Makten i Europa
Presentation av Demokratirådets rapport SNS 2011
Göran Persson och Birgitta Ohlsson kommenterar

SNS Tisdagen den 31 maj klockan 09.00-12.00. Jakobsbergsgatan 18

Tiotusentals spanjorer trotsade natten till lördagen demonstrationsförbudet och fortsatte att protestera mot åtstramningar, arbetslöshet och korruption.
Runt om på torg i de stora städerna har människor slagit läger för att kräva förändring.
SvD 21 maj 2011

Spanish protests in pictures
BBC and Youtube

Greklands regering kommer inom de närmaste dagarna att annonsera åtgärder för att
minska budgetunderskottet med mer än 6 miljarder euro /SEK 54 miljarder/
e24 2011-05-18

Rolf Gustavsson får Publicistklubbens stora pris
9 maj 2011

SOM-institutet har funnit att svenska folkets stöd för EU-medlemskapet är rekordhögt (53%), medan stödet för euron har rasat till den lägst nivån någonsin.
17 maj 2011

ECB har, det senaste året, köpt grekiska statsobligationer för 404 miljarder kronor
Rolf Englund blog 19 maj 2011

The confusing debate about “reprofiling” or soft restructuring pays testimony to the sheer incompetence of eurozone’s finance ministers,
who are now effectively talking Greece into a damaging, and most likely contagious default.

The FT reports that Jean-Claude Trichet walked out of a recent meeting chaired by Jean-Claude Juncker in protest.
FT Deutschland reports this morning that Trichet told finance ministers on Monday night that the ECB would respond to a reprofiling by refusing to buy any new Greek debt instruments (meaning it will not be part of any voluntary arrangement in respect of its own Greek debt portfolio).
Furthermore, the ECB would refuse to supply the Greek banking system with any further liquidity.
Eurointelligence 19 May 2011

The total cost to taxpayers in Germany and other creditor countries of supporting Greece, Ireland and Portugal will be much higher than seemed likely last year
because last year’s bailout funds were largely spent on repaying private lenders to these countries and their insolvent banks.
Anatole Kaletsky, The Times 11 May 2011

The ECB, which has bought about €45bn /SEK 404 miljarder/ of Greek bonds over the past year,
believes that eurozone governments should provide further loans
if Greece requires additional help.
Financial Times 18 May 2011

The eurozone's crisis in BBC graphics: Click here

A Eurostate or bust
The bailouts don’t work but they do allow the EU to build up centralised power at the expense of nation states
Anatole Kaletsky, The Times 11 May 2011

The underlying economics of the /Euro/crises are clear
During the boom years, a number of countries were able to borrow more and on more favourable terms than ever before. They, then, ran huge current account deficits.
The latter turned out to be the leading indicator of future crises, not fiscal deficits, as Germany’s mistaken conventional wisdom would have it.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times 18 May 2011

The problem with the strategy of imposing the burden on taxpayers in borrowing countries is that it is unlikely to work.
As an ever greater proportion of the financing ends up with official sources, the latter are likely to end up bearing politically explosive costs when debts are written off.
Martin Wolf, Financial Times 18 May 2011

Modiga Malmström
När Cecilia Malmström i går presenterade kommissionens nya meddelande om ”bättre styrning av migrationen till EU” såg hon stridslysten ut och rösten var stadig. Malmström ger Italien och Frankrike rätt på en punkt. Hon anser att länder i det passfria Schengenområdet ska kunna återinföra gränskontroller vid avgränsade och mycket speciella tillfällen.
DN-ledare 5/5 2011

These days, merely saying that the European idea transformed a war-torn continent into an island of freedom and stability would seem rather quaint to most.
Now the issue is whether Europe can even be prevented from becoming a transfer union
In many countries, Europe is no longer seen as a historic stroke of luck. Instead, we ask ourselves how we can protect our countries from African refugees and - depending on our various perspectives - from supposedly greedy southern countries or the overbearing Germans.
Ralf Neukirch, Der Siegel 12/5 2011

Richard Swartz om en union utan gemensamma värden
i Bryssel talas ju ideligen – och högtidligt – om gemensamma värden och identitet. Men vad betyder det konkret? I verkligheten mycket litet: för den ene är staten en trygg försörjare, för den andre ett hot, här skatter utslag av solidaritet, där av konfiskering och något som bör undvikas, för några är arbete livets mening, för andra dess kvarnsten. Och så vidare. Och alla måste vi passa till formeln ”europé” för att EU ska kunna fungera.
DN 2011-05-14

Greece
No country save Britain at the height of its empire has ever recovered from a debt-to-GDP ratio of over 150% without a default. None.
And the reason is simple arithmetic. Even a nominal interest rate of 6% means that it takes 10% of your national income just to pay the interest.
Not 10% of tax revenues, mind you; 10% of your total domestic production.

That is a huge burden on any country. It sucks up half your tax revenues (or more), leaving not enough to pay for ordinary government services like police, defense, education, pensions, health care, etc.
John Mauldin 14/5 2011

Om Grekland ställer in betalningarna, alternativt skriver ned värdet på sina utestående lån,
kommer den största förlusten att drabba Europeiska centralbanken.
ECB, har blivit Greklands enskilt största fordringsägare.
Gunnar Örn, Dagens Industri Papper, 12 maj 2011

Euroländernas del av det lån på 110 miljarder euro som förhandlades fram förra våren ligger på 80 miljarder euro.
Pengarna betalas ut kvartalsvis och hittills har Grekland kunnat kvittera ut 38,4 miljarder.
På den summan betalar grekerna ränta.
SvD/e24 16/5 2011

Grekland har ingen chans att klara sig undan en omstrukturering av sina skulder.
Då är lika bra att använda pengarna till att rädda de tyska bankerna som är engagerade i Grekland med 40 miljarder euro, anser Schäffler.Frank Schäffler, FDP, medlem i parlamentets finansutskott
Tomas Lundin, SvD Näringsliv 13 maj 2011

Läget i Grekland blir allt allvarligare. Ekonomin skenar och missnöjet bland människor växer.
Vilka politiska konsekvenser får den ekonomiska krisen i Grekland? Giorgios Logothetis är författare och journalist och före detta borgmästare på Lefkas, nu på besök i Sverige.
Vår korrespondent Vladislav Savic rapporterar från gatorna i Aten
Ekot 11/5 2011

Hans Werner Sinn, chef för det ansedda IFO-institutet. I helgen aktualiserade den ansedda ekonomen alternativet att Grekland lämnar eurozonen.
Alternativet, att Grekland försöker bli mer konkurrenskraftigt inom eurozonen, riskerar att leda till inbördeskrig.
Ekot 10 maj 2011

The eurozone’s journey to defaults
Martin Wolf, Financial Times, May 10 2011

“I was told to say there was no meeting... We had certain necessities to consider”
Guy Schuller, spokesman for Jean-Claude Juncker, admitted yesterday to lying about the secret meeting of finance ministers on Friday.
Wolfgang Münchau no longer believed any statement by any EU officials in respect of this crisis.
We are in the stage of the crisis where officials are lying all the time.
Eurointelligence 10/5 2011

Skrattar bäst som skrattar först om Grekland
Rolf Englund blog 10/5 2011

Ett EU som innefattar också ett demokratiskt Turkiet kommer att vara en starkare och bättre union.
Det skriver ministrarna Carl Bildt och Birgitta Ohlsson gemensamt på Europadagen.
SvD Brännpunkt 9 maj 2011

Den som vill göra EU till ett nytt romerskt rike bör först fråga folket
Rolf Englund blog 9 maj 2011

Sources with information about the government's actions have informed SPIEGEL ONLINE that
Athens is considering withdrawing from the euro zone
Der Spiegel Onlina 6/5 2011

I det tysta fortsätter den europeiska integrationen.
Och under det senaste året har det gått fort. För närvarande slutförhandlas ett helt paket av lagar och andra bestämmelser
som sammantaget liknar ett skelett för gemensam ekonomisk politik i EU.
Allt ska vara klappat och klart i juni.
Samtidigt som den europeiska populismen går framåt tas det alltså ett par ordentliga kliv framåt på väg mot en politiskt alltmer sammansvetsad union.
Gapet mellan retoriken och det som sker i verkligheten vidgas – vilket utgör ett växande problem.
DN-ledare 9 maj 2011

Europe is running a giant Ponzi scheme
The writer was governor of Argentina’s central bank and director of the Centre for Central Banking Studies at the Bank of England
Financial Times 5/5 2011
Vem kan vara mer kvalificerad?
Länk via Rolf Englund blog 2011-05-06

Europe’s political elites are afraid to tell a truth that economic historians have known forever: that a monetary union without a political union is simply not viable. This is not a debt crisis. This is a political crisis.
The eurozone will soon face the choice between an unimaginable step forward to political union or an equally unimaginable step back.
Wolfgang Münchau, Financial Times, May 8 2011

De nödlån som nu ges till Grekland, Irland och senast Portugal av IMF, ECB och EU-kommissionen ger ett visst andrum
Man får väl utgå ifrån att dessa nödlån inte hade givits om inte de tre institutionerna gjort analyser som visar att det faktiskt är möjligt att ta sig ur krisen.
Mats Hallgren, SvD Näringsliv 5 maj 2011

Martin Wolf argues that the eurozone faces a choice between permanent pro-cyclical adjustments, a break-up; or closer union
Financial Times 3/5 2011

Martin Wolf sätter EMU och folkstyret på sin spets - Skall vi uppge vår suveränitet och bli likt provinser i det forna romar-riket.
Rolf Englund blog 4/5 2011

Den europeiska efterkrigshistorien kan beskrivas som Frankrikes – alltmer fåfänga – ansträngningar att förhindra ett Europa dominerat av Tyskland, en utveckling det totala tyska nederlaget 1945 bara tillfälligt satte stopp för.
Men den tyska återföreningen var ett hårt slag för den franska strategin. I sista ögonblicket lyckades man ändå kapa tyskarnas D-mark och ersätta den med euron. Nu står den på spel.
Richard Swartz, DN 30/4 2011
RE: Mycket viktig, lysande, artikel.

Greece - A year after agreeing a €110bn European Union and IMF bail-out and economic reform plan, times are hard.
Each evening, as darkness descends on Athens, police in riot gear wait in buses that line the side streets of the city centre. Some fidget with mobile phones, others stare into the night. What they are waiting for, nobody is sure. But everyone in the Greek capital agrees something could happen any time.
FT May 1 2011

Greece budget deficit worse than thought
The Greek government has brought in a string of draconian spending cuts and tax rises
Greece's two-year cost of borrowing rose further in bond markets to more than 23 procent
BBC 26 April 2011

SNS, Pagrotsky och Greklands återhämtning
Sedan kommer vändningen, i Sardelius (tidigare Greklands Bo Lundgren) diagram. - Men vad är det som får BNP att vända upp, trots åtstramningarna, vid fast växelkurs, frågade jag från golvet.
Sardelius svarade att det var genom utbudspolitiken, borttagande av onödig byråkrati mm. Jag skrattade. - Skrattar Du, sade Sardelius. Ja, sade jag. Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-28

In May 1931, a Viennese bank named Credit-Anstalt failed.
it occurred in a small, peripheral country, just as today's worst problems are concentrated
so far in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal
Bloomberg Businessweek's Economics editor Peter Coy, April 20, 2011

Martin Wolf refers me /Clive Crook/ to this new paper by Paul De Grauwe,
The Governance of a Fragile Europe.

It very well argued and, I /Clive Crook/ think, entirely convincing.
FT 2011-04-22
RE: With names like that it is not necessary to point out that the article is Highly Recommended

In a front page editorial with the title „Warning shot from the North-East“ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger warns against stigmatizing the True Finns as populist rightists.
“Whoever tries to put those parties which capitalize from this disgruntlement in the same corner as demagogues should remember that even the federal government (of Germany) said until recently that
the interdiction to bail out other countries was nonnegotiable.”
Eurointelligence 19/4 2011

For all Germany’s fear of becoming locked into permanent support for the Irish and others,
the irony is that it is already providing involuntary ‘bailouts’ via the eurosystem that carry similar risks.
In the Irish case, this is both larger than the EFSF bailout , €146bn as against €67bn,
and much cheaper, 1% interest as against 5.8 %.
John Whittaker, Eurointelligence 7/4 2011

Islands nej kan också få Grekland och Portugal att inse att IMF- och euroländernas krav för att stå för sina lånelöften är en plågsam vandring till ett utblottat Ebberöd.
(Skuldavskrivning är med all sannolikhet den enda rimliga vägen om de ska kunna komma på fötter.)
Men framför allt kan det få den ekonomiskt lerfotade kolossen Spanien att inse att landet vare sig kan eller bör hålla sitt banksystem under armarna om eller snarare när det börjar rämna.
Per Lindvall, e24, 13/4 2011

Auftritt der Anti-Euro-Krieger
Finnlands Rechtsaußen Timo Soini hat mit seinen "Wahren Finnen" 19 Prozent geholt und drängt in die Regierung.
Der Erfolg ist kein Zufall, überall zwischen Nordkap und Palermo sind Scharfmacher auf dem Vormarsch.
Ihr Feindbild: der Euro, die EU, der Islam.
Der Spiegel, 18/4 2011

En omstrukturering kan innehålla olika typer av förändringar av villkoren i ett lån, men vanligtvis innebär det en nedskrivning av skuldernas värde.
Tekniskt sett är en omstrukturering lika med en betalningsinställelse.
Hittills har den officiella linjen från ledande EU-politiker och beslutsfattare varit att en omstrukturering inte är aktuell, även om de flesta räknar med att det bakom kulisserna dras upp planer på hur en sådan skulle se ut
Viktor Munkhammar DI 14/4 2011

After the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s, US regulators lied about the health of American banks until they were in a position to take a voluntary haircut on their bad loans.
The Brady Plan holds important lessons for euro-zone governments looking for a way out of the current debt crisis.
Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, Der Spiegel 14/4 2011

RE: "Tsunamani sinks all the boats"
Eurozone banks need to address serious weaknesses in their funding, the report argued,
citing a $3,600bn “wall of maturing debt” coming due in the next two years across the globe,
with Irish and German banks facing the greatest difficulties in rolling over funding.
about IMF global financial stability report, FT 13/4 2011

Greek, Portuguese Bonds Slump as Schaeuble Proposes Restructure
Bloomberg, Apr 14, 2011

A group of 50 economists and lawyers are apply for a court injunction at the Karlsruhe constitutional court against the rescue program for Portugal
Eurointelligence 12/4 2011

According to a study by PriceWaterhauseCoopers, the total volume of bad debt
in five EU countries – Germany, UK, Italy, Spain and Ireland rose 14% to € 688 bn in 2010.
The largest chunk came from the German banks, whose estimated bad debts rose 7% at € 225 bn /SEK 2 025 miljarder/
Eurointelligence 14/4 2011

A day after Portugal formally requested aid from the European Union to help ease ongoing debt problems, Madrid on Friday insisted that it was "out of the question" that Spain would be next.
German commentators aren't so sure, and say that it's time for European leaders to reveal the true extent of the problems.
Der Spiegel 8/4 2011

Spain will be next
Wolfgang Münchau, April 10 2011

Waiving the rules for Portugal
Desmond Lachman, FT April 7, 2011

Drawing a line in the Iberian sand
Financial Times editorial, April 7, 2011

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s Werner Mussler
the next in line is the first really big Euro economy: Spain
Eurointelligence 8/4 2011

It may have been inevitable, but it was a sad moment for Portugal:
Europe’s oldest nation state brought low
This newspaper has repeatedly argued that
the debts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal are unpayable and must be restructured
The Economist print Apr 7th 2011

Portugal ger upp, ber om krislån
BBC's business editor Robert Peston said rescue loans could amount to as much as 80bn euros ($115bn; 725 miljarder kr)
DN/TT 2011-04-06

EMU bollar Gris med Europa
Rolf Englund blog 7/4 2011

The eurozone’s economic governance
Superficially, the reform is about ensuring the dispensation of good economic policy.
Fundamentally, it is about the sensible allocation of sovereignty in a core area of our democracies.
This highly political task should be a matter of vital concern for all politicians and engaged citizens.
Thomas Klau, Eurointelligence 3/4 2011

German banks are among the biggest holders of eurozone sovereign debt
– with €46.5bn of bonds from the governments of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain combined,
according to the most recent data from the Bundesbank
The banks have another €91bn of exposure to those countries’ banking sectors
James Wilson and Gerrit Wiesmann, FT, April 5, 2011

ECB and The Taylor Rule - a difference of 9 per cent
President Trichet’s European Central Bank again faces the conundrum that its monetary policy rarely suits all 17 members of the euro area
Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece would need an average rate of minus 4.6 percent, according to estimates by Credit Suisse equity strategists.
Germany requires a rate of 4.5 percent, they say.
Bloomberg Apr 4, 2011

The risk is roughly one in seven that Europe's ongoing debt crisis will push member nations to abandon the shared currency,
raising the spectre of the "effective end of the euro area,"
The Economist Intelligence Unit has warned
Daily Telegraph 4 Apr 2011

Though unconfirmed, only substantial liquidity support from the European Central Bank is keeping the financial systems and, indirectly, the governments of peripheral states such as Ireland, Portugal and Greece alive,
their banks often acting as conduits to supply funds for nations effectively locked out of private capital markets
The Independent 1 April 2011

Stödet för euron sjunker kraftigt hos Sveriges småföretagare
Det visar en rapport som SEB presenterar i dag
SvD Näringsliv 4 april 2011

They’re bust. Admit it.
Greece, Ireland and Portugal should restructure their debts now
Angela Merkel called the euro-zone summit on March 24th-25th a “big step forward” in solving the region’s debt crisis.
Something between a fudge and a failure would be more accurate.
The Economist print March 31st 2011

Bara en floskelavtrubbad EU-byråkrat kan kalla en blyväst för en livboj och förvänta sig att bli trodd.
Politikernas räddning av krisande euroländer ser i själva verket ut att vara en enkelbiljett till den undergång de påstår sig vilja undvika
Andreas Cervenka, SvD Näringsliv 1 april 2011

The Irish finance minister, Michael Noonan, said that 30 September, 2008, will go down in history as the blackest day in Ireland since the Civil War.
That was the fateful day on which the then Irish government extended its infamous guarantee to the banks, and thereby saddled the Irish taxpayer with liability for years of excessive, corrupt and injudicious lending.
Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph March 31st, 2011

I find it unforgivable that the last Irish government guaranteed bank debt so insouciantly and that the rest of the European Union has supported this decision.
For a sovereign to destroy its own credit, to save creditors of its banks, is plainly wrong.
It does not make it better, but worse, that it is doing so largely to protect financial systems in other countries.
Martin Wolf, FT March 8 2011

German president and SPD chief attack bankers
Like his predecessor Horst Köhler, who had called the financial markets “a monster”, German President Christian Wulff attacked the bankers by accusing them of being highly paid inhabitants of a parallel world.
Eurointelligence 1/4 2011

Liksom för Irland så är inte Spaniens största bekymmer att statsfinanserna spårade ur, som för Grekland och i viss mån Portugal,
utan att landets privata sektor och banker har bygg upp och finansierat en gigantisk fastighetsbubbla.
(Såväl de irländska som de spanska bankerna har i sin tur finansierat sig hos andra europeiska insititut.)
Per Lindvall e24, 1/4 2011

Portugal will follow Greece and Ireland to failure
IMF and EU appear set to do so by prescribing for Portugal the same failed policy approach of savage fiscal retrenchment in the most rigid of fixed exchange rate systems that has had such dismal results to date in Greece and Ireland.
Desmond Lachman,FT March 31 2011

The banks are being forced to shrink to a size that poses less risk to the Irish economy.
They've been instructed to reduce the net loans on their balance sheets by 71bn euros by the end of 2013
- an amount equivalent to around half the value of the Irish economy.

Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, 31 March 2011

SPIEGEL Interview with Ex-ECB Chief Economist Issing
Issing: Before the euro was introduced, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl said: The monetary union will not function without a political union.
But a political union of Europe doesn't exist, and it won't happen in the foreseeable future.

That's why we need mechanisms that force the member states to pursue solid financial policies. These mechanisms are missing, and even the most recent decisions reached in Brussels can do little to change this.
Otmar Issing, Der Spiegel 23/3 2011

Irish banks need extra 24bn euros to survive
Until now, losses in the Irish banking system have stemmed from the collapse of a speculative bubble in the commercial property sector, where billions were borrowed from the banks to fund hotels and shopping malls.
However, the latest stress tests focused instead on an emerging meltdown in the residential sector.
BBC 31/3 2011

Standard & Poor’s downgrading of Portugal’s sovereign debt made clear that the primary cause
was the concluding statement of the European Council meeting of March 24-25.

Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph March 29th, 2011

The Fundamental Problem with Efforts to Save the Euro
European politicians are still pursuing a path to integration that citizens have long since abandoned.
For former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the idea of "maintaining an economic and monetary union in the long term without a political union" was an "absurd notion."
Michael Sauga, Der Spiegel 03/30/2011

The most important hole in the plans for economic co-ordination is the unwillingness to recognise the link between the external surpluses of core countries and the financial fragility in the periphery.
The focus remains overwhelmingly on fiscal indiscipline, which was not the cause of the crises in Ireland or Spain.
An additional question is whether those in trouble can regain competitiveness without making their euro-denominated debt yet more unmanageable.
Martin Wolf, FT March 29, 2011

The unbelievable truth about Ireland and its banks
Total quantity of state investment a breathtaking 75bn euros - 45% of GDP
Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, 30 March 2011

The total exposure of foreign banks to the struggling quartet of
Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain tops $2.5 trillion
once all forms or risk are included, according to the latest data from BIS
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 14 Mar 2011

The BIS, the central bank of central banks, said in its quarterly report that Germany had $569bn of exposure to the quartet, France $380bn, and the UK $431bn.

Greece’s increasing jobless rate may become a “bomb in the foundations of society”
Economy and Competitiveness Minister Michalis Chrisochoides said.
Bloomberg 28/3 2011

Portuguese debt yields soared to new records. The 10y bond hit 7.9%
El Pais writes that even the ECB, which returned to secondary markets after three weeks of absence to buy €432m in government debt last week, could not halt this.
Portugal needs to repay or rollover €4.3bn of bonds maturing on April 15
and another €4.9bn in June
Eurointelligence 29/3 2011

Euro breakup revisited
I would take Germany’s limited liability as given, both for reasons of domestic politics and constitutional law.
It is inconceivable that the German constitutional court would accept an unlimited burden sharing.
And even a change of government in 2013 would not fundamentally Germany’s position.
If any politicians tried to raise Germany’s burden, the country would revolt.
Wolfgang Münchau 24.03.2011

/Datalagrings/direktivet, som har baxats fram av medlemsländernas regeringar och röstats igenom
i Europaparlamentet (där svenska väljare utser 18 ledamöter av 736), kan formellt inte stoppas av våra folkvalda.

Paulina Neuding,chefredaktör för magasinet Neo, kolumn SvD ledarsida 26/3 2011

EU bailar inte ut någon, EU lånar ut
Rolf Englund blog 25/3 2011

Three numbers stand out: 12.4, 9.8 and 7.8
Those are the interest rates currently paid on 10-year government bonds for Greece, Ireland and Portugal
CNBC/New York Times 25 March 2011

For some time, Portugal's government has been borrowing from its banks by selling them bonds, which in turn have been swapping the bonds for cash from the ECB (see my earlier notes on this).
And the ECB has also been endeavouring to put a floor under the price of Portuguese bonds, by buying them in the secondary market.
Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, 24 March 2011

The divisiveness pact
Plans for closer economic integration in the euro zone could cause trouble
Charlemagne, The Economist print March 10th 2011

Euro's Collapse Is Not 'Unthinkable': Warren Buffett
CNBC, 24 March 2011

"Europakten är bra för Sverige"
Sverige bör föregå med gott exempel och på frivillig basis åta sig att uppfylla de krav som europakten ställer.
Annika Lundius, vice vd Svenskt Näringsliv, Europaportalen 23/3 2011

To cover Portugal’s deficit and bond repayments for three years,
the bail-out would have to be between €60bn and €70bn.

Open Europe 24/3 2011

William White, chairman of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Economic and Development Review Committee,
talks about Portugal's debt and budget and the outlook for a possible international rescue.
Bloomberg March 24 2011

Reinfeldts utanförskap
Libyen och euron ska behandlas vid dagens EU-toppmöte. Men Sveriges statsminister duckar och driver en alltför avvaktande svensk linje.
DN-ledare 24/3 2011

Portugal PM Socrates' resignation overshadows EU summit
BBC 24 March 2011
With nice music

Moody's sänker kreditbetyget för 30 spanska banker
DI 2011-03-24

The flawed economics of the Competitiveness Pact:
Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies, Eurointelligence 10.03.2011

Skuldkrisen i EMU är av allt att döma på väg in i ännu en kritisk fas.
Det stora orosmolnet är inte Portugal utan Spanien.

Viktor Munkhammar, DI 24/3 2011

The opposition parties appeared to be responding to the public mood in Portugal, which had turned against the belt-tightening.
Der Spiegel 24/3 2011

Finland is blocking the increase in the EFSF’s effective lending capacity because of the April 17 elections.
Finland’s PM Mari Kiviniemi said she had no mandate from the outgoing Finnish parliament to accept a deal,
and would need to call an emergency session of the parliament to get approval, which may be difficult, if not impossible.
Eurointelligence 23/3 2011

In a damning editorial for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Werner Mussler is highly pessimistic about the Euro governance reforms the summit will decide.
The advantages of political integration that defenders of the new Euro rules like to point out will turn into the opposite because protests against painful reforms in Greece and protests in Germany against the Euro will produce the opposite of more integration.
Eurointelligence 24/3 2011

Permanent Euro Fix
Germany to Contribute 22 Billion Euros to New Fund

Finance ministers agreed on Monday to furnish the new permanent bailout fund with 80 billion euros, with the ability to call on 620 billion euros more should the need arise. The deal paves the way for agreement at an EU summit later this week.
Der Spiegel 22/3 2011

Portuguese opposition parties have refused to back austerity measures drafted to help the country avoid a bail-out
The political crisis in Lisbon threatens to dominate a European Union summit on Thursday, at which leaders hope to finalise “a grand bargain” to resolve the eurozone debt crisis.
FT March 22 2011

The European stability mechanism, which will be the permanent crisis mechanism from 2013
The agreement reached on March 11 not only appeared comprehensive, it also came as a surprise. Unfortunately, when you look more closely, as I did last week, it begins to look smaller. By the end of the week, it had crumbled.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT March 20 2011

EU:s flyktingkommissionär Cecilia Malmström slöt avtal med Gadaffi i Libyen den 1 oktober ifjol.
Gadaffi skulle få en halv miljard kr under tre år för att med Gadaffimetoder stoppa flyktingar från Afrika att nå EU.
Nils Lundgrens blog "My correct views on everything" 1:e mars 2011

Jean-Claude Trichet is upping his war against the European Council when he decried yesterday’s Ecofin agreement as poor and insufficient.
Eurointelligence 16/3 2011

Riksdagens finansutskott beslutade i dag att Sverige inte ska gå med i den så kallade europakten,
när EU:s stats- och regeringschefer möts i Bryssel nästa vecka.
Ekot 17/3 2011

"The fundamental problem is in the banking system "I think this whole thing is a Ponzi scheme in which governments that are already in deep red ink are trying to generate more red ink,"
Niall Ferguson, history professor at Harvard University, told CNBC 15/3 2011.

In 2013, a new mechanism will replace the EFSF. It is called the European stability mechanism (ESM).
The crucial difference between the two is that its credits will be senior to those of private investors.
To come up with such an idea requires a good deal of ignorance of how financial markets work.
Unfortunately, financial illiteracy is, and always has been, a hallmark of much of European economic policy.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT March 13, 2011

Right now Europe may be embarking on a path that could tilt the union away from economic liberalism,
risking a split and, ultimately, even a British exit.

Mrs Merkel seems to be sleepwalking into this danger.
The Economist print 10/3 2011

The deal reached to strengthen the bloc’s €440bn rescue fund will be overshadowed by the horrors in Libya and Japan.
That may delay the sceptical reaction in the markets and buy Europe some time.
But, have no doubt, the European debt crisis will return.

Gideon Rachman, FT March 14 2011

Moody's Cuts Spain's Debt Rating to Aa2
The cut in the rating drove the euro to session lows against the dollar and
the premium investors charge for Spanish 10-year debt instead of German Bunds widened 9 basis points on the day to 232 bps.
CNBC, 10 Mar 2011

Anyone familiar with the Byzantine complexities of European policymaking would not have been surprised to learn that
the latest round of EU bank stress testing is going to be – well, about as testing as the last one,
which famously found both Allied Irish Banks and Bank of Ireland to be perfectly solvent.
Jeremy Warner Daily Telegraph 9 March 2011

Over the next few weeks important decisions have to be made over the euro and how to prevent a repeat of the crisis that has threatened the single currency.
Some of the ideas - wrapped up in the words "economic governance" - may involve a significant transfer of power away from nation states to Brussels.
If the changes are dramatic it poses again the question as to whether the people should get a say.
Gavin Hewitt, the BBC's Europe editor, 8 March 2011

Det var något överraskande att på EU-toppmötet den 4 februari behöva påpeka att varje förslag måste stå i överensstämmelse med EU-fördraget, sade Barroso, som en gliring åt den pakt som Tysklands Angela Merkel och Frankrikes Nicolas Sarkozy lanserat
DN print, inte på nätet, 9 mars 2011, reporter Henrik Brors

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the European Union may face a “lost half-decade” similar to that experienced by Japan
as governments implement budget cuts that may undermine the economic recovery.
Joseph Stiglitz, Bloomberg Mar 8, 2011

Why the eurozone will survive
Martin Wolf, FT March 8 2011

In his FTD column, Wolfgang Münchau argues that Germany cannot have it both ways:
saying no to an increase in the EFSF’s remit, and saying No to government capital injections into the domestic banking sector.
If Germany decides against bailout that prepare the grounds for a default of Greece, Portugal and Ireland,
which would have significant consequences for the German banking system.
Eurointelligence 9/3 2011

Latvia's prime minister earns far less than Latvians in Brussels
For his trouble he receives a pretax salary of about $45,000 a year,
buys his own health insurance and lives in a three-room, Soviet-built apartment.
Andris Piebalgs, Latvia’s member of the European Commission earns $345,000 a year,
Latvia’s judge at the European Court of Justice, gets the same amount, which means he earns about $100,000 more than the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.
The benefits are not bad, either: a housing and living allowance, a stipend of about $6,000 annually per dependent child, around $10,000 a year for entertainment and a generous pension with no employee contribution.
New York Times, March 8, 2011

Egentligen strider det mot EU:s grundlag att låta EMU-länderna gå i borgen för varandras skulder,
men finansmarknaderna har länge satsat på att unionen ändå aldrig skulle låga ett euroland gå i konkurs.
Men det är just vad EEAG:s sjuhövdade råd av tunga europeiska ekonomiprofessorer föreslår som krislösning.
/The Group is chaired by Jan-Egbert Sturm and includes Giancarlo Corsetti and John Hassler (Stockholm University/
DI 9/3 2011

Greek 10-year yield reached a eurozone record, of 12.9%,
as the markets are now overwhelming expecting a debt restructuring
Eurointelligence 9/3 2011

If an internal devaluation in a country suffering from a lack of international competitiveness were to succeed, the real burden of the country’s debt would increase.
This would be true not only for its public debt, but also for all indebted households and businesses.
Stefan de Vylder december 2010

The European Central Bank turned a blind eye to "irresponsible lending" by German, French, British and Belgian banks,
the European Union's former ambassador to the United States, John Bruton has said.
EUobserver 8/3 2011

FT Deutschland noted that the Greek rating was now below that of Egypt, and on the same level as that of Angola.
The downgrade was a testimony how dangerous the euro crisis can still be at a time when political leaders had become more relaxed.
Eurointelligence 8/3 2011

Frankfurter Allgemeine writes in a comment that Greece was a clear-cut case for a debt restructuring.
Even if the Greek adjustment strategy went to plan, the country would be straddled with an extremely high burden of debt.
But Athens, Berlin, and Brussels, in cohorts with the ECB, are serving the interests of the banks, by refusing to accept this.
Eurointelligence 8/3 2011

Reinfeldt talade om folkomröstningen 1994, men inte om folkomröstningen 2003

Det Östliga Partnerskapet
And to the East of our Union there is a vast region with its 12 very different countries between us and the borders of China - the 80 million people of the six Eastern Partnership countries, the 140 million people of Russia and the nearly 60 million people of the five countries of Central Asia.
Carl Bildt, Utrikesminister, Tal vid Bilgi University, Istanbul 6 mars 2011

Merkel är fiffig med inte demokratisk
Rolf Englund blog 7/3 2011

It is twelve years since the launch of EMU.
There has been no meaningful convergence of the disparate economies since then. The one-size-fits-all monetary policy continues to cause havoc.
All that changes with the evolving economic cycle is a rotation in the locus of stress, and a change in its features.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 7 March 2011

Germany, Finland and the Netherlands are blocking proposals to increase the scope of the EFSF to include bond purchases, or to fund any effective bond bond repurchase programmes.
The article says the development was a setback for the ECB, which had hoped that the EFSF could buy part of the ECB’s own peripheral bond portfolio, which it amassed as part of its securities market programme. The article says that Germany was ready to increase the package from a nominal to a real €440bn (but what’s is the point of that without bond purchases?).
Eurointelligence 7/3 2011

Mycket fiffigt
European Central Bank Wants to Unload PIIGS Bonds
Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party's group in parliament is strictly opposed to the purchase of state bonds through the EFSF,
but neither Merkel nor Schäuble feels bound in their vote in Brussels to the parliamentary group's position.
Opposed to the direct purchase of bonds by the EFSF, but they are not opposed to troubled countries taking loans from the rescue fund in order to buy back their own bonds from the market.
Der Spiegel 4/3 2011

For the benefit of our readers, we thought we’d post a copy of the Barroso-Van Rompuy plan’s four-page outline,
which was distributed to eurozone “sherpas” – the economic officials in each country responsible for negotiating the deal
– at a closed-door meeting Monday (click here to see the pdf).
FT Brussels blog March 1, 2011

Måndagen den 7 mars är statsminister Fredrik Reinfeldt inbjuden av EU-kommissionens kontor i Stockholm
för att hålla ett tal om Sveriges syn på utvecklingen i EU
Tid: 14:00 Plats: Europahuset, Regeringsgatan 6
Pressmeddelande Statsrådsberedningen

För Sveriges del borde slutsatsen vara att ett väl fungerande svenskt utrikesdepartement behövs, också i EU.
Utrikespolitiken kan inte vara en enmansföreställning.
Annika Ström Melin, Signerat, DN-ledare 4/3 2011

At the time of the Greek bailout, the real question was:
"If €750 billion isn't enough, what is?"
The heavily indebted European states face USD 2850 billion of maturing debt up to 2013.
Satyajit Das, January 19, 2011

The last time EU leaders met, in early February, a Franco-German proposal for a competitiveness pact was thrust upon them.
That task should be the preserve of the European Commission, not a cabal of two or three countries imposing a model on the rest.
Guy Verhofstadt, Jacques Delors and Romano Prodi, FT March 2 2011

Som om förvirringen kring EU:s utrikespolitik inte redan vore nog bidrar nu unionens president till att dimmorna tätnar ytterligare.
Herman Van Rompuy har kallat till extra toppmöte i Bryssel. Unionens stats- och regeringschefer ska diskutera
det som på EU-språk kallas ”utvecklingen i det södra grannskapsområdet”,
vilket betyder Nordafrika och Libyen på vanlig svenska
.
Annika Ström Melin, Signerat, DN-ledare 4/3 2011

“Sovereignty”, the “British Constitution”, our “democracy”, “self-government”
The hard won right of the British people to elect and dismiss those who make their laws.
The British people have given Parliament the power to make all their laws for them,
but they have not given Parliament permission to give that power away.
Both these principles, for which, over the centuries, millions have willingly given up their lives,
already stand deeply betrayed by our membership of the European Union.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch, January 2005

Sverige bekräftar nu sin plats bland tigerekonomierna.
Under fjärde kvartalet 2010 växte Sveriges bruttonationalprodukt (BNP) med 7,3 procent och tillväxten för hela fjolåret blev 5,5 procent, den högsta siffran sedan 1970.
e24 2011-03-01

Moody’s estimates necessary volume of caja recapitalisation at €50bn
The Spanish government imposed core tier one ratios of 8-10% for the entire savings banking industry, and estimated the recapitalisation volume of under €20bn.
Eurointelligene 1/3 2011

Libyan clients have more than one billion euros ($1.4 billion) stored in Austria's banking system,
the head of the national bank in Vienna told state television late on Monday.

Last week, the political developments in Germany shifted dramatically in the wrong direction.
The Bundesbank, the parliament, the small business community and influential academics have all come out openly against an extension of the various support mechanisms.
German society as a whole is in open revolt against the eurozone.
The only reason to accept such a loss of sovereignty would be the prize of an ever closer economic union.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT, February 27 2011

The devastation that last Friday’s Irish election brought to Fianna Fáil was almost as complete as the destruction that banks and real estate developers inflicted on the country on that party’s watch.
The government’s humiliation is a historic moment for Ireland. For the first time, allegiances dating back to the civil war of the 1920s have been overshadowed by a newer trauma.
The wreckage from the banking crisis is stained with red ink, not with blood; it will nonetheless permanently change Irish society.
Financial Times editorial February 28 2011

If Spain has no strategy, France has had something worse: a bad one.
President Nicolas Sarkozy has saddled Europe with a worse than useless outfit called the Union for the Mediterranean.
Its founding co-president, alongside Sarkozy himself, was none other than Hosni Mubarak.
This 43-country waffle shop has an array of cumbersome, dysfunctional committees and projects, wholly unfit for purpose.
Now that we do need a union for the Mediterranean, we should really start by abolishing the Union for the Mediterranean.
Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian, 17 February 2011

Statsminister Fredrik Reinfeldt och utrikesminister Carl Bildt
reser till Paris den 13- 14 juli för att delta i Medelhavsunionens toppmöte
Regeringen 10 juli 2008

Irland växte snabbt under 90-talet. Med euron tillkom en låg ränta som blåste upp en jättelik fastighetsbubbla. Politiker, bankdirektörer och näringslivstoppar blundade och höll varandra om ryggen.
Även banker i andra euroländer lånade glatt till allt och alla.
Bubblan sprack slutligen 2008, och regeringen fick för sig att utfärda en totalgaranti för bankernas långivare.
När bankerna rasade gick botten ur statskassan.
Gunnar Jonsson, Signerat DN:s ledarsida 24/2 2011

Pakten löser inte eurons problem
Fredrik Reinfeldt vill inte uttala sig, och precis som statsministern påpekade: vad är det han ska uttala sig om?
Det finns inget papper och inga detaljer nerskrivna än. Men faktum kvarstår: Tysklands Angela Merkel och Frankrikes Nicolas Sarkozy föreslår en ”fransk-tysk konkurrenspakt” för eurozonen.
Allt ska vara bestämt om drygt en månad och nej, det finns inget papper.
Aftonbladet ledare, signerad Katrine Kielos, 12/2 2011

The European Economic Advisory Group (EEAG), a group of leading European economists, has warned that Greece may need another bailout by 2013 at the latest. creditors might have to write off more than 30 percent of their loans.
Greece might even have to reintroduce the drachma to overcome its debt crisis
Der Spiegel 02/22/2011

Academics and businesses are joining Bundestag and Bundestag in protests against proposed extension of the eurozone’s financial umbrella;
Eurointelligence 25/2 2011
Very important article

The government, the Bundestag, and the Bundesbank all have their own, and conflicting, views on how the crisis should be resolved.
To add to the confusion, the three parliamentary groups in the Bundestag yesterday made a recommendation to the Bundestag
– a proposal that will be formally voted on - that Merkel must not agree anything without asking the parliament first,
something FT Deutschland reports she was “not entirely happy” about.
In addition, as Reuters reports, the parliamentary parties are dead set against any bond buyback to be organised by the ESM.
A draft contained the following excerpt: "Parliament expects that jointly financed or guaranteed purchase programmes of government debt would be
ruled out for reasons of constitutional and European law, and on economic grounds."

Eurointelligence 22/2 2011

EMU travails will goes on, and on, until Germany – and the others – understands that it has been lured into a Monet trap:
it cannot both be a member of monetary union and remain a self-governing sovereign nation.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 20 Feb 2011

Fin bild på Barroso och Gaddafi
Trots den välkända brutaliteten i Libyen finns sedan några månader ett nära
samarbete med EU-länderna för att se till att flyktingar inte når Europa
Jesús Alcalá, SvD Brännpunkt 23/2 2011

Rätt åt Cecilia Malmström få ta hand om migration,
Europeiska byrån för förvaltningen av det operativa samarbetet vid Europeiska unionens yttre gränser (FRONTEX)

All that has occurred so far is that Irish and Greek taxpayers have taken on fresh debt so that creditors do not crystallise losses.
It remains a disguised rescue for North European banks and insurers.
There can no longer be any doubt that Germany has lost control of the ECB, that the implicit contract under which the German people agreed to give up the D-Mark has been breached.
The eight judges of the Verfassungsgericht ruled on the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 that EMU failure to ensure monetary stability in Germany would violate the Grundgesetz
and either force Germany to change its constitution (very hard) or leave the euro.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 20 Feb 2011

September 29, 2008 was the day the government guaranteed all bank creditors,
to the tune of €440bn – some 250 per cent of Irish gross domestic product.
Everything that has happened in Ireland since then, especially its daily recurring banking crisis,
has been a consequence of that fateful decision.
FT Lex February 22 2011

Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats have just suffered the worst defeat since World War Two in the Hamburg elections.
Their vote share collapsed from 43pc to 21pc
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, February 21st, 2011

For those of us who lived through the ERM crisis of 1992 and followed German events closely at that time, all this has a familiar ring.
It was not just recession in the UK, Italy, Spain, and parts of Scandinavia that caused the fixed exchange system to blow up, it was the deadly cocktail of slumps and banking troubles in these countries combining with German overheating. The mix triggered the final crisis.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, February 21st, 2011

It is unbelievable how far /Axel Weber/ stands outside the emerging policy consensus in European capitals.
His message is that everybody should do their own thing. The cornerstones of the monetary union are subsidiarity, responsibility of individual member countries, and the no-bailout rule.
In other words, this is a monetary union only.
Eurointelligence 22/2 2011

The Bundesbank also yesterday launched a further broadside against bond purchases in its monthly report.
The Bundesbank said it opposed giving the EFSF or the ESM powers to buy government bonds in the secondary market.
Eurointelligence 22/2 2011

The current crisis has challenged the founding principles of EMU
Some proposals would result in a weakening of the responsibility of financial market participants and member states,
diminished incentives for sound fiscal policies,
and again a shifting of risks to the taxpayers of other member states.
Axel Weber, outgoing president of Germany’s Bundesbank, FT 21/2 2011

Axel Weber, Germany’s departing Bundesbank president, has put his country on a collision course with its eurozone partners
by opposing a central part of proposals for resolving future sovereign debt crises.

FT 21/2 2011

Wolfgang Münchau har nu begått ytterligare ett mästerstycke i Financial Times
While the rest of us are debating how to solve Europe’s banking crisis,
and become exasperated by the lack of progress, Ms Merkel is solving a crisis in a parallel universe.

Rolf Englund blog 21/2 2011

Hamburg, the city-state of Merkel’s birth
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party suffered its worst defeat since World War II in Germany’s richest state,
losing control of Hamburg in the first of seven state elections this year

Bloomberg Feb 21, 2011

First, low interest rates, especially in real terms, which resulted from the single monetary policy, and encouraged risk-taking behaviour;
Second, fiscal policies assessed on the basis of nominal variables (deficit as a percentage of GDP) turned out to be pro-cyclical and contributed to excessive domestic demand growth and the accumulation of external imbalances
Speech by Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, 14 February 2011

Det är sant att Anders Borg har prioriterat ordning och reda i den offentliga ekonomin. Men det har han inte varit ensam om.
Samma sak kan även sägas om finansministrarna i Irland och Spanien, länder som till alldeles nyligen fick ett gott betyg för sin ekonomiska skötsel och hade föga gemensamt med exempelvis Grekland.
Peter Wolodarski, DN 20/2 2011

ECB intervened in the markets on Friday to prevent Portugal’s borrowing costs spiralling to “danger levels”
that could force Lisbon to seek international assistance.
FT February 18 2011

Portugal väntas i april be om ett stödpaket från EU och IMF, rapporterar Reuters med hänvisning till källor i eurozonen.
– Det är redan en utbredd uppfattning på finansmarknaden, men nu har även EU:s finansministrar börjat inse detta, säger en källa.
DN/TT 18/2 2011

"I dag försöker finansministrarna till varje pris hindra en omstrukturering av statsskulderna,
men mycket talar för att man till slut tvingas till en sådan ändå.
Och det blir en enorm prestigeförlust eftersom man har kopplat ihop det med eurons framtid, vilket det egentligen inte finns någon anledning till"
Lars Calmfors, Dagens industri 18/2 2011

Eurokrisen är inte över
Detta kan visa sig vara lugnet före, om inte stormen så åtminstone det stora braket.
Mars kan bli riktigt rörigt och återigen sätta det finansiella systemet inom eurozonen under press
- liksom det inte helt transparenta politiska beslutssystemet.
Per Lindvall, e24, 2011-02-18

Use of marginal lending facility spikes to €15bn
In the money markets, this headline is the equivalent to “fire in the theatre”.
Eurointelligence 18/2 2011

Spanish savings banks, which have been ordered to raise more capital by the government,
are facing an uphill struggle to persuade investors to help them improve their balance sheets.
The New York Times, 18 Feb 2011

We have been presented with the same data over and again:
since 1999 when the euro was introduced, unit labor costs have risen by 25% to 30% relative to Germany in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy.
This is impressive, but well short of a proof. First, is 1999 a good base to make comparisons?
We know that Germany mistakenly converted deutschemarks into euros at an inflated value, thereby knocking off its competitiveness.
Wage moderation was needed and impressively achieved over the first decade of the euro.

Charles Wyplosz, Eurointelligence 17.02.2011

Germany may have Europe’s largest and most robust economy, but...
An auction for WestLB, a publicly owned institution in Düsseldorf that was once Germany’s third-largest lender, has attracted just two bidders
The New York Times 17 Feb 2011

For months, financial markets and policymakers from Wall Street to Frankfurt have been begging European leaders to do something – anything –
to address the short-term needs of struggling, debt-laden countries on the periphery of the eurozone.
Instead, Europe’s presidents and prime ministers have proposed plan after plan to deal with the continent’s economic problems over several years.
FT, February 15 2011

Rädda euron första punkten på finansministrarnas lista
Av de 500 miljarder euro som ska finnas i den nya fonden ska hela summan vara lånbar.
Hur man då ska bevara AAA-värderingen valde de 17 euroländerna att skjuta på framtiden.
Teresa Küchler e24, 2011-02-16

Bundesbank president Axel Weber said a lack of political acceptance in the eurozone for his hawkish monetary views
had driven his abrupt decision not to run for European Central Bank presidency.
CNBC, 14 Feb 2011

Under finanskrisen har Sverige haft nytta av att ha en egen valuta.
Nackdelarna med den gemensamma valutan och en gemensam räntepolitik har visat sig de senaste åren
Men jag är kluven i frågan och har egentligen ingen stark åsikt vare sig för eller emot euron,
säger SCA:s koncernchef Jan Johansson, SvD Näringsliv 15/2 2011

Axel Weber, the president of Germany's Bundesbank and leading candidate as the next head of the European Central Bank, will step down

It casts a spotlight on Angela Merkel´s problems with the chancellor's EU policies and threatens to further erode her authority in Brussels.
Der Spiegel 11/2 2011

Birgitta Ohlsson har en ovanlig förmåga att fånga ett auditorium. Hon är personlig, men inte kladdigt privat, och talar engagerat om behovet av frihandel, fred och frihet utan att det känns det minsta påklistrat.
Men hon har ett problem. Som EU-minister har hon ansvar för allt – men samtidigt nästan ingenting.
Annika Ström Melin, DN 2011-02-09

Företagen inordnade sig efter tyska påtryckningar - och med regeringens goda minne - i det som kallades “Grosswirtschaftsraum”.
Det var en ekonomisk motsvarighet till det geografiskt-militära “Lebensraum” . En tullfri zon med tyska riksmark som valuta och tysk styrning av handeln. Syftet var bland annat att trygga Tysklands tillgång till råvaror.
e24 2006-06-14

Dangers lurk in Franco-German plans for a more tightly integrated euro zone
The Economist print Feb 10th 2011

It is hard to estimate the exact amount it will cost to recapitalise the European banking sector. I have heard a credible estimate of €100bn-€200bn.
Last year’s bank stress tests came up with a puny €3.5bn – a deliberate attempt by Europe’s regulatory authorities to misrepresent facts and mislead the public.
Everything I hear about the next round of stress tests tells me they will once again try to hide the truth.
Wolfgang Münchau. FT February 6 2011

Den uttalade avsikten bakom införandet av en gemensam EU-valuta var att tvinga fram en tätare samordning av statsfinanserna i medlemsländerna och på sikt en samordnad finans- och skattepolitik.
De flesta insåg att det bara var en tidsfråga innan olikheterna mellan euromedlemmarnas ekonomier skulle kräva en sådan. Den makt över statsfinanserna som euroländerna inte självmant kunde förmå sig till att lägga i gemensamma EU-händer skulle försvaret av den gemensamma valutan så småningom tvinga dem att förlägga just där.
Euron var ett luftslott byggt på förhoppningen att marken skulle närma sig.
Göran Rosenberg, DN 2011-02-04

Tungviktarna Tyskland och Frankrike försökte att på egen hand föra fram flera konkreta förslag om nya regler för bland annat pensionsålder

– Jag tror inte att vi kommer att hamna där, av det skälet att länderna är olika, vi har olika förväntansålder, vi har olika skattetryck, vi har olika arbetsmarknadsregler och sätt att sätta löner

Fredrik Reinfeldt, Ekot 5/2 2011

Det bor en liten Brysselhatare i flertalet stats- och regeringschefers bröst. Kanske är det därför de ser så glada ut när de anländer till Euro-peiska rådet, EU:s toppmöte. Där är diskussionerna förtroliga, besluten kräver enhällighet och är inte bindande. Det skrivs inte ens protokoll.
Annika Ström-Melin, DN 2011-02-05

Spain’s success is of acute relevance to the rest of the eurozone
Spain is where Ireland was a couple of years ago
Mohamed El-Erian, FT February 3 2011

Sarkozy in Davos
'Mrs. Merkel and I Will Never, Never Allow the Euro To Fail'
Der Spiegel 27/1 2011

"Irish domestic banks currently depend almost entirely on the (European Central Bank) to refinance expiring market debt,"
Total debts of the six Irish banks approach USD 375 billion, more than 170 percent of Ireland's gross domestic product.
S&P senior analyst Frank Gill, CNBC, 2 Feb 2011

The key issue in Europe now is not the merits of the single currency but the parlous state of its banking system.
Philippe Legrain, Eurointelligence 11.01.2011

Again, the mood about the eurozone is now more optimistic. But how the zone is to exit from its difficulties remains obscure.
European leaders have willed the end: survival of the eurozone. Whether and how they can will the means is still unknown.
Martin Wolf, February 1 2011

“Amazing” that the Irish government has “socialized” the banks
— some $80 billion in senior and subordinated debt — and made it the financial responsibility of Irish taxpayers, who didn’t create it.
Michael Lewis, author of "Liar’s Poker," "The Big Short" and "The Blind Side,"
CNBC 1 Feb 2011

Mätt med det handelsvägda TCW-indexet noterar kronan den starkaste nivån sedan sommaren 1998.
e24 26/1 2011

The IMF’s Article IV report on Ireland published in September 2007 begins:
“Economic performance remains very strong, supported by SOUND policies. Given the Irish economy’s strong fundamentals and the authorities’ commitment to sound policies, Directors expected economic growth to remain robust over the medium term.”
The IMF said Ireland was in fiscal SURPLUS of 3pc of GDP and total public debt had fallen to just 12pc.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard January 21st, 2011

Merkel Rules Out Return to Deutsche Mark
Der Spiegel 19/1 2011

Irland
net outward migration to be 100,000 over the two-year period from April 2010 to April 2012.
CNBC 20/1 2011

Let us assume for the sake of argument that Europe succeeds in containing the immediate EMU debt crisis, with help from Asia, and that Germany’s fractious coalition actually agrees to a bail-out fund big enough to make any difference.
What does this achieve, other than allowing banks to buy time by offloading liabilities onto European and Chinese taxpayers?
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 16 Jan 2011

That is to say, Germany must be prepared to do for Southern European what it has already done for its own kin in East Germany, but on six times the scale.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 16 Jan 2011

Ett oroligt mummel i regeringsbyggnaderna runt om i de europeiska huvudstäderna.
Det här går inte längre! viskas det lite varstans.
Många ifrågasätter om den tillfälliga fond som inrättats räcker för att rädda euroländer som brottas med allvarliga svårigheter.
DN, huvudledare 17/1 2011

EU har för länge sedan utvecklats till något mer än en inre marknad.
Redan i dag kan unionen liknas vid ett slags europeisk federation.
Den kommer antagligen aldrig att bli en lika sammansvetsad union som USA – vilket inte heller är önskvärt.
Men det är rimligt att länderna har en mer gemensam ekonomisk politik än i dag.
DN, huvudledare 17/1 2011

Hur många euro går det på en tulpanlök? Rätt svar är: minst en.
Den gemensamma valutan har alla förutsättningar att tillsammans med 1600-talets holländska tulpaner
kvala in på fortsättningen av den framlidna professorn Charles P Kindlebergers klassiska lista över historiska finans- och spekulationskriser.
Per Lindvall e24 14/1 2011

In his FT Deutschland column, Wolfgang Münchau says
the FDP has turned from an internationalist, profoundly pro-European party into anti-European nationalist ragbag of politicians, who lack a basic understanding of the function of the EU.
Eurointelligence 19/1 2011

Time for Plan B
The euro area’s bail-out strategy is not working.
It is time for insolvent countries to restructure their debts
The Economist print 13/1 2011

Spanish banks have €323 billion (the equivalent of 31% of GDP) in loans to property developers.
Add in construction, and the exposure rises to 42% of GDP.
The Economist print 13/1 2011

The tragedy of the Euromess is that the creation of the euro was supposed to be the finest moment in a grand and noble undertaking: the generations-long effort to bring peace, democracy and shared prosperity to a once and frequently war-torn continent.
But the architects of the euro, caught up in their project’s sweep and romance, chose to ignore the mundane difficulties a shared currency would predictably encounter
Instead, they engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the nobility of their mission transcended such concerns.
Paul Krugman, New York Times, January 12, 2011
En lysande artikel

The unemployment rate in Greece jumped to 13.5 percent
A record 684,047 people were officially without work, a 39 percent increase year-on-year.
CNBC 12/1 2011

Nouriel Roubini och SvD:s Tomas Lundin sätter fingret på EMU:s ömma punkt
Rolf Englund blog 12/1 2011

It is one thing for an anti-European British politician, or a short-selling New York banker, to express scepticism about the euro’s future.
But when doubts come from a founding father of European monetary union, everyone should pay heed.
Otmar Issing, who served from 1998 to 2006 as the European Central Bank’s first chief economist,
is one of the most decent and thoughtful men in German public life.

Financial Times, editorial, January 11 2011

Roubini:
Europe needs growth to prevent a disorderly collapse of the euro area.
Der Spiegel 11/1 2011

The dam breaks in Portugal
As Wolfgang Munchau wrote in the FT on Monday,
the essential problem is that Spain and other Club Med states cannot both deflate to regain lost competitiveness within EMU and at the same grow fast enough to control debt dynamics.
They can do one or the other, but not both at the same time.

The EU strategy is simply unworkable.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, January 11th, 2011

Portugal
Ã…tstramningarna som har framtvingats av marknaderna gör saken inte bättre, i alla fall inte på kort sikt. Medan länder som Tyskland och Sverige växer så det knakar väntas Portugals BNP sjunka i år,
precis som investeringarna, sysselsättningen och den offentliga och privata konsumtionen.

Hur Portugal i det läget ska klara av att sänka budgetunderskottet är för många en gåta.
Tomas Lundin, SvD Näringsliv 12/1 2011

Roubini says it is absurd to focus on 2013
“ What the euro countries decide for 2013 is completely inconsequential. Forget 2013!
The important thing is what will happen in the next three months in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France.
I can’t fathom how the EU member states can hold a summit entirely preoccupied with what will happen after the present rescue package runs out,
without once mentioning what they intend to do now to help Portugal and Spain.”
Eurointelligence 12/1 2011

Europe is now facing what Edwin Truman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics calls
“a collective run on the financial institutions and governments of the euro zone countries.”
This contagion, says the former head of the Federal Reserve’s international finance division, makes it essential that euro zone members and the European Central Bank devise “a Plan B,
a structured process for writing down debts,” in case the current safeguards — the country by country bailouts — don’t hold.
MaketWatch Dec. 17, 2010

Mr Issing said proposals that Emu should be expanded into a “transfer union” – the transfer of funds from Germany and other financially strong states to weaker, highly indebted states – were wrong.
“This would wholly change Emu’s character,” he said.
FT 11/1 2011

Otmar Issing, the former chief economist of the European Central Bank and the German Bundesbank,
is a genial number-cruncher who believes in the overall benefits of European integration
has turned virulently pessimistic over the European single currency.
In a marked change from his relative sanguinity during his eight years at the ECB,
he terms member countries’ unreliability on economic policies “a basic design flaw of monetary union.”
David Marsh, Market Watch, Jan. 10, 2011
Highly recommended

Economist Desmond Lachman of Washington’s American Enterprise Institute:
The euro crisis, he argues, “is not at the periphery, but at the core.”
He emphasizes that German and French banks hold the bulk of the $2 trillion of sovereign debt
owed by Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece.
MaketWatch Dec. 17, 2010

At the December summit, the European Union missed a historic chance to get on top of this crisis. We will do whatever it takes, they swore, and went home.
Nobody believed them, but the panic did not start until last week, when bond yields rose, and the euro slumped.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT January 9 2011

Portugal planerar i år att låna upp 18-20 miljarder euro med nya obligationslån
Totat löper portugisiska obligationer för 9,5 miljarder euro ut 2011, varav 4,5 miljarder i april.
SEB:s ekonomer ser onsdagens försök i Portugal att ta upp obligationslån för sammanlagt 1,25 miljarder euro (cirka 11 miljarder kronor) som "ett viktigt test".
Ekot 10/1 2011

VLT:s ledarsida argumenterade för ett ja till euron och själv röstade jag då logiskt nog ja.
Oron för att dagens eurooro skulle ha givit direkta problem för Sverige med en ja-seger kan jag inte heller dela.
Finland, Österrike och Nederländerna är exempel på länder som påminner om Sverige och har klarat sig bra med euron.
Ändå kan jag inte frigöra mig från att det i efterhand har visat sig mest hederligt att nej-sidan vann.
Skulle ja-sidan ha vunnit borde det ha berott på att våra främsta argument övertygade. Men så här i efterhand framstår de inte som särskilt övertygande.
VLT 8/1 2011

Vad finns det egentligen för ekonomiska argument för att EU eller EMU ska låna ut pengar till de medlemsländer som inte har ordning på sina statsfinanser? Vad skulle hända om vi inte ställde upp, utan i värsta fall lät exempelvis Grekland göra en ensidig nedskrivning av sina skulder med kanske tjugo eller trettio procent?
för skattebetalarna vore det naturligtvis billigare om staten bara räddar bankerna från konkurs, och om man dessutom gör det på ett sådant sätt att man inte räddar dessa bankers aktieägare, utan bara den systemviktiga verksamheten.
Mats Persson, DN Debatt 2011-01-09

Move forward decisively on the path toward “federalization” of economic and fiscal policies.
In my view, this is the right course

The European Council should lead this effort toward federalization and a single global voice,
including proposing the requisite changes in the European treaties,
even when it may be expected that some countries of the Union may not wish to join this development.
Felipe González New York Times 7/1 2011

Samme Treschow som varit ordförande för Svensk Näringsliv – den organisation som bekostade en icke föraktlig del av ja-kampanjen för svenskt euromedlemskap.
Den kampanjen är för övrigt det jag skäms mest över från min nästan tioåriga sejour i partipolitiken.
Jag var vid den här tiden anställd av Liberala ungdomsförbundet, och därför heltidsengagerad på ja-sidan.

Ändå har jag inget egentligt minne av att vi pratade politik. I stället sprang vi omkring och delade ut badbollar, kepsar, nyckelband och gud minns vad mer med käcka "Ja Till Euron"-budskap på. Våra affischer täckte varenda reklampelare i landet.
Vi lade mer pengar på mazariner med euro-loggor än vad den luspanka nej-kampanjen spenderade totalt.
Nej-sidan hade däremot något annat, nämligen argument.
Johan Ingerö, Örnsköldsviks Allehanda, 30 december 2010

Greece has become the world's riskiest borrower in the fourth quarter of 2010, surpassing Venezuela,
while Spain, Portugal and Ireland were riskier than Iraq

CNBC 7 Jan 2011

If the euro zone is truly to put the debt crisis behind it,
three very painful measures are going to be needed
“The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area periphery is closely tied up with a suppressed banking crisis
throughout the euro area — core and periphery”

according to Citi Chief Economist Willem Buiter, CNBC 7/1 2011
Highly recommended

Yep, Portugal’s 10-year debt is yielding more than 7 per cent
Neil Hume FT Alphaville Jan 06 2011

Irish 10-year yields have been climbing to 9%, Greek 10-year yields to over 12%,
well into territory where investors are factoring in a non-trivial default risk.
Eurointelligence 6/1 2011

Euron är "världens mest stabila valuta".
Eurogruppens ordförande Jean-Claude Juncker i en tidningsintervju på fredagen, rapporterar Bloomberg News.
DI 2011-01-03

Jean-Claude Juncker dismissed concerns about the future of the euro, calling it
“the most solid currency in the world,”
“We are not facing a crisis of the euro, but a debt crisis in individual euro nations,”
“The euro’s existence and its essence are not at risk.”
Bloomberg Dec 31, 2010

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
Just joking

The foreign owner of a Greek, Irish or Portuguese bond, for example, faces two specific dangers
One is the risk of a eurozone break-up.
The other is a default risk – in which case the debtor defaults but stays inside the eurozone.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT December 29 2010

Europe preview of 2011
In 1931 the collapse of the Creditanstalt, an Austrian bank, heralded the Great Depression.
Eighty years later could the end of the euro set off a catastrophic chain reaction
tearing down the world’s financial institutions and states?
Bruno Waterfield, Daily Telegraph 24 Dec 2010

Eurons framtid högst osäker
Angela Merkel: ”Det viktigaste är att vi tror på euron
och inte låter oss irriteras av marknaderna”
Toma Lundin e24 2010-12-30

”Just nu vill ingen ansluta sig till euron”
Michael Treschow: – Just nu verkar det inte vara en bra idé
–Jag tror ändå på lång sikt att det är en fördel för ett land med liten valuta att hitta mer stabila spelregler,
men det verkar som det ligger långt i framtiden just nu.
EURON DELAR EUROPA | SvD granskar valutaunionen – del 1, 27 december 2010

- Jag känner väldigt mycket äckelkänslor inför utanförskapet.
Alla har väl någon erfarenhet av detta. Att inte bli vald till knattelaget i fotboll.
Att inte bli uppbjuden på damernas.
Michael Treschow, på moderaternas ekonomiseminarium Aftonbladet 7/7 2003

In Hoc Anno Domini
When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.
Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.
Read more here

Joschka Fischer om en ny allians mellan Paris och Berlin
Den irländska krisen har kommit mig att för första gången undra om euron – och därmed EU – kan gå i stöpet.
Trenden går i riktning mot ett ”tyskt Europa”, som aldrig kommer att fungera.
Joschka Fischer, Kolumn DN 28/12 2010

Den tyske förbundskanslern Helmut Kohl tog denna oro på allvar och accepterade tanken på valutaunionen, som ett sätt att förankra det nya starka Tyskland i Europasamarbetet.
Resultatet blev Maastrichtfördraget.
Inför hotet om ett sönderfall kan man enas om åtgärder som vanligtvis ökar EU:s överstatliga karaktär.
Mats Hallgren, e24 21/12 2010

The euro’s struggles could become more pronounced in coming months as traders increasingly use the beleaguered currency to fund so-called “carry trades.”
That may sound surprising, given the yen and the dollar’s singular appeal as currencies is that they cost next to nothing to borrow.
But the euro is perceived to be so vulnerable to further declines on the foreign exchange market that big market participants are zeroing in on trades to bet against it.
Stephen L. Bernard, WSJ Real Time Economics, 21/12 2010

EU, the small dogs och de arbetslösa EUROpéerna
Rolf Englund blog 21/12 2010

The issue is not whether to preserve the eurozone, but how.
The crucial requirement is understanding rightly what has gone wrong.
It has not, as conventional wisdom now goes, been a fiscal failure, except in Greece.
It’s the private sector, stupid!
Martin Wolf. FT December 21 2010

"Can countries inside a fixed exchange-rate system like the euro grow and tighten budget policy at the same time?
I don't think so. It didn't work in Argentina,"

Andrew Bosomworth, head of Pimco's portfolio management in Europe,said.
Daily Telegraph 20/12 2010

The crisis was caused – except in Greece – by large and persistent intra-eurozone private sector imbalances between the centre and the periphery,
which gave rise to large financial flows and bubbles. The European response is not to address the problem directly
but to insist on fiscal discipline and structural reforms.
Wolfgang Münchau, December 19 2010

Look and learn from across the Irish Sea
A generation ago it would have seemed ridiculous to go to Ireland for economics lessons. Not any more
George Osborne, numera finansminister, The Times February 23, 2006

And what did the European Union’s leaders come up with after high-level talks in Brussels? A two-line treaty amendment.
It’s crazy. It might be the case that the euro isn’t worth saving.
This column has certainly argued that it has turned into a bankruptcy machine.
But given that no one is contemplating that yet, it would surely make sense to come up with a credible plan for salvaging the euro.
Matthew Lynn, Bloomberg Opinion Dec 21, 2010

It’s simply stunning that this revolution in the European political system is about to take place under the guise of a “limited treaty change”
that European officials say will not require the votes of member states. It’s hard to believe that anyone truly thinks this is minor;
more likely the EU officials are just frightened that the peoples of Europe will not accept the new regime. Better to impose it before the people can oppose it.
John Carney, Senior Editor, CNBC.com, 20 Dec 2010

ECB Expresses `Serious Concerns' About Irish Proposals to Stabilize Banks
Bloomberg 20/12 2010

Auch deutsche Banken haben sich mit Milliardensummen in Irland engagiert.
Wo die Risiken liegen und wie viel Geld die einzelnen Institute im Feuer haben.
Handelsblatt 18/11 2010

If Germany and its hard-money allies genuinely wish to save the euro – which is open to doubt –
they should stop posturing, face up to the grim imperative of a Transferunion, and
desist immediately from imposing their ruinous and reactionary policies of debt deflation on southern Europe and Ireland.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 19 Dec 2010

Folkomrösta om EU:s fördragsändring för räddningsfonden
Rolf Englund blog 18/12 2010

Ronald Reagans ofta citerade ”Det är staten som är problemet”, har alldeles särskilt kommit att gälla bygget av en europeisk superstat.
Att borgerligheten drev på för ett medlemskap för fredens, demokratins och frihandelns skull är inte skäl att okritiskt älska en politisk koloss som i allt större utsträckning ägnar sig åt annat.
Paulina Neuding chefredaktör för Neo, SvD 19/12 2010

Fredrik Reinfeldt ser ingen överhängande risk för att fördragsförändringen som det beslutats om på mötet skulle kunna leda till nationella krav på folkomröstningar.

- Det ska ligga i linje med vad som kallas ett förenklat förfarande. Det bygger på att man kan fatta beslut på några få månader. Det kräver fortsatt ratifikation i alla 27 medlemsländer, men det behövs inga konvent ihop med EU-parlamentet eller folkomröstningar.
SvD/TT 17/12 2010

Article 48
1. The Treaties may be amended in accordance with an ordinary revision procedure.
They may also be amended in accordance with simplified revision procedures.

The amendment to the Lisbon Treaty will have to be ratified by 27 parliaments, after all.
Der Spiegel 17/12 2010

Två meningar som kan ställa till det rejält
Merkel var orolig för att den mäktiga tyska författningsdomstolen skulle opponera sig mot den tillfälliga krisfond på 750 miljarder euro
SvD, reporter Teresa Küchler, 16 december 2010

Översättning från tyska till svenska via Google:

Valutakris
Euron är i fara - och Europas ledare inte inser den historiska dimensionen av hotet.
Nu behöver en revolution: Alla EU-länder måste samordna skatt, pensioner och löner.
Annars kommer det att gå illa just Tyskland.
Der Spiegel 15/12 2010, av Sven Böll, född 1975, sedan mars 2010, biträdande chef för nationalekonomi.

Sveriges utrikesminister är en av få som öppet argumenterar för fortsatt utvidgning av EU.
Turkiet, Kroatien, Island, Makedonien, Montenegro, Serbien, Albanien, Kosovo och Bosnien/Herzegovina.
Annika Ström Melin, DN 16/12 2010

"Der Euro ist unser gemeinsames Schicksal, und Europa ist unsere gemeinsame Zukunft"
Förbundskansler Merkels ord kommenteras
Rolf Englund blog 16/12 2010

Der Euro ist in Gefahr - und Europas Spitzenpolitiker verkennen die historische Dimension der Bedrohung.
Jetzt braucht es eine Revolution: Alle EU-Staaten müssen Steuern, Renten und Löhne koordinieren.
Sonst wird es gerade Deutschland schlecht ergehen.

Der Spiegel, 15/12 2010, von Sven Böll, Jahrgang 1975, Seit März 2010 stellvertretender Ressortleiter Wirtschaft.

Spain credit rating review by Moody's hits euro
BBC 15 December 2010

So if nothing bad were to happen to force Spain to raise even more money, it will need to borrow €290bn next year, equivalent to a non-trivial 27% of the country's GDP.
Robert Peston, 15 December 2010

SCB:s undersökning om EU- och EMU-sympatierna.
28,9 procent uppgav att de skulle rösta ja till euron om det var folkomröstning i november,
medan 58,2 procent uppgav att de skulle rösta nej.
e24 14/12 2010

The architects of the euro knew that it was incomplete when they designed it.
– unavoidable given that the Maastricht treaty was meant to bring about monetary union without political union.
The authorities were confident, however, that if and when the euro ran into a crisis they would be able to overcome it.
After all, that is how the European Union was created, taking one step at a time, knowing full well that additional steps would be required.
George Soros, FT December 14 2010

Mechanics of a European capital flight
$107bn outflow from Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain in Q2
FT Alphaville Dec 13 2010

Moody’s yesterday put the losses of the Spanish banking sector at €177bn
A recession would drive up losses to €300bn, with new capital requirements of €100bn.
Eurointelligence 14/12 2010

How can Germany or France agree lightly to plans that amount to
an EU debt union, with a common treasury, tax system, and budget policy,
the stuff of civil wars and revolutions over the ages?

To do so is to dismantle the ancient nation states of Europe in all but name.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 12 Dec 2010

Eurokrisen farligare än en terrorist från Tranås
Rolf Englund blog 13/12 2010

The Bank for International Settlements,
not exactly the world’s most controversial institution,
said the debate about investor bail-ins triggered by the Franco-German agreement at Deauville
was an important factor in the intensification of the euro zone sovereign debt crisis
Eurointelligence 13/12 2010

Desmond Lachman, now a research fellow with the American Enterprise Institute:
Most people continue to underestimate the severity of the problem.
The euro zone could be in disarray by this time next year
Fortune 13/12 2010

Det osannolika och omöjliga med en uppdelning eller ett sönderfall av euron i en ny monetär flora,
blasfemiskt tal i politiska kretsar men livligt diskuterad i akademiska,
har blivit allt mer sannolikt.

Per Lindvall 10/12 2010

The EU Is Pushing Ireland to the Brink of Ruin
To make sure that the state does not drown in its debts,
the annual rate of growth has to be significantly higher than the interest due on the national debt,
If the Irish economy does not grow by 8-10 percent, then the country will end in a debt-deflationary spiral.
And even the most optimistic government projections are just below 4 percent.
Der Spiegel 8/12 2010

Most economic historians and international economists I know believe a monetary union would fail unless it develops into a fiscal union.
Yet, almost all political and legal experts who specialise in the European Union believe a fiscal union is Utopian.
If both are right, a fiscal union is simultaneously necessary and impossible.
And that would mean – again if both are right – that the euro is doomed to fail.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT December 12 2010

What once could be dismissed as simply a Greek crisis, or simply a Greek and Irish crisis,
is now clearly a eurozone crisis.


The economics is really quite simple.
Greece has a budget problem. Ireland has a banking problem. Portugal has a private-debt problem. Spain has a combination of all three.
all must now endure excruciatingly painful spending cuts.
Barry Eichengreen, 2010-12-09
Higly recommended

A step closer to Eurobond-age
Rolf Englund, Financial Times, Letters to the editor, December 9 2010

Now that markets have been forced to focus on the fact that
EMU members are more likely to default than truly sovereign states,
they have started to charge a variable risk premium
This is very reminiscent of the ERM crises in the early 1990s.
Gavyn Davies blog November 30, 2010

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he
fears the euro will face a "high noon" moment of reckoning early in the New Year.
BBC 8 December 2010

a defining moment for Europe
I make no apologies for repeatedly taxing the reader with commentary on the future of the single currency,
for its crisis is without doubt the most important European story of the decade.
We are fast approaching a defining moment.
Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph 9 Dec 2010

We've heard it before: Spain is too big to fail—and too big to be saved.
The Blame in Spain Falls Mainly on—Chancellor Merkel?
8 Dec 2010 Ash Bennington, NetNet Writer, Special to CNBC.com

In its financial stability report, the ECB warned that some banks are overreliant on ECB funds.
9 December 2010 - Financial Stability Review December 2010

Nu har alla länder i EMU en gemensam valuta, och därmed en gemensam penningpolitik.
Men alla har en egen finanspolitik, och alla är överens om att det ska förbli så.
Och därmed kommer systemet, i sitt nuvarande skick, inte att fungera.
Nils-Eric Sandberg, f d ledarskribent i DN och publicist i ekonomiska och filosofiska ämnen.
i Kristianstadsbladet 2 december 2010

Nils-Eric Sandberg och sökandet efter EMU:s Holy Grail
Rolf Englund blog 9/12 2010

Det är en väldigt liten sannolikhet för att euron kommer att bryta ihop.
Det säger Svenskt Näringslivs chefekonom Stefan Fölster
och menar att krisen är stärkande och kan föra mycket gott med sig för Europas del i framtiden.
e24 9/12 2010

"Hur kunde euroområdet hamna i dagens prekära läge?"
Lars Jonung om "den statsfinansiella krisen" i EU
kolumn på DN:s ledarsida 9/12 2010

Gordon Brown:
'We have a major crisis in the euro area'
The enormous liabilities of the eurozone's banks are
a serious and substantial accident waiting to happen.
BBC, 8 December 2010

Andrew Duff MEP writes in the FT that the EU was “slithering” into a fiscal union.
“What is happening is not very democratic and it will take years for politicians to explain and justify the process by which fiscal union came about.”
Eurointelligence 9/12 2010

Bank runs have not recurred (after Norther Rock), in spite of the eurozone’s continuing crisis.
But the calm ignores a writhing nightmare of worries behind the doors of once unquestionably sound institutions from Dublin to Athens.
Financial Times December 8 2010

Euro-Krise
Vergiftete Staaten von Europa
Es wird gelästert und kritisiert. Es ist eine paradoxe Situation
- die Währung, die Europa eigentlich aneinander binden soll, spaltet den Kontinent zunehmend.
Der Spiegel 9 december 2010

Doubts are growing as to whether the euro has a future
Europe needs a far-reaching debt restructuring mechanism - but strangely,
politicians have shown a preference for issuing yet more mountains of debt. The euro has never been popular with Germans.
But now that they might have to atone for the financial sins of other EU countries,
the number of euroskeptics has been swelling dramatically.
Der Spiegel 7/12 2010

Could Assange escape extradition to Sweden? His lawyer claims the charges are “politically motivated,” but it won’t be easy.
Sweden is employing the fast-track European Arrest Warrant system, which allows few grounds for challenging extradition.
Underlying the arrangement is an assumption that all the signatory states have trustworthy legal systems and share a respect for human rights.
Newsweek 7/12 2010

Irlands nedskärningar motsvarar 110 miljarder kronor
Rolf Englund blog 7/12 2010

For sceptics the question has always been how robust a currency union among diverse economies with less than unlimited mutual solidarity can be.
Only a crisis could answer that question. Unfortunately, the crisis we have is the biggest for 80 years.
Will what the eurozone is able to agree to do be enough to keep it together? I do not know.
We all will, however, in the fairly near future.
Martin Wolf, FT December 7 2010

Ireland
Severe Budget cutbacks will see drop in living standards

Middle-income workers, families and social welfare recipients will bear the brunt of a €6 billion fiscal adjustmeny
Irish Times, December 7, 2010

Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt has accused his country's current leaders of failing to grasp modern international finance.
He also said the EU lacked leaders capable of crisis management.
BBC 7/12 2010

One of the hallmarks of the unfolding financial crisis is that even “experts” quickly concede that
they do not have answers to most of the really important questions

Gideon Rachman, FT December 6 2010

How Close Did Europe Come to Lehman-Style Crisis?
Before the European bailout package the European banking sector was awash with rumors of an
impending liquidity crunch as interbank lending rates spiked
Many banks with the highest Tier 1 Capital Ratio were struggling to raise money
for more than a 30-day time horizon on the Friday afternoon before the bailout
Patrick Allen, CNBC Senior News Editor 17 May 2010

Direct
How you could possibly create a bond market for which all European Union member countries were responsible, without changing the treaties on which the single currency is based.
Stephanie Flanders, BBC6 December 2010

Any bank requires a continuous flow of funds and the question ceases to be whether it is solvent and becomes simply whether it will be able to refinance maturing debt at an acceptable price.
The worry that it won’t becomes self fulfilling.
The euro area is standing on the brink of such a meltdown today.
Sir John Gieve, Daily Telegraph 7 December 2010

The financial storm has reopened the debate on the euro’s flawed design
The political commitment to the euro may be strong enough to bail out excessive debtors and even to survive a partial default. But it may not be so strong that it can support closer fiscal integration.
Charlemagne, The Economist print Dec 2nd 2010

Direct
Germany Snubs Pleas to Boost Aid, Sell Joint Bonds
Bloomberg 6/12 2010

Reinfeldt, Rolf Gustavsson, Lissabonfördraget och Sudettyskarna
Rolf Englund blog 5/12 2010

Man kan lätt konstatera att Fridolin har fel genom att vända blicken österut.
Finland, en liten ekonomi i Europas utkant och lik vår egen, har klarat sig marginellt bättre än Sverige sedan 1999 med euron som valuta, skrev Carl B Hamilton.
BBCs diagram visar något annat

Despite an €85 billion bail-out for Ireland, the euro zone’s debt crisis is getting worse.
Our first article looks at why politicians’ attempts to stem the crisis are failing.
Our second examines what a break-up of the euro zone might look like
The Economist print Dec 2nd 2010

I become nervous when Angela Merkel says the future of the euro and that of the EU are inextricably linked.
What worries me is that, on the evidence so far, Berlin does not have the political will to rescue the single currency.
Philip Stephens, FT December 2 2010

European Union states have underwritten their financial sectors
with 4.5 trillion euros ($5.9tn) of aid since the banking crisis hit.
Sweden 161.6 bn euros
BBC December 1, 2010 with nice list

Breaking up the euro is not unthinkable, just very costly.
Because they refuse to face up to the possibility that it might happen,
Europe’s leaders are failing to take the measures necessary to avert it.
The Economist print Dec 2nd 2010

De som köpte bostad i Spanien under 2007, innan finanskrisen slog till,
har i vissa fall fått se sitt hus halveras i värde.
Mäklare i Spanien talar om prisfall på allt från 25 till 50 procent.
e24 2/12

It pains me to say this. I’m probably the most pro-euro economist on my side of the Atlantic.
I’m also a believer in the larger European project.
But given this abject failure of European and German leadership, I am going to have to rethink my position.
Barry Eichengreen
Highly recommended

Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero:
"[Our banking system] is definitely healthy"
Rolf Englund blog 2/12 2010

Can Europe save the euro?
Slowly, people are beginning to realize that the eurozone's debt problems are structural.
And that means adding more debt to countries like Ireland,
already struggling to repay creditors, is a recipe for disaster

Anthony Mirhaydari, MSN Money 1/12 2010
Highly recommended

Only Trichet can save us now – ECB about to monetise peripheral debt
The second problem is that a large purchasing programme of the kind demanded by analysis
is almost certainly a breach of European law, and German constitutional law.

Eurointelligence, 2 December 2010

The FT has news from the Bank of International Settlements,
according to which Irish banks are extremely exposed to borrowers in Greece, Spain and Portugal,

Irish banks are also the fifth largest global lender in Italy.
Eurointelligence, 2 December 2010

Europe’s sovereign crisis is spreading to the heart of the 16-nation bloc as
investors question Belgium’s ability to cut the euro region’s third-highest debt load
Bloomberg Dec 1, 2010

The only problem that lies in the way of this rational outcome is that
much of Europe is currently burdened by a political elite that can't admit that it was wrong.
There seems to be no desire among these politicians to recognize that that single currency was a mistake
Guy Johnson, CNBC "European Closing Bell" Anchor 29 Nov 2010

Konstruktionen av den fond som sattes upp efter Greklandskrisen i våras har en inneboende svaghet.
Den garanteras av samtliga EMU-medlemmar, men ett land som själv använder fonden faller bort som garant.
Det innebär att ju större behovet är av fonden desto mindre pengar har den att låna ut.
Viktor Munkhammar, DI 2010-11-30

- The survival of the Euro is no longer up for debate
Once this episode is over, almost everybody will be much happier.
Rolf Englund blog 1/12 2010

The others are tapas; Spain is the main course.
Why is Spain in so much trouble? In a word, it’s the euro.
Paul Krugman, New York Times November 28, 2010

2011 will see the first member of the European single currency starting to talk seriously about
leaving the euro zone.
That country will be Germany.
Guy Johnson, CNBC "European Closing Bell" Anchor 29 Nov 2010

Dr. Robert Shapiro (served as Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs in President Clinton's administration):
The big fear is that a default in Spain could significantly hurt German and French banks since
they hold more than $600 billion in Spanish debt, a large chunk.
And that could create a scenario similar to the Wall Street meltdown of 2008
CNN 30/11 2010

Under a floating exchange rate, some of the pressure would be relieved by a rising exchange rate in the boom and a falling rate in the bust.
With a pegged rate, the collapse in the currency would normally restore competitiveness and growth.
In a currency union, these safety valves are lost. Instead, we have a joint credit and competitiveness crisis.
The solution for the loss of competitiveness is a sharp fall in prices.
But that worsens the credit crisis: this, then, is debt deflation, as Ireland knows
Martin Wolf, FT November 30 2010

European finance ministers have in effect announced that the risks of lending to financially stretched eurozone countries would increase in two and a half year's time
- which is no time at all for many investors.
Robert Peston BBC 29 November 2010

Nigel Farage: The Euro Game Is Up!
European Parliament, Strasbourg - 24 November 2010
YouTube

The public-sector rescue of Ireland's banks is predicated on the idea that the banks' creditors will be reassured
by a lifting in their capital resources from 8% of assets to 12%.
Robert Peston BBC 29 November 2010

Nu börjar Eurokrisen bli riktigt rolig
Rolf Englund blog 30/11 2010

2 triljoner euros
Yields on 10-year Italian bonds jumped 21 points to 4.61pc, threatening to shift the crisis to a new level.
Italy's public debt is over €2 trillion, the world's third-largest after the US and Japan.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 29 Nov 2010

Folkpartiet välkomnar de förslag som EU-kommissionen lagt, även när de innebär steg mot överstatlighet med makroekonomisk övervakning och gemensamma strängare budgetregler.
Ett starkare ekonomiskt samarbete är bästa medicinen för Sveriges och det tättbefolkade Europas ekonomiska stabilitet.
Carl B Hamilton, ordförande i riksdagens EU-nämnd, SvD 28/11 2010

Endgame
The same pattern again. The EU agrees a pact, and the markets are panicking.
This time it took them only a few hours. The EU’s credibility is sinking with each agreement.
We are now fast approach default time. Yields have been rising in Spain and even Italy yesterday afternoon,and the situation continued to deteriorate overnight.
We at Eurointelligence consider a default of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal a done deal.
Eurointelligence 30/11 2010

The markets attention shifted from the immediate funding problems to the underlying solvency issues.
Ireland’s interest rates under the EFSF will average 5.8%, and investors realised that this rate is too high to be sustainable.
As the country’s nominal growth is almost certain to lie well below that number for many years to come, Ireland’s debt will be on an explosive trajectory.
The markets have come to recognise that Ireland is insolvent. This morning, the yields on 10 years were close to 9.5% - which entails a high default probability.
Eurointelligence 30/11 2010

Fear is spreading in Europe. How many countries are going to need bailouts
-- and how many billions of euros will that take?
And is the entire euro alliance at risk?
Der Spiegel 11/26/2010

Europe is edging towards the unthinkable
The eurozone is manoeuvring itself into a position where it confronts the choice between two alternatives considered “unimaginable”:
fiscal union or break-up.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT November 28 2010

Eurokrisen från PIGS till BIIGS
Rolf Englund blog 26/11 2010

The euro crisis
Spreading from Ireland to Iberia
To stop the euro’s meltdown, Zapatero must revive Spanish reform
The Economist print Nov 25th 2010

Think BIIGS:
There's One Euro Country Under the Radar

/Belgien/
CNBC 26 Nov 2010

Credit default swaps (CDS) measuring risk on German, French and Dutch bonds have surged over recent days,
rising significantly above the levels of non-EMU states in Scandinavia.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 26 Nov 2010

Probably one of the best pieces of analytical commentary we have yet read on the eurozone situation
Once the dust finally settles Europe will either be a unified country
with fiscal sovereignty firmly established in Berlin or Brussels,
or it will be fragmented with little chance of reunion.

Michael Petis via Rolf Englund blog 24/11 2010

Eurozone borrowing costs hit record
Don Smith, economist at Icap, said: “Wildfire can be very difficult to put out.

The contagion could eventually spread all the way to France. The markets are very nervous.”
FT 25/11 2010

Europe's fate may be decided soon by the German constitutional court
the legality of the Greek bail-out, the EFSF machinery, and ECB bond purchases
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 26 Nov 2010

Leaving the euro: how would it work?
BBC 25 November 2010

EMU är inget experiment. EMU är ett vågspel.
Ett experiment kan avbrytas. EMU är som att göra fisksoppa av ett akvarium.
Om man ångrar sig är det svårt att göra ogjort.
Rolf Englund 13/7 2003

"There is zero danger"
"It is inconceivable that the euro fails"

Klaus Regling, chief of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF)
CNBC 25/11 2010

"There are no Americans in Bagdad"
Bagdad Bob 2003

The road to self-destruction of the eurozone
Paul de Grauwe, Eurointelligence 18/11 2010
Highly Recommended

Did he sing in the bath?
Lord Lamont was UK chancellor of the exchequer 1990-93 and is co-chairman of the Bruges Group
The problem with the EU is that at times its very nature exacerbates internal tensions.
That is why the euro may eventually break up

Norman Lamont, Financial Times, June 22 2005

Portugal is the next example of a country to demonstrate that austerity in the middle of a financial crisis is a sure recipe for disaster.
The mood in the bond markets is deteriorating sharply, as Portuguese, and Spanish, spreads reach new records,
amid expectation that the crisis is very certain to spill over to Portugal, and possibly even to Spain.
FT Deutschland makes the remark the Portuguese spreads are about as high now as the Greek spreads
were ahead of the rescue.
Eurointelligence 24/11 2010

EU:s "Bagdad Bob"
Europeiska rådets ordförande Herman Van Rompuys retoriska skönmålning av de finansiella krishärdarna i euroländerna
Grekland, Irland, Spanien och Portugal blir alltmer verklighetsflyktiga.
I hård konkurrens med andra EU-höjdare gör han anspråk på titeln EU:s "Bagdad Bob"
Per Lindvall e24, 24/11 2010 med bra bild och länk till Real Bagdad Bob

Back in 2007, Ireland’s net public debt was just 12 per cent of gross domestic product.
This compares with 50 per cent in Germany and 80 per cent in Greece.

Martin Wolf, FT November 23 2010

I Sverige har bostadspriserna rusat i höjden med hela 116 procent på tio år.
Det är lika mycket som i Spanien och betydligt mer än på krisdrabbade Irland
där priserna stigit med 34 procent sedan år 2000, enligt SEB
Expressen 24/11 2010

Den grundlagsförändring som riksdagen den 2 juni i år enhälligt röstade för i en första omgång,
och som kan komma att klubbas igenom den 24 november, innefattar punkter som försvagar det svenska medborgarskapet, grundlagsbefäster mångkulturalismen samt innebär krav på att
grundlagen åter måste ändras i det fall Sveriges vill träda ur den europeiska unionen.
Jimmie Ã…kesson och Kent Ekeroth, Sverigedemokraterna, SvD Brännpunkt 19 november 2010

Den 24 november ska riksdagen fatta det andra och avgörande beslutet för att ändringarna i regeringsformen
som ska träda i kraft den 1 januari 2011.
Med denna nya paragraf blir Sveriges EU-medlemskap grundlagsskyddat.
Konsekvensen blir att medlemskapet i EU cementeras och att det blir svårare för Sverige att lämna EU.

Jan-Erik Gustafsson, ordförande i Folkrörelsen Nej till EU, m fl, SvD Brännpunkt 23 november 2010

The Irish bailout is not, after all, what one normally thinks of as a bailout
— it’s not like the Texas S&L bailout, where national taxpayers assumed the losses of failed Texas banks.
It’s simply an agreement to lend Ireland funds at more or less safe market rates.
We can also see why the bailout isn’t likely to succeed. The basic situation is that given the cost of rescuing Ireland’s banks
and the damage harsh austerity is inflicting on Ireland’s economy,
investors are understandably skeptical that the Irish government will actually be able to meet its commitments.
Paul Krugman New York Times November 23, 2010

Krugman: Det är ingen bail-out för Irland
och några ord om Dagens Nyheter

Rolf Englund blog 23/11 2010

Dagens Nyheter: EU har ännu ingen helt gemensam skattepolitik
"Beskattningsrätten är kärnan i det nationella självbestämmandet och demokratin"
DN, huvudledare 23/11 2010

Den irländska krisen är långt ifrån över och läget för euron är "exceptionellt allvarligt",
enligt Tysklands förbundskansler Angela Merkel. Hon tillägger att hon inte kommer backa från kravet på att
den privata sektorn, i första hand banker och pensionsfonder, är med och tar smällen i det system för
stödåtgärder som 2013 ska ersätta euroländernas stödfacilitet EFSF.
VA TT-Reuters 23/11 2010

It would be nice if the BBC stopped trotting these characters /EMU-suportes/ out as if they were disinterested experts, while presenting those of us who opposed the euro as Right-wing eccentrics.
We don’t want an apology, those of us who got the call right: we just want to be listened to next time.

Daniel Hannan November 21st, 2010

Det var inte folket som besegrade eliten.
Det var den slutna ekonomins särintresse som besegrade den öppnas

Lars Jonung kolumn DNs ledarsida 10/9 2004

Tyska och brittiska banker har stora fordringar på Irland
och det skulle slå mycket hårt om man på förfallodagarna fick svaret: vi kan inte betala.

SvD 23/11 2010

Here's what we Eurosceptics were saying about Ireland and the euro in 1998
Daniel Hannan November 21st, 2010

The eurozone is pressing ahead with the same approach it has followed ever since the collapse of Lehmans
When in doubt, sign another blank cheque to private creditors, and try not to think about the money, or the moral hazard.
Stephanie Flanders, the BBC's economics editor, 22 November 2010

"Can the Euro Still Be Saved?"
The countries of the euro zone are hopelessly divided over the question of how to save the currency in the long term.
Bailouts for individual countries like Ireland and Greece can only be a temporary solution.
Meanwhile, an internal paper drawn up by the German government has revealed Berlin's plans for
forcing private-sector investors to take their share of losses in future crises.
By SPIEGEL Staff, 22/11 2010

British taxpayers should not have to fund a bail-out of the Irish banks because Ireland's financial crisis is “not our problem,”
the former Conservative Cabinet minister John Redwood has said.
Daily Telegraph 22/11 2010

– Det är självklart för Sverige att delta, säger finansminister Anders Borg
om möjligheten att bistå Irlands regering med ett bilateralt lån på 5—10 miljarder kronor
DN 22/11 2010

Det finns jätterisker att det inte fungerar.
Att Irland kommer att misslyckas att få till sin ekonomi i alla fall – att de kommer att gå i statsbankrutt
och vara tvungna att be om att få sina skulder nedskrivna.
Om det händer har privata skulder i banker och finansbolag flyttas över till skattebetalarna.
Ekots Staffan Sonning 22/11 2010

Den verkliga faran är Spanien och kanske även i Italien,
EMU:s tredje respektive fjärde största ekonomier.
Viktor Munkhammar, DI 22/11 2010

The two largest creditors to Ireland are /banks in/ the UK and Germany,
with loans outstanding of $149bn and $139bn respectively

An Irish bank default would affect the German and British banking systems directly, and require significant domestic bank bail-outs.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT November 21 2010

Ireland: An extreme version of the British disease
Robert Peston, BBC 22 November 2010

Peter Wolodarski försvarar EMU om Irland och Grekland
Rolf Englund blog 2010-11-21

Conditions for securing a lasting peace within Western Europe were arguably already in place by 1954
The European creation myth of the 1990’s (“Europe must accept supranational political and economic structures to prevent future conflict”) may be flawed. Such a flaw, to the extent that Europeans no longer believe it, may explain a lot of things, from public referendums rejecting the EU constitution
Stocksthatpay 21/11 2010

De som försöker skuldbelägga Europeiska centralbankens låga ränta för den ohållbara låneexpansionen har en poäng.
Skeptiker till euron vädrar morgonluft och upprepar sin gamla kritik mot den gemensamma valutan:
– Vad var det vi sa, säger de. Euron passade inte för Greklands behov och den passar inte heller för Irlands.
Vad som krävs är en nationell räntepolitik och nationella valutor, som går att devalvera.
Peter Wolodarski, DN Signerat 21/11 2010

Var det den gemensamma valutan som ligger bakom Irlands problem.
Skulle krisen ha dämpats om den irländska riksbanken hade kunnat höja räntan för att kyla av den keltiska tigern? Har landet drabbats av en så kallad asymmetrisk chock?
Ja, svarade Lars Calmfors. Han anser att Irland är ett tydligt exempel på att den gemensamma räntenivån i hela euroområdet kan skapa problem för enskilda länder.
Annika Ström Melin, DN Signerat 18/11 2010

Officials disclosed that the Irish central bank had extended €20bn ($27bn) of exceptional liquidity to the banks in September and October
– over and above the €130bn they had been lent by the European Central Bank,
which itself was one-quarter of all ECB lending to eurozone banks.
Financial Times November 19 2010

It was an old-fashioned property bubble
Ireland Central Bank governor Patrick Honohan warned repeatedly that the credit bubble was out of control and would end badly
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 19 Nov 2010
Highly recommended

This is the most important eurozone news today, much more important, and alarming, than anything that happens in Ireland.
The OECD forecasts that Germany’s current account surplus will rise back to 7% of GDP by 2012.
This means that the forces that driving the eurozone apart, are gathering speed again.
Eurointelligence 19/11 2010

Until the country joined the European exchange rate mechanism in 1979, the Irish pound was virtually identical with the UK pound.
Samuel Brittan 18/11 2010

The conundrum is that the best course for Ireland would be to exit the euro zone,
depreciate its currency and restructure its bank debt.

Yves Smith, writes the blog Naked Capitalism, New York Times November 17, 2010

The Irish government has issued guarantees to its banking system worth approximately 176 percent of Irish gross domestic product. Irish banks, increasingly shut out of private markets, have grown ever more reliant on liquidity provided by the ECB.
Jacob F. Kirkegaard, research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics,
New York Times November 17, 2010

Ireland
What is the fundamental problem that needs to be fixed?
And second, how can that problem be fixed?
Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor 18 November 2010

Ireland borrowed and spent itself into a financial crisis.
Irish banks borrowed abroad and re-lent the money to Irish home buyers on the expectation that home prices would continue to climb.
When the real estate market collapsed, borrowers crashed, the banks came tumbling after, and so did the rest of the economy.
Sound familiar?

Jeffry A. Frieden, a professor of government at Harvard, author of Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century."
New York Times November 17, 2010

The EU has taken its most decisive step towards becoming a genuine unitary State,
by shifting key policies on taxes and public spending from national to federal level.
with almost no public awareness or debate
Anatole Kaletsky The Times November 3 2010

Germany wants to bail out Ireland more than the Irish want to be bailed out.
The Irish financial problem, in contrast to the Greek one, is not caused by excessive government borrowing
but by the enormous losses suffered by the country’s private banks, which owe tens of billions of euros more
to their foreign creditors than they can expect to recoup from their dud property loans.

Anatole Kaletsky The Times November 17 2010

DN och SvD drar inga slutsatser av Irland och EMU
Rolf Englund blog 18/11 2010

Det stora testet kommer när Spanien ber om hjälp.
”Det vill man helst inte tänka på, men det är en tidsfråga”, säger Pär Magnusson, chefsanalytiker på Royal Bank of Scotland.
Annelie Östlund e24 2010-11-17

Noch stehen Irland und Portugal im Mittelpunkt der Euro-Krise.
Doch die wirkliche Gefahr für die Stabilität der Währungsunion geht von Spanien aus.
Würden die Investoren das Vertrauen in das große EU-Land verlieren,
könnte die Schuldenkrise eine völlig neue Qualität bekommen.

Handelsblatt 15/11 2010

Daniel McCormack von der Investmentbank Macquarie.
"Spanien macht zwölf Prozent der Wirtschaftsleistung der Euro-Zone aus, mehr als dreimal so viel wie Irland und Portugal zusammengenommen",
rechnet der Volkswirt vor.

SEK 796 miljarder
Dublin hopes to dress up any bail-out as aid for banks rather than the state,
but the distinction became meaningless when Ireland guaranteed its banks in September 2008.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 18 Nov 2010 with nice pic

Auch deutsche Banken haben sich mit Milliardensummen in Irland engagiert.
Wo die Risiken liegen und wie viel Geld die einzelnen Institute im Feuer haben.
Handelsblatt 18/11 2010

"Irland behöver EU:s lugnande tigerbalsam"
Krisen /för Irland/ bottnar i att boomen i alltför hög grad var lånedriven med banker som använde glädjekalkyler.
Däri ligger också den politiska skulden: man borde ha kylt ned marknaden.
SvD-ledare 18/11 2010

När den amerikanska bostadsmarknaden dök sprack också den irländska fastighetsbubblan.
Bankerna kapsejsade under trycket av svajiga krediter och bostadsköpare som inte kunde betala sina lån.
Staten håller nu ett svårt sjukt finanssystem under armarna.
DN-ledare 18/11 2010

Supply side rabbits
How do you try to convince markets that an economy is going to grow even in the face of serious budget cuts, at a time of already high unemployment?
You produce some supply side structural reforms from a hat, et voila!
Kevin O’Rourke 16/11

Europe heads back into the storm
Ireland’s basic problem is that it now has to choose between its own sovereign solvency and the solvency of its banks.
Other European countries – in and out of the eurozone – may soon face the same choice.
In such a world, keeping banks afloat with public capital risks sinking the sovereign
– and with it, the whole banking system.

Financial Times editorial November 17 2010

The conservative Die Welt writes:
"The unthinkable has happened. The euro, the common currency and pride of the Europeans, is suspiciously close to the abyss."
"Europe is in the deepest crisis since its foundation. The community began as a project for peace and reconciliation. Its credo was: The whole is more important than the individual country. Little remains of that sentiment. The EU of today is like a club of 27 egotists, that are somehow connected through technocratic procedures and the competition for the biggest slice of the European wealth cake.
Europe is exhausted. It lacks strength, ideas, a common purpose and an indentity."
Cit by Der Spiegel 17/11 2010

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:
"The euro, which was supposed to make European integration 'irreversible' could become its undertaker.

When the euro was launched, it was a big bet that sharing the same currency would make a group of very different economies converge, and so allow the European Central Bank to operate a single monetary policy for all of them.
It was an interesting theory, but it turned out to be wrong.
Matthew Lynn Bloomberg 16/11 2010

Spanish economy - 5th largest in EU
Population: 45.8 million, Budget deficit in 2009: 11.1%, Unemployment in Sept: 20.8%
BBC 17/11 2010

EU:s president och Tysklands förbundskansler pratar strunt
Rolf Englund blog 16/11 2010

The exposure of banks /in Greece, Portugal, and Ireland/ is around $1.5 trillion
Let's assume, which is reasonable, that a meaningful portion of that $1.5 trillion can never be repaid
What would be a disaster would be a disorderly, piecemeal process of public and private sector defaults
Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, 16/11 2010

I dag har jag varit elak, hoppas jag
Några citat om Krisen för EMU
Rolf Englund blog 16/11 2010

Mr Van Rompuy said he was "very confident" the problems could be overcome. But he added:
"We all have to work together in order to survive with the eurozone,
because if we don't survive with the eurozone we will not survive with the European Union."

BBC 16/11 2010

Euro under siege after Portugal hits panic button
'If the euro fails, then Europe fails,'
warned the German Chancellor Angela Merkel last night
DT Tuesday 16 November 2010 with nice pic

Europe stumbles blindly towards its 1931 moment
Unless the ECB takes fast and dramatic action, it risks destroying the currency it is paid to manage,
and allowing a political catastrophe to unfold in Europe.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 14 Nov 2010

It is not an exaggeration to say that there would not be a banking system in Ireland - and therefore not an economy in any conventional sense for the generosity of the European Central Bank in providing loans to Irish banks that the markets won't provide.
Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, 15/11 2010

So why are the possibility of sovereign default, persistent imbalances and lack of a fiscal union incompatible?
Wolfgang Münchau, FT November 14 2010

Coca-Cola last week issued $4.5bn of three-year bonds on a rock-bottom coupon of 0.75 per cent.
Compare Coca-Cola with poor old Ireland whose three-year government bonds are now yielding 8.8 per cent.
Something is wrong.
Tony Jackson, FT November 14 2010

Löpsedelstext från Dublin: 48 Hours to Save The Euro
Irland avvisar spekulationer om EU-stöd
Ekot 15/11 2010, med fin bild

Europas stabilitet är inte längre given
Om boken Peer Steinbrück, tidigare Tysklands finansminister, Unterm Strich
Rolf Gustavsson, SvD 6 november 2010

The Republic of Ireland is in preliminary talks with EU officials for financial support, the BBC has learned.
It is now no longer a matter of whether but when the Irish government formally approaches the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF) for a bailout
BBC 13 November 2010

A treaty change will be rammed through under Article 48 of the Lisbon Treaty, a trick that circumvents the need for full ratification.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 31 Oct 2010

The futile attempt to save the eurozone
Samuel Brittan, FT November 4 2010

If you strip out the humbug, the Greek package allows banks and funds to shift roughly €150bn of liabilities onto EU governments, or the European Central Bank, or the IMF.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 31 Oct 2010

Angela Merkel consigns Ireland, Portugal and Spain to their fate
Germany has had enough. Any eurozone state that spends its way into a debt crisis
or cannot adapt to a monetary union set for Northern rhythms will face “orderly” bankruptcy.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 31 Oct 2010

European Financial Stability Facility (Greklands räddningspaket)
Germany’s constitutional court has left Ms Merkel little leeway.
Without a treaty change, the EFSF must run out in 2013
Wolfgang Münchau, FT October 31 2010

Ben S. Bernanke’s push to jump-start the U.S. economy this week may weaken the dollar
Within 33 hours this week, fallout from the Fed could cause even ECB change course if the euro surges
Bloomberg 1/11 2010

Angela Merkel insisterade på att en begränsad ändring är nödvändig
för att landets författningsdomstol inte ska stoppa Tyskland
från att vara en del i det skyddsnät som ska ersätta den tillfälliga räddningsfond som inrättades efter eurokrisen i våras.
SvD Näringsliv 29 oktober 2010

According to EU officials,
Mr Trichet told the summit that signalling to markets that private investors would be more at risk in restructurings could spook the bond market, driving up interest rates for countries such as Ireland and Greece.
The EU officials said Mr Trichet’s warning was met with bitterness by Nicolas Sarkozy, who complained he did not understand the challenges facing heads of state.
FT 29/10 2010

ECB loans to banks down to 514 billion euros (USD 716 billion),
the least since Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s collapse in September 2008,
Greek, Irish and Spanish banks took 61 percent of the loans supplied
Bloomberg Oct 29, 2010

Calmfors: EMU klarar inte ytterligare en kris
Blir den stor måste IMF kallas in.
Men det är inte säkert att ens IMF skulle räcka till i en situation
där exempelvis Grekland tvingas ställa in betalningarna och effekterna sprider sig till andra EMU-länder.
E24 29/10 2010

Greece to run a budget deficit for 2010 greater than the 8.1 percent it agreed to as part of a rescue package,
according to a person briefed on the matter but not authorized to speak about it.
At worst a deficit of 8.9 percent, latest revision in Greece’s 2009 deficit — to about 15.5 percent
New York Times, tips by Eurointelligence, 27/10 2010

Political upheaval rocks eurozone debt markets
Hopes of a budget deal in Portugal collapsed
Ireland has announced fiscal retrenchement of €15bn over the next four years,
twice the original plan. It is already cutting public wages by 13pc.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 27 Oct 2010

No governments have yet fallen, and no sovereign debt has yet been repudiated.
The key word is "yet."
Irwin Stelzer, director of economic-policy studies at the Hudson Institute
Wall Street Journal 25/10 2010

French and the Germans have once again been discussing whether /Stability Pact/ sanctions should be automatic or not.
For Jean-Claude Trichet to issue an official note of disagreement – after European Union finance ministers last week drafted a watered-down sanctions package – is extraordinary
Wolfgang Münchau, FT 25/10 2010

Europeiska byrån för förvaltningen av det operativa samarbetet vid Europeiska unionens yttre gränser (FRONTEX)
Klicka här

The new French revolution
Youths as young as 15 are turning France into a battleground in a violent protest over pensions.
Are they becoming unstoppable?
The Times 24 October 2010

Tusentals serber och makedonier har tagit sig till EU efter att visumtvånget för serbiska medborgare avskaffades.
Nu vill Sveriges EU-kommissionär Cecilia Malmström stoppa asylströmmen.
DN 22/10 2010

Är hon EU:s polisminister?
Lördagsintervjun med Cecilia Malmström 23 oktober 2010

Some 200 demonstrators blocked France's Marseille-Provence airport for more than three hours
Thursday as strikes and protests continued across the country
CNN 21/10 2010 with nice video

Is Turkey turning its back on the West?
Europeans are trembling over the prospect of being asked to admit
such a populous state /CIA: 76,805,524 (July 2010 est.)/ into the European Union
The Economist, Oct 21st 2010

Vi har en EU-minister som under det första året inte gjort mycket annat än att i drastiska ordalag förklara hur dåligt Europa är på olika områden och hur skadliga delar av EU-lagstiftningen är för Sverige.
Hon gör ett undantag i och med att hon konsekvent hyllar eurosamarbetet som en universallösning på alla tänkbara problem
Olle Ludvigsson, EU-parlamentariker (S), DN Debatt 21/10 2010


Spanska fastighetspriser

Jag är oerhört besviken över att kommissionen i gårdagens rapport inte verkar för radikala reformer eller neddragningar inom jordbrukspolitiken.
Birgitta Ohlsson, DN Debatt 20/10 2010

Sarkozy warning as French strikes hit power supply
BBC 20 October 2010, with nice video.

French strikes force petrol stations to shut
BBC 18 October 2010, with nice video

Defiant France ignores the abyss
There is the argument in government ministries and the smoke-free conference rooms of Brussels, as politicians and bureaucrats attempt to define new continent-wide rules to ensure Europe does not slip back into a new and debilitating debt crisis.
But the future of the European economy and its single currency is more likely to be decided on the streets.
Gideon Rachman, FT October 18 2010

Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin"
WSJ OCTOBER 18, 2010 By MATTHEW KAMINSKI

Konventionell ekonomisk visdom säger att det är ohållbart att i längden ha så stora obalanser i världshandeln som vi haft sedan början av 2000-talet. Länder med underskott i utrikeshandeln måste ta sig samman och och sluta att leva på utlandslån (USA, Storbritannien och PIIGS-länderna). Här är euro-området en svag punkt. Den europeiska centralbanken ECB har en mycket rigid inställning till QE. En bedömare som professor Nouriel Roubini menar att ECB är beredd att offra PIIGS-länderna för att slippa vidta QE med hänvisning till inflationsfaran. Roubini pekade i förrgår på att risken för PIIGS-länderna istället är deflation. Nu utmålar han allvarliga risker för att en ny världsdepression är under uppsegling.
Danne Nordling 16 oktober 2010

Portugal’s minority government is to unveil a tough austerity budget on Friday
amid fears that opposition parties will fail to provide the necessary support
FT October 15 2010

Robert Mundell — the Columbia University professor
who advocated the hard-money, low-tax policy mix that broke stagflation in the early 1980s,
and who received the Nobel Prize in 1999 for his work on exchange rates —
He thinks the European Central Bank, along with the Federal Reserve, should intervene in currency markets
to limit movement in the world's single most important exchange rate

Wall Street Journal, 16/10 2010

Mrs Thatcher, 85
The Times: Baroness Thatcher is expected to attend a reception in her honour at 10 Downing Street on Thursday.
Reports suggest that about 150 serving and former ministers will be present.

For four months Belgium has been without a government, its public debt is approaching 100% of GDP
and the spread of Belgian 10-year bonds over the German benchmark is today three times as high as at the beginning of this year.
Is Belgium the next country with a sovereign debt crisis?
Susanne Mundschenk and Raphael Cottin, Eurointelligence 15/10 2010

China wants to impose a deflationary adjustment on the US,
just as Germany is doing to Greece.

Martin Wolf 12 october 2010

Euro disintegration was never a great risk.
The real danger was and remains a collapse of Europe’s financial system
and the slump this would trigger. A sovereign default could easily have repercussions exceeding even those of the Lehman bankruptcy two years ago.
The fact that the aid to Greece was a surreptitious /Obtained, done, or made by clandestine or stealthy means/ rescue of German banks was an important, if unmentioned, reason for Berlin’s willingness to play along.
Financial Times editorial October 12 2010

The Estonia entry decision was made in haste, coinciding as it did with May’s sovereign debt crisis.
The decision was a kind of vote of confidence in the resilience of the Euro Area: “look, we aren’t about to fall apart, we’re even accepting new members”.
Edward Hugh, Fistful of Euros, 11/10 2010

The chances that governments would obey the rules did not exactly brighten when
Romano Prodi, Commission president from 1999 to 2004, asserted in October 2002 that the stability pact was “stupid”
because it provided for sanctions on countries already in financial difficulties.
Tony Barber, FT October 11 2010

The euro:
Dinner on the edge of the abyss
On a spring evening, a group of the world’s most powerful policymakers sat down to dinner at 501 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Eleven days earlier, European leaders and the International Monetary Fund had promised Greece a €45bn ($62bn) bail-out. But the discussions at 501 Pennsylvania Avenue, hosted by Jim Flaherty, Canada’s finance minister, established that this was likely to be far too little.
Tony Barber, FT October 10 2010

Europe is the region in the world most at risk of losing a currency war.
Unlike normal nation states, the eurozone lacks a legal and institutional framework to deal effectively with such a situation.
The most likely outcome would be a further large real appreciation of the euro,
which would ultimately lead to a significant slowdown in exports and growth.
One of the numerous toxic effects likely to occur in such a scenario is the imminent failure of the European bank rescue strategy.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT October 10 2010

Riksdagen sade på onsdagen för första gången nej till ett EU-förslag med hänvisning till närhetsprincipen
Beslutet gällde två förslag från EU-kommissionen om att alla EU-länder ska bli skyldiga att låna ut pengar till andra medlemsländer som inte klarar av insättningsgaranti och investerarskydd.
Sydsvenskan 7 oktober 2010

It seems doubtful that the Celtic Tiger will ever roar again.
How did Ireland lurch into crisis once more
when most other European countries seem to have got to grips with their banking woes?
Sunday Times 3 oktober 2010

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt stressed that the EU is a trading "super-power"
but needed to pool more defence resources, in particular on conflict resolution and management.
A full write-up of the event and an audio recording will be available on our website shortly.
Click here

"One of the most catastrophic political decision taken in post-war Europe"
The collapse of Lehman Brothers was without a doubt the single most symbolic moment of the financial crisis.
But for Europe it was on Tuesday, 30 September 2008, when the Irish prime minister gave a blanket guarantee for the entire banking sector.
Wolfgang Münchau, Eurointelligence 7/10 2010

Joseph Stiglitz sees bleak future for euro as New Malaise takes hold
Exclusive extract: In an updated edition of his critically acclaimed book, Freefall, Joseph Stiglitz analyses the response to the financial crisis and finds new threats stalking the global economy
Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy
Amazon

Wherever I go in Europe I am asked what happened to the Eurosceptics in the Conservative Party?
Some imagine, mistakenly, that they have quietly joined the endangered species list.
Gavin Hewitt, the BBC's Europe editor, 4 October 2010

Mitterrand forderte Euro als Gegenleistung für die Einheit
Aus bisher geheim gehaltenen Protokollen geht nach SPIEGEL-Informationen hervor: Erst die Bereitschaft der Kohl-Bundesregierung, ihren Widerstand gegen die Einführung des Euro aufzugeben, ebnete den Weg zur Einheit.
Der Spiegel 25/9 2010

We received a report submitted from a Spanish blogger who wishes to remain anonymous, in which the author, in 7 brief pages, describes why
in his view Spain's GDP is massively overrepresented.
The report (attached below) provides extensive validation for this hypothesis
by Tyler Durden at zerohedge 30/9 2010

Ireland will take a majority stake in its second-largest bank, Allied Irish Bank
The bail-out costs will lift the fiscal deficit from the planned 11.75 per cent of gross domestic product in 2010 to 32 per cent.
This compares with the Maastricht treaty guidelines of 3 per cent.
FT, September 30 2010

Moody’s downgraded Spain’s government bonds, citing weak economic growth, a deterioration of financial strength and higher borrowing needs.
The downgrade by Moody’s by one notch from its top rating of AAA to Aa1 makes it the last of the three big rating agencies to downgrade Spain
The downgrade, which was also applied to Spain’s Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring, known as Frob from its Spanish initials
Victor Mallet, FT September 30 2010

Part 2 of our series on the spring’s sovereign-debt crisis.
The next day, a Friday, euro-zone leaders were due in Brussels for a quick meeting to approve the Greek package. Events were overtaking them: Lending between European banks was freezing up; investors were fleeing weaker euro nations' bonds.
Wall Street Journal 27 September 2010

EU:s Räddningspaketet kollapsar om Frankrike förlorar AAA
Rolf Englund blog 2010-09-27

I spent the best part of last week trying to figure out the mechanics of the eurozone’s €440bn bail-out fund.
The European Financial Stability Facility is in many respects like a gigantic collateralised debt obligation and uses much of the machinery of modern finance.
And finally, the whole edifice would collapse if France was downgraded. This is a non-zero probability event, to put it mildly.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT September 26 2010

Part 1 of our series on the spring’s sovereign-debt crisis.
On the Secret Committee to Save the Euro
Two months after Lehman Brothers collapsed in the fall of 2008, a small group of European leaders set up a secret task force—one so secret that they dubbed it "the group that doesn't exist."
Wall Street Journal September 24, 2010

Den ekonomiska politiken i EU måste utvecklas och det kan bara ske gradvis.
Den nationella budgeten är ett slags kärna i alla medlemsstaters självbestämmande och demokrati.
DN-ledare 26/9 2010

A 69-year-old plan for dealing with imbalances in currency unions
One weekend in September 1941, John Maynard Keynes sat down in his farmhouse in Tilton to consider
how the world’s currencies might be managed once the war was over.
Within a few days the prolific economist produced two papers.
These set out his thoughts on what lay behind the breakdown in the early 1930s of the gold standard, in which currencies were linked at fixed rates to the gold price and so to each other.
The Economist September 23rd 2010

Fervent federalists (and a few Eurosceptics) have rushed to claim that the euro’s long-term survival requires a United States of Europe, with a big central budget.
A United States of Europe is not going to happen, because neither EU governments nor voters want it.
The bigger failing is that several (mostly Mediterranean) members have suffered a huge loss of competitiveness against Germany and other northern countries.
The Economist Sept 23rd 2010

Det är inte uteslutet att ett eller flera länder så småningom kan överge euron som valuta,
säger Ottmar Issing, före detta ledamot i Europeiska centralbankens styrelse.
Ekot 23 september 2010

Among the ex-Commissioners still receiving salaries are
the Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini and the Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite.
Open Europe press summary: 24 September 2010

A recent IMF study argues that sovereign default in today’s advanced economies (AEs) is “unnecessary, undesirable and unlikely"
The study represents the triumph of dogma over evidence and logic
Willem Buiter cit. by Tyler Durden at zerohedge 23/9 2010

Open Europe’s Chairman Lord Leach
“I’m not against European cooperation…A complete free trade area would be perfect, that brings about prosperity.
But a monetary union is also a political union and there it goes wrong.
The European system of supranationality comes at the cost of democracy.”
Open Europe press summary: 23 September 2010

When asked about the future of monetary union, Lord Leach said,
“Politicians must understand that this isn't a temporary crisis, but a permanent problem.
It is no banking or debt crisis, but a problem of competitiveness. The South of Europe is too far behind on the North and will never be able, within one monetary union, to close the gap…
I can not think of any satisfactory solution which does not lead to a breaking up of the eurozone as it is now.
That could however be either controlled or uncontrolled. Controlled means that vulnerable countries would be led to the exit...
An uncontrolled exit means that financial markets force a break-up.”
Open Europe press summary: 23 September 2010

17 former Commissioners still receive €96,000 per year in allowances from EU despite new private sector jobs
According to EU rules, former Commissioners are paid between 40% and 65% of their final basic salary (€20,278 per month) over a three year period
Open Europe press summary: 23 September 2010

Klart för lettiskt miljardlån
220 miljoner euro (drygt 2 miljarder kronor) från Sverige
SvD/TT 21/9 2010

Jacques Chirac to stand trial
Could face a ten-year prison sentence and 150,000-euro fine if found guilty.
Daily Telegraph 21 Sept 2010

Kronan påverkar extremt mycket. Särskilt när den går under eller över magiska gränser och hela krontal
Och under en magisk krongräns, 7 kronor, gick kronan mot dollarn på tisdagen.
Vid slutet av dagen kostade en dollar 6,96 kronor.
Samtidigt stärktes kursen mot euron till 9,14 kronor.
Så stark har inte kronan varit mot euron på nästan tre år.
DN Ekonomi 22/9 2010

The European Central Bank intervened to stabilise the Irish bond markets on Friday
after a report by a leading UK bank triggered investor fears that the country might turn to the international community for a multibillion-euro bail-out.
FT September 17 2010

The extra yield that investors demand to hold 10-year Irish bonds over German bunds today exceeded 400 basis points for the first time Portugal is also being punished by investors, with the spread on its bonds also touching a record today.
Bloomberg 20 september 2010

Portugal
That is what happens when you cut interest rates suddenly from 16 to 3 per cent
yields back to May crisis levels when the EU faced its "Lehman moment"
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 19 Sep 2010

Ireland has shown what happens when you grasp the fiscal nettle, slashing public wages by 13pc – to applause from EU elites – without offsetting monetary and exchange stimulus.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 19 Sep 2010

A joke doing the rounds in Brussels has Cathy Ashton, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief,
telling Hillary Clinton she now has the single telephone number so that America can “call Europe”.
But when the secretary of state dials it, all she gets is a recording:
“For French foreign policy, press 1. For British foreign policy, press 2…”
Charlemagne, The Economist, Sept 16th 2010

The international community has postponed bank stress tests for Greece
Financial Times September 19 2010

Varken Frankrikes president Sarkozy, Tysklands förbundskansler Merkel
eller Europeiska rådets ordförande Herman Van Rompuy tycker att Turkiet hör hemma i EU
Annika Ström Melin, DN 14/9 2010

France's junior minister for EU affairs has said to the European Commission:
"This is not how you speak to a major power like France, which is the mother of human rights."
"A plane ticket to one's country of origin in the European Union is not a death train, and is not the gas chamber,"
EU Observer 15/9 2010

En form av ohelig allians, där problemtyngda stater garanterar problemtyngda banker,
som i sin tur köper statsskuld med finansiering från den europeiska centralbanken

minskar risken för misslyckade emissioner,
men frågan är hur långt det går att driva detta reptrick innan bubblan spricker.
Martin Enlund, senioranalytiker på Handelsbanken, DI 2010-09-09

A eurozone banking crisis left unresolved
As long as you make sufficiently optimistic assumptions about future income growth, you can pay off any amount of debt.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT September 12 2010

Joachim Fels, chief global economist at Morgan Stanley, said strains had reached a point where "one or several governments" may soon have to tap soon the rescue mechanism.
"Neither the European sovereign debt crisis nor the banking sector crisis has been resolved and both continue to mutually reinforce each other," he said, adding that the EU's stress tests for banks had failed to restore confidence.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 08 Sep 2010

Fintan O'Toole in the Irish Times:
"The choice is now stark: do we go on being "good Europeans" at the cost of destroying our own society or do we become "bad Europeans", lose the trust of our European partners, but save ourselves?"
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 08 Sep 2010

Markets are starting to panic about the eurozone periphery
Sovereign bond spreads rose to new records. Here are the latest ten year spreads:
Ireland 372bp, Greece 944bp, Portugal 355bp, all up substantially yesterday,
in the case of Portugal and Ireland to new record levels.
The FT reports that Portuguese banks borrow a record amount from the ECB in August because
they could not access capital markets.
Eurointelligence 8/9 2010

It is worrying that European policymakers have not created a mechanism for dealing with an insolvent state in the European Monetary Union.
Sushil Wadhwani, FT September 8 2010

Sarkozy förklarade med ödesmättat tonfall:
Vi lever med konsekvenserna av femtio års invandring. Det har slutat med ett stort misslyckande när det gäller integrationen. Varför säger vi ingenting om detta? Är vi rädda?
Talet hölls i Grenoble den 30 juli och finns på Elyséepalatsets hemsida
Annika Ström Melin DN 8/9 2010

Imagine what would have happened, in the absence of the euro.
The exchange rate of the D-Mark would have exploded upwards
The absence of such shocks has greatly enhanced the prospects for the German recovery.
The creation of the eurozone was, for this reason alone, much more than a favour Germany did for its partners. It was also a big economic (not to mention political) gain for Germany.
German industrialists are clear on this, as is the government.
Martin Wolf, FT 7/9 2010

Belgian’s deputy prime minister, Laurette Onkelinx, who is close to Mr Di Rupo, is quoted as saying:
“We have to prepare for the end of Belgium. Not wish for it, but prepare for it nonetheless. We cannot ignore that it is what is wanted by a large swathe of the Flemish population.”
Eurointelligence 6/9 2010

Gadaffi uppmanade Italiens regering att till EU framföra ett krav på minst fem miljarder euro om året som ersättning för att Libyen skulle stoppa den illegala invandringen till Europa.
Utan pengarna skulle flyktingströmmen flöda och Europa skulle bli svart som Afrika, förklarade diktatorn. Utrikesminister Franco Frattini lovade att i Bryssel ta upp frågan.
Hur reagerar EU på sådan öppen utpressning? Nästa toppmöte mellan EU och Afrika hålls i Libyen senare i höst.
Rolf Gustavsson, SvD 4 september 2010

Action-Bildt föreslår fredsinstitut inom EU
Rolf Englund blog 3/9 2010

While the Europeans are celebrating the end of the financial crisis, something strange is happening in the bond markets.
The gap in the yields – the spread – between the 10-year bonds of peripheral eurozone countries and Germany has been growing at an alarming rate.
It is now close to the level that prevailed in the days before the European Union decided to set up its bail-out fund in May.

Wolfgang Münchau, FT September 5 2010

"Risken är att EU plötsligt ger upp andan"
Europeiska unionen är döende, skrev Charles Kupchan i en tankeväckande krönika i söndagens Washington Post.
Det finns tyvärr en del som tyder på att han har rätt.
Annika Ström Melin, Kolumn DN 1 september 2010

As nationalism rises, will the European Union fall?
Charles Kupchan, Washington Post August 29, 2010

Spain’s Unemployment Continues To Rise
Spain’s EU harmonised seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate (which is the interesting number) went up again in July, according to the latest data from Eurostat. It rose to 20.3% from 20.2% in June.
Edward Hugh, A fistful och euros 7 august 2010

For those willing and able to examine our present situation with a reasonably open mind,
a comparison of the recent history of the Spanish and German economies can prove illuminating

As Wolfgang Munchau pointed out in the FT yesterday, Germany entered the eurozone at an uncompetitive exchange rate and embarked on a long period of (quite painful) wage moderation and deep structural reform.
A Fistful Of Euros, 31 August 2010 with many nice charts.

De politiska partierna har en skyldighet att vara tydliga mot sina väljare inför valet hur man ställer sig till en framtida folkomröstning.
En röst på Folkpartiet innebär att vi kommer att fortsätta arbetet för en ny folkomröstning under nästa mandatperiod.
Vi ser tre alternativa datum för en ny folkomröstning: under 2013, i samband med Europaparlamentsvalet 2014 (bäst) eller - men sämre - vid riksdagsvalet 2014.
OLLE SCHMIDT (FP, CARL B HAMILTON (FP) riksdagsman, ordförande i näringsutskottet, talesman för ekonomi- och näringspolitik.
Hamiltons blandning, den 30:e augusti 2010

HQ-styrelseledamoten Pernilla Ström anklagar Finansinspektionen för att ha agerat med politiska motiv.
”Det här sker i ett läge då Finansdepartementet och marknadens parter diskuterar om Finansinspektionen ska läggas ned och tillsynen på finansmarknaden läggas över på Riksbanken”, säger Pernilla Ström i en intervju på sajten va.se.
DI 2010-08-31

Alliansen, EMU och det Östliga Partnerskapet
Rolf Englund blog 2010-08-29

The intra-eurozone imbalances will not only persist, but probably increase.
This will make the economic adjustment for Spain, Portugal or Greece even more difficult than it already is.
Those persistent imbalances, much more than the build-up of debt, are my deep cause of concern about the long-term health of the eurozone.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT August 29 2010

Is the crisis coming back?
After the downgrading of Ireland by S&P, Irish sovereign bond spreads rose from 318bp to 344bp to level higher than before May, and even Greece spreads are now back at close to 10%, the level before the agreement on the EFSF. This means that the European rescue package have failed to calm down the market stress that triggered on those package in the first place.
There was further bad news from the US, where existing home sales declined by a record amount for July, giving rise to expectations of another decline in US house prices.
As ever, Calculated Risk has the best coverage of this.
The Wall Street Journal says in a comment that even a downturn to annualised growth rates of under 2% will feel like a recession.
In a 2% economy, there won’t be any job creation, or wage increases.
Eurointelligence 25/8 2010

This story is also not at all the way it’s being told. Yes, Ireland had fiscal austerity — but it also benefited from a devaluation and an inflationary boom in the UK.
Oh, and Irish interest rates fell sharply, which was possible because they were very high to begin with
So yes, you can boost your economy with fiscal austerity, as long as you also devalue your currency and sharply reduce interest rates.
Paul Krugman June 15, 2010

Av idén om ett politiskt och ekonomiskt alltmer sammansvetsat Europa har blivit
idén om ett alltmer utvidgat Europa, vilket inte nödvändigtvis är samma idé
även om båda idéerna för närvarande samsas under namnet EU
Göran Rosenberg, kolumn DN 24 augusti 2010

The Irish Republic has had its credit rating downgraded
Thinks that the Irish government will spend 90bn euros helping the banks
10bn euros higher than previous estimates.
BBC 25/8 2010

Member countries share a common currency, but when it comes to sovereign credit they are on their own.
This fact was obscured until recently by the willingness of the European Central Bank (ECB) to accept the sovereign debt of all member countries on equal terms at its discount window.
This allowed the member countries to borrow at practically the same interest rate as Germany,
and the banks were happy to earn a few extra pennies on supposedly risk-free assets by loading up their balance sheets with the government debt of the weaker countries.

These positions now endanger the creditworthiness of the European banking system.
"The Crisis & the Euro", George Soros, New York Review of Books, August 19, 2010

The European economy is at risk of sliding back into a recession as governments cut spending to reduce their budget deficits.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Bloomberg 24/8 2010.

Greece
Banks had lost 8pc of their entire deposit base in the five months to May
Households and companies are running down savings to make ends meet
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 19 Aug 2010

The Euro Crisis
Entering a Death Spiral?
Tensions Rise in Greece as Austerity Measures Backfire
The austerity measures that were supposed to fix Greece's problems are dragging down the country's economy. Stores are closing, tax revenues are falling
Der Spiegel 18/8 2010

Exactly 70 years ago war-time leader Winston Churchill stood up and addressed parliament to hail the efforts of the aircrew who were fighting overhead.
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few," he pronounced in the midst of his speech.
"You shouldn't say it, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, I think most of the chaps enjoyed it," said Wing Commander Paul Farnes.
BBC 19 August 2010

Remember Winston Churchill’s phrase about "fighting them on the beaches". Well our beaches are entirely subject to the European Commission’s directives.
One of the great clichés of politics is that Britain has no written Constitution. Britain’s constitution is called the Treaty of Accession. It has been supplemented by the Treaties of Maastricht and Nice.
John Blundell in the Business 12/3 2006

History in maps
Trace the century through Europe's changing borders
BBC

The premium Ireland has to pay over Germany has risen to 3 percentage points
– the highest since March.

Ireland’s budget deficit, at 14 per cent of gross domestic product, is the biggest in the eurozone.
FT 17 August 2010

Spreads on Irish 10-year bonds reached 297 basis points over German Bunds on Wednesday
amid reports the European Central Bank (ECB) is intervening to shore up Irish debt,
a reversal of the bank’s plans to withdraw emergency support.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 11 Aug 2010

Spanish banks asked for a record 130 billion euros ($166 billion) in July
Bloomberg 16 August 2010
Nice chart

Brussels proposes ‘eurotaxes’ to fund EU
The European Commission intends to show how new “eurotaxes” on banks, financial transactions, air travel and carbon permits could help meet a bigger share of the bloc’s annual budget
FT, August 9 2010

Göran Persson varnar för EU-federalism
Rolf Englund blog 2010-08-12

Skäggen i Sarajevo
När jag i början av sjuttiotalet kom till Sarajevo för första gången var det en handfull äldre män som på darrande ben reste sig efter förrättad bön i Gazi Husrevbegs moské. Jag trodde jag blivit vittne till det sista kapitlet av islam som religion i Europa. Det var ett misstag.
I dag är de som ber här många, de flesta mycket unga och muskulösa män.
Richard Swartz, kolumn DN 7/8 2010

IMF report
It isn’t only Spain where the current account deficits are going to persist.
Edward Hugh, A fistful och euros 7 august 2010

In May, the EU and the IMF agreed to loan Greece 110bn euros over three years.
A 9bn-euros loan is due to be given to Greece on 13 September, and is dependent upon the government meeting progress targets.
BBC 5 August 2010

Grekland går inte i konkurs den 13 september

Rolf Englund blog 5/8 2010

Om man, som Maria Rankka, är av uppfattningen att vi i princip bör gå med i EMU, men samtidigt hävdar att vi hittills har tjänat på att stå utanför, men att vi i alla fall nog bör gå med, har man mycket att förklara.
Rolf Englund blog 4/8 2010

"Sist men inte minst ger euron EU-invånarna en handfast symbol för den europeiska identiteten. Det är en symbol att vara stolt över, i takt med att euroområdet växer och mångdubblar fördelarna för sina nuvarande och kommande medlemmar".
EU-Kommissionen


Dollarn har under sommaren sjunkit mot kronan


Euron mot Kronan 12 månader augusti 2010

There are five reasons why Belgium has hung together for the last 180 years: Britain, God, the King, fear and most importantly, money.
Before addressing these, it is necessary to understand why Belgium exists at all.
When in 1815 Britain was the Big Beluga after the battle of Waterloo, it wanted a buffer state to contain France
By those friendly guys from Bedlam Asset Management in London at John Mauldin July 2010

Maria Rankka om EMU, nu när hon slutar på Timbro
Jag är i princip för ett svenskt medlemskap i EMU, men jag erkänner att vi hittills har tjänat på att stå utanför.
På sikt bör vi nog gå med, eftersom det skulle gynna oss.
SvD e24 2010-08-01

Certainly, the stress tests should be based on what one might call a plausible worst-case scenario, not one that represents the absolute worst. Nobody is asking the bank supervisors to stress-test the impact of an alien attack.
But sovereign default in the case of Greece is not such a far-fetched scenario – even if you believe it to be unlikely. It is irresponsible for the stress testers to ignore that sort of event.
That is like a car crash tester failing to consider the possibility of an oncoming vehicle.
Wolfgang Münchau FT July 25 2010

Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG, Agricultural Bank of Greece SA and five Spanish savings banks didn’t have adequate reserves to maintain a Tier 1 capital ratio of at least 6 percent in the event of a recession and sovereign-debt crisis
Had the Tier 1 threshold been 7 percent, 24 of the banks would have failed,
said Andrew Sheets, Morgan Stanley’s head of European credit strategy in London
Bloomberg July 25, 2010

Only seven of 91 banks failed the tests
Five of the seven were cajas, Spanish savings banks
The Bank of Spain on Friday indicated that it had sufficient contingent liquidity measures in place to reassure caja customers and counter any threat of a run on these banks.
FT July 23 2010 17:46

Ingen fara säger Bank of Spain
Rolf Englund blog 2010-07-24

Var är utgången ur EMU?
Jag har länge varit en varm tillskyndare av euron, eller närmare bestämt av projektet att med en gemensam europeisk valuta tvinga fram en mer hållfast politisk union
Göran Rosenberg, kolumn DN 23/7 2010

- Jag brukar föreslå min federalistiska tyske kollega att Tyskland och Frankrike kan väl börja med att bilda en federation så kommer vi efter om det går bra.
Jan Zielonka, Oxford University, 14/12 2006

Domedagen II “If HRE is the only German bank that fails, that completely discredits the tests – not just for Germany but for the whole of Europe”.
Eurointelligence skriver i dag stresstesterna, det som gör att, som jag skrev i går, domedagen blir på fredag.

Ett väl godkänt betyg skulle sänka förtroendet helt för ett test som redan mötts av skepsis och ifrågasättanden. Nästa fråga skulle då bli: vad är det myndigheterna försöker dölja? Ungefär så paranoid är finansmarknaden.
Andreas Cervenka SvD Näringsliv 22/7 2010

Domedagen blir på fredag
Då lägger EU fram resultaten, utvalda resultat, av de stresstester de har utsatt de europeiska bankerna för.
Anatole Kaletsky i The Times "undemocratic survival plan for the euro"
Rolf Englund blog 2010-07-20

Our economies are emerging from the worst economic crisis since the second world war, and without the swift and appropriate action of central banks and a very significant contribution from fiscal policies, we would have experienced a major depression.
Now is the time to restore fiscal sustainability.
But the timing remains disputed.
Jean-Claude Trichet, FT July 22 2010

Hungary's IMF revolt augurs ill for Greece
"Austerity is extremely hard to sell to electorates.
The risk is that this moves from a wider financial and economic crisis to a European political crisis as governments are punished by voters.
The approval rating for Lithuanian's prime minister has fallen to 7pc."
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 19 July 2010

The Irish Independent picked up these incredible comments from the Bundesbank in its monthly bulletin
in which it criticised Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece for running "persistently high" current-account deficits over the past decade,
which the Bundesbank says is a "source of danger" for the single-currency region.
Eurointelligence 20.07.2010

My undemocratic survival plan for the euro
If Europe can avoid a financial breakdown at the end of this month, when its banks undergo stresstests to expose which are potentially insolvent, then the euro will almost certainly survive.
Indeed, this could be the year when the single currency mutates from being a morbid enterprise that is threatened by its internal contradictions into the project to create a United States of Europe that its architects always intended.
Anatole Kaletsky, The Times July 14 2010

Det största problemet:
har risken för att exempelvis Grekland ställer in betalningarna verkligen lagts in i testerna på ett ärligt sätt?
Enligt Financial Times har marknaderna tagit höjd för förluster på 60 procent på grekiska statsobligationer – medan regleringsorganen har sagt åt bankerna att räkna med 17 procent.
DN-ledare, signerad Gunnar Jonsson, 20 juli 2010

Cameron
After Thatcher, conservatism in Britain became radioactive. As Tony Blair moved the Labour Party to the center, the Tories moved right, became extreme and thus politically unviable.
Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek 11/7 2010

Theo Waigel, German finance minister in the 1990s:
"In '92 and '93 we had big crises," he says.
The "euro crisis" is no more than media hysteria and political ineptitude.
BBC 19 July 2010

Sverige, Estland och Luxemburg
Den ekonomiska krisen har slagit sönder många länders offentliga finanser.
3 av 27 länder som inte är föremål för EU:s underskottsförfarande
Anders Borg DN Debatt 2010-07-13

Fixing Spain's Savings Banks Means Paying Workers to Play Golf
The central bank has coaxed ailing savings banks to merge, financing the process with more than 10 billion euros. Consolidating the lenders, known as “cajas,” may eventually cost as many as 50,000 jobs, with many workers taking early retirement
Bloomberg July 15, 2010

German and French officials tend not to mention that it was lending by their domestic banks and investors that helped Greece, Spain and others to live so long beyond their means.
Stephanie Flanders, the BBC's economics editor,14 July 2010

Alan Beattie bevakar internationell handel för Financial times.
Han tror helt enkelt inte att Grekland kommer lyckas få sin ekonomi att växa samtidigt som de genomför massiva besparingar.
Och när de inser det om ett halvår eller ett år så blir en skuldavskrivning den enda möjliga lösningen.
Och det här räknar finansmarknaderna med säger Alan Beattie, Ekot 16/7 2010

The snag with Germany’s idea (insolvency rules)is that it goes too far
It is hard to see how such a plan could be imposed, let alone enforced. It would place the debtor nation in a position of colonial submission.
If ever agreed to, this would be politically explosive.
FT editorial July 13 2010

.

Germany reiterates its insistence on an EU sovereign insolvency law
There is still no final agreement on the EFSF, as this is still blocked by the Slovakians. But the fund will go ahead one way or the other.
Eurointelligence 13.07.2010

One Size Fits One
"a lot of the issue can be captured by one picture"
Paul Krugman July 12, 2010

The gap between Spain and Germany
These two countries share a single currency and inhabit the same monetary union.
Spain would benefit from a looser monetary and fiscal policy.
Germany would not.
Gavin Hewitt, the BBC's Europe editor, 9 July 2010

The new Slovak government remains opposed to a rescue package for Greece, Prime Minister Iveta Radicova said Monday, after a meeting with European Union Council President Herman van Rompuy.
Wall Street Journal 13 July, 2010

Germany is now actively (and very secretly) pushing for a plan outlining a set of insolvency rules,
which would require that private investors bear a portion of the rescue burden, and much more importantly,
would see at least a partial give up in state sovereignty
Tyler Durden, Zerohedge, 12/7 2010

Slovakia stalls €440bn bail-out fund
Slovakia's incoming government is also determined not to pay the country's €800m contribution to a €110bn IMF-eurozone rescue plan that was activated in May for Greece. But this has not prevented disbursement of loans to Athens.
FT July 2 2010

The Folly of Currency Pegs
Notwithstanding the highly touted Greek rescue package
Greece will probably default on its debt sometime within the next year

John H. Makin (May 2010

The trilemma in international finance
The United States of Europe may have been too much to hope for
N. Gregory Mankiw, New York Times July 9, 2010

Det är numera tyst om vad som en gång var Jugoslavien.
I höst är det femton år sedan Dayton, det avtal som med undantag för Kosovo satte punkt för de balkanska krigen.
Mycket i Dayton präglades av brådska, improvisation och en hel del ignorans;
att den albanska frågan inte togs upp är bara det mest flagranta exemplet. Men räkningen kom i form av krig med vändande post.
Richard Swartz, kolumn DN 10/7 2010

»Jag är övertygad om att det ekonomiska system som byggts upp i Jugoslavien … tillhör en av vårt århundrades mest betydelsefulla sociala innovationer«, skrev professorn och s-riksdagsmannen Bo Södersten
Tomas Fischer, Fokus 19/12 2008

Contrary to general belief, Germany’s eurosceptic professors have not abandoned their legal efforts to block the EU rescues for European banks exposed to Greek debt,
Should they succeed, of course, the eurozone risks disintegration within days, and perhaps hours.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard July 8th, 2010

Staring into the abyss
As the euro-zone crisis spooks governments, opinions are diverging dramatically about what the union is for
The Economist print July 8th 2010
Nice pic

SPIEGEL: Despite all of these efforts, the central problems with the euro remain. Strong economies belong to the same currency union as weak ones like Greece. Is the euro not doomed to failure?

Thomas Mirow, head of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development:
There are also big differences between the states in the US.
The question is, to what degree are the states there for each other and if there are effective balancing mechanisms. That was kept from the public for a long time.

Der Spiegel 6 July 2010

"I was opposed to the euro, I think it was a great mistake to have monetary integration,"
"We are stuck there and to break up would be the second-biggest mistake to do now, it would generate a huge amount of panic and concern,"
Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 1998, told CNBC

Italy could fall into a so-called 'debt trap.'
We think that it might take a decade or more of stagnant or falling wages to restore full competitiveness
Roger Bootle and his team over at Capital Economics
CNBC 6 Jul 2010

The creation of the euro resulted in the disappearance of intra-area exchange rate risk and an expectation of fiscal and macroeconomic convergence among the euro member countries.
This was reflected in a significant narrowing of regional sovereign spreads until very recently.
On the heels of Greece’s fiscal troubles, investors are now re-pricing these risks across the region.
This highlights the need for policymakers to continue to pursue credible fiscal consolidation plans and strengthen economic governance in the euro area.
IMF Global Financial Stability Report, July 7, 2010

Stress test scenarios are not forecasts.
They are only scenarios, of the kind that market participants have already factored into the pricing of bonds.
What else is the implication of a 10 per cent yield on 10-year Greek sovereign bonds?
Wolfgang Münchau, FT July 4 2010
Highly recommeded

Den europeiska stabilitetspakten var feltänkt från början
eftersom det inte är realistiskt med böter mot länder i ett läge just när de har stora budgetunderskott.
Lars Heikensten, DI 2010-07-06

In 1998, four renegade German professors tried to stop the introduction of the euro with a legal challenge in Germany's highest court.
Now, 12 years later, they are fighting against a German bailout for Greece - and this time around, people are listening to them.
Der Spiegel online 30 june 2010

It was 20 years ago that then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl made a lonely decision.
a monetary union for the two Germanys
Instead of one to one, the exchange rate should have been one to three or one to four, to reflect the economic reality
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, Der Spiegel 1st July 2010

Alla kan inte exportera sig ur krisen, för då är det ingen som köper.
Grekland och Spanien måste skära ned drastiskt, inget annat kan återställa finansmarknadernas förtroende.
Tyskland ska ha ordning på statsfinanserna, men ....
DN-ledare 29 juni 2010

"intellectually and politically schizophrenic"
The current debt crisis is a direct result of a governance structure for the single currency that was excessively respectful of national economic sovereignty.
Peter Sutherland, former European Union commissioner, FT 30 June 2010

Spanish banks have been lobbying the European Central Bank to act to ease the systemic fallout from the expiry of a €442bn ($542bn) funding programme this week
FT, June 28, 2010

International capital markets are “closed” to most Spanish companies and banks
chairman of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA, Spain’s second-largest bank, said on June 14.
the risk premium on Spanish government debt to a euro-era record
Bloomberg 29 June 2010

Only a closer union can save the eurozone
I am aware that, at a time of rising nationalism and regionalism throughout the EU, there is no consensus for such sweeping reforms
Wolfgang Münchau, FT, June 27 2010 19:52

EMU:s Ja-sägare förorsakar Världsdepression
Rolf Englund blog 2010-06-28

Sverige måste aktivt verka för att Turkiet, Kroatien, Makedonien och andra kandidatländer genomför nödvändiga reformer så att de kan bli fullvärdiga EU-medlemmar
när de och deras befolkning så önskar, och att de uppfyller Köpenhamnskriterierna.
Det är vår förhoppning att också övriga Balkan-länder så snart som de önskar kan bli medlemmar av EU.
Avsnittet om Europeiska unionen ur rödgrön slutrapport om utrikespolitiken

En rödgrön regering kommer inte att genomföra en folkomröstning om införande av euron.
Vi respekterar folkomröstningsresultatet och de utfästelser som gavs i samband folkomröstningskampanjen 2003.
Avsnittet om Europeiska unionen ur rödgrön slutrapport om utrikespolitiken

Euron är främst ett politiskt projekt, ett nödvändigt steg mot Europas Förenta Stater.
Om det bara handlade om ekonomi finns det fördelar med euron, men också nackdelar. Jag menar att fördelarna uppväger, men det är ganska jämt.
De politiska fördelarna med att vara med i eurokretsen är däremot huvudskälet för att vara med.
OLLE WäSTBERGS NYHETSBREV 17 JUNI 2010

Reinfeldt tycker fortfarande att en gemensam europeisk valuta är en bra idé,
men för att det ska bli aktuellt med ett svenskt inträde måste euron först leva upp till
den skapelse den var tänkt att vara.

Privata Affärer/Nyhetsbyrån Direkt 2010-06-24

är Sverige med i motståndsrörelsen?
Ett tysk-franskt förslag mötte motstånd på EU-toppmötet. Det blockerades, av England, Tjeckien och Sverige
Rolf Englund blog 18/6 2010

"I am really confident in the medium and long-term prospects for the Spanish economy,
providing the efforts that have to be made will be made,"
IMF-chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, BBC 18/6 2010

Ska EU ha en ”ekonomisk regering” är det i alla fall inte Frankrike som ska styra den.
Tyskland måste å andra sidan förstå att alla inte kan vara exportvärldsmästare samtidigt.
EU har mer kvar att göra innan skuldkrisen är begravd.
DN-ledare 18/6 2010

Setbacks for Merkel at the European Union Summit
The German-French initiative came up against considerable resistance.
British Prime Minister David Cameron blocked it together with his colleagues from the Czech Republic and Sweden.
Der Spiegel online 18 June 2010

The rebellion against the 1930s fiscal and monetary policies of the Euro-complex is gathering pace.
Il Sole has published a letter by 100 Italian economists warning that the austerity strategy imposed by Brussels/Frankfurt risks tipping Europe into a self-feeding downward spiral.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, June 16th, 2010

Annika Ström Melin, president Van Rompuy och EMU
Rolf Englund blog 17/6 2010

Det finns egentligen inte någon Eurokris.
Tvärtom tvingar euron fram reformer som sedan länge varit nödvändiga, vilket alltid har varit ett av de starkaste argumenten för en gemensam valuta.
Stefan Fölster, Magasinet Neo 2010-06-15

In the US, stress test forced weaker institutions to raise capital and turned round sentiment
But politicians in Europe are balking at making public the results of stress tests, because of worries that releasing details of what lies on balance sheets may be counter-productive and create the very crisis that everyone is trying to avoid.
David Oakley, FT June 14 2010

Spain's risk premium, as measured by the yield spread on Spanish bonds over German bunds,
hit its highest level since the creation of the euro
after El Economista reported the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the U.S. Treasury are preparing a €250 billion ($308.68 billion) liquidity facility for Spain.
Wall Street Journal 16 June 2010

"We're not afraid of transparency," said the Spanish Banking Association (AEB), saying the full truth would put an end to rumours battering Spain's instutitions. El Pais reported that the government backs the initiative, putting it on a collision course with Germany which insists on secrecy.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 15 Jun 2010

EU leaders will tomorrow meet in Brussels for a crucial summit.
A briefing outlining recent developments and moves towards what French President Nicolas Sarkozy has labelled an economic government for the EU
Open Europe 16 June 2010

Merkel, Sarkozy Paper Over Differences Before EU Summit
a vague call for an "economic government"
Spielgel Online 15/6 2010

I en ovanligt öppenhjärtig intervju i måndagens Financial Times förklarade EU:s president Herman Van Rompuy att euroområdet var ”på gränsen till ett sammanbrott” i våras.
I motsats till många andra hävdar han också att eurons kris delvis beror på valutasamarbetets konstruktion.
”Euron blev en stark valuta i ett område med små ränteskillnader. Det blev ett slags sömnpiller. Vi var inte medvetna om de underliggande problemen.”
Det är ett anmärkningsvärt uttalande.
Annika Ström Melin, DN 16/6 2010

När EU:s stats- och regeringschefer samlas för att ha förtroliga samtal om Europas politiska vägval skrivs inte ens protokoll.
Herman Van Rompuy leder den minst öppna av EU:s institutioner. Genom intervjuer öppnar han dörren på glänt, men priset för den förändrade maktbalansen i EU är ökat hemlighetsmakeri.
Annika Ström Melin, DN 16/6 2010

Moody's cuts Greece to junk
The rating agency warns that a $1 trillion bailout package may not be enough.
CNN June 14, 2010

Aldrig tidigare har så många varit emot ett svenskt medlemskap i valutaunionen
Om det hade varit folkomröstning om euron i maj i år skulle
28 procent röstat ja och
cirka 60 procent skulle röstat nej.

Omkring 12 procent uppger att de inte vet hur de skulle rösta, enligt Statistiska centralbyrån (SCB).
Ekot 15 juni 2010

Tyska banker har lånat ut motsvarande ungefär 800 miljarder kronor till spanska banker.
Spanska banker har i sin tur lånat ut ungefär 900 miljarder i Portugal.
Noterbart är också att franska banker ensamt står för halva utlåningen till Grekland.
Ekot 14 juni 2010

A blogger who left Britain 20 years ago for rural bliss in Spain has become an unlikely economic sage whose advice has been sought by the International Monetary Fund.
Edward Hugh counts Nobel Prize winner and American economist Paul Krugman among his avid followers.
CNN June 10, 2010

The case against the euro
Travelling between Germany and Spain a disturbing question formed in my mind.
Has the euro been not just bad for some countries but damaged them perhaps for a generation?
Gavin Hewitt, BBC's Europe editor, 11 June 2010
Highly recommended

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Paradigm Lost - the Euro in Crisis.

This is a rare one newspaper-only scoop.
Frankfurter Allgemeine reports this morning that EU officials will start talks about a bail out for Spain, citing unnamed sourced in Berlin. The paper said the situation had deteriorated so much that they did not want wait until the EU summit on Thursday.
The trigger is the freeze in the inter-banking market last week as the markets have lost confidence in the Spanish banking sector.
Eurointelligence 14 June 2010

.The eurozone’s tragic small-country mindset
One of the most important characteristics of a small open economy is that its own actions have little impact on the rest of the world.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT 13 June 2010

Om små nationers karaktäristiska drag.
Richard Swartz, Kolumn DN 2010-06-12

The ECB was part of the shock-and-awe package of policy steps announced last month to arrest the very real risk of a debt-deflationary spiral in Europe.
The ECB is buying government bonds of troubled members of the monetary union, taking on their credit risk, paying for them with newly created money.
So it is ineluctably the case that the ECB has ventured into the fiscal policy realm, de facto monetising the debt of the troubled members.
If there is any doubt about that, the fact that the Bundesbank opposed the action should end that doubt. It was and is what it was and is, and the Bundesbank’s objection speaks directly to that reality.
Paul McCulley June 2010

It was the banks and other financial institutions (e.g. pension funds, insurance companies) that facilitated the boom at the periphery of the eurozone by lending huge sums to Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal under virtually the same conditions as those applicable to Germany and the Netherlands.
In doing so they failed to charge a realistic risk margin. One of the consequences was that European leaders were lulled into a false sense of security. After all, if the financial markets didn’t envisage any problems, why would Europe’s leaders – themselves mere mortals – be troubled? Surely the markets are always right?
Heleen Mees, Eurointelligence 10 June 2010

“What went wrong wasn’t what happened this year. What went wrong was what happened in the first 11 years of the euro’s history. In some ways we were victims of our success. “The euro became a strong currency with very small interest rate spreads [on government bonds].
It was like some kind of sleeping pill, some kind of drug. We weren’t aware of the underlying problems.”
Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Union, FT June 13 2010

The economic situation today is drastically worse than a couple years ago,
and the euro is doomed as a concept,
Nassim Taleb, professor and author of the bestselling book "The Black Swan,"
CNBC 10 June 2010

Carl B Hamilton och Finland
- För att få en känsla för hur Sverige skulle ha klarat sig med euron som valuta kan vi se hur det gått för Finland, som gick med i eurosamarbetet från början och vars ekonomi i mångt och mycket liknar Sveriges
Rolf Englund blog 10 juni 2010

European finance ministers backed Estonia’s bid to become the 17th country using the euro,
overriding the European Central Bank’s warning that the Baltic state may struggle to keep inflation under control.
Bloomberg 8 June 2010

Debunking The "Spain Is Safe" Myth
We’re concerned about austerity in a country that already has 20% unemployment; where home prices are down only 11% with half the newly constructed ones sitting unoccupied; and with $3.4 trillion of household and corporate debt (220% of GDP, one of the highest ratios in the world).
Tyler Durden on 06/08/2010

Spansk strejk mot sparpaket
Mer än 2,5 miljoner spanjorer arbetar inom den offentliga sektorn, lönesänkningar med fem procent.
Dessutom försämras villkoren för pensionärer och nyblivna föräldrar
Spaniens budgetunderskott är det tredje största i Europa, näst Grekland och Irland.
DN/TT 8 juni 2010

Elisabet Kopelman, SEB:s räntestrateg, liknar upplägget /EUs paket/ vid subprimelån
DI 8 juni 2010

European finance ministers put the finishing touches on a rescue fund being backed by 440 billion euros ($524 billion) in national guarantees
The fund will be based in Luxembourg.
Bloomberg June 8 2010

EU har givit klartecken åt att hjälpa Grekland (= rädda i första hand tyska och franska banker från förluster på sina grekiska statsobligaitoner) genom att tillsammans med IMF skapa
en Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) i skatteparadiset Luxenburg, för att kringgå bestämmelserna som förbjuder EU från att finansiera medlemsländernas underskott.
href="http://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2010/06/tyskland-ska-spara-771-miljarder-det.html">Rolf Englund blog 2010-06-08

Tyskland, G20, Grekland EU/SPV
Rolf Englund blog 2010-06-08

Välvilliga spanska sparbanker i kombinaton med spanjorernas önskan att själva äga sina bostäder har eldat på den prisbubbla som ledde fram till landets krasch på bomarknaden.
Bokrisen slår direkt mot ett fyrtiotal småbanker, som kämpar för sin överlevnad och sprider skräck bland ekonomer i hela eurozonen.
DI 8 juni 2010

Tyskland ska spara 771 miljarder
DI 2010-06-07

German Government Agrees on Historic Austerity Program
Right or wrong – whether this plunges the whole world into a deflationary abyss from which there is no escape or if, somehow, this has the desired effect of restoring financial stability over time –
it’s nice to see that there are at least a few elected officials in the world who question the idea of simply piling on more debt to cure the world’s economic ills.
Tim Iacono 7 Jun 2010

Det är en stor och intressant skillnad mellan krisländerna Ungern och Grekland.
Grekland är med i EMU och har euron. Ungern är inte med i EMU och sin egen valuta forint.
Rolf Englund blog 5 juni 2010

Anders Borg tror inte på en folkomröstning under nästa mandatperiod.
Det saknas både opinion och ett blocköverskridande stöd i riksdagen.
– Och det är såpass mycket som måste komma i ordning i euroområdet.
DN/TT 6/6 2010

Sverige bör nästa mandatperiod besluta att införa euron.
Carl B Hamilton, SvD Brännpunkt 2 juni 2010

Bara var fjärde svensk vill införa euron
Om det vore folkomröstning om euron i dag skulle
61 procent rösta nej och
25 procent ja.
För ett år sedan var siffrorna 44 respektive 47 procent.
DI 2010-06-03

It is a union of nation states that has created something less than a federation and more than an alliance.
How much did that vision presume the blurring or even fading away completely of national boundaries and identities?
Was ever closer political union a way of describing a federal or super state?
Chris Patten, FT June 2 2010

CDS prices are over 721bp for Greek five-year bonds, Portugal 345bp, Ireland 260bp, Spain 247bp, and Italy 234bp.
CDS spreads are back to where they were right before that fateful summit May 7, when EU leaders met to work out the mother of all rescue packages
Eurointelligence 3 June 2010

Krisen i euroländerna driver fram förslag om gemensam finanspolitik i EU.
Nu diskuteras nya skatter på EU-nivå. Sverige måste stå emot ökad centralism

Riksdagsledamoten Karl Sigfrid (M) och Mats Persson, chef för tankesmedjan Open Europe, SvD Brännpunkt 31 maj 2010

In its financial stability review, the European Central Bank predicted €195bn in bank writedowns in 2010 and 2011, and warns of dangerous financial contagion as a direct result of the sovereign debt crisis.
Specifically, the ECB warned about “a number of hazardous contagion channels and adverse feed-back loops between financial systems and public finances.”
Eurointelligence 1 june 2010

Hoppet är ute för EMU - Euron kollapsar i Spanien
Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-31

Eurozone:
State of the union
Ralph Atkins, FT 31 May 2010

ECB Buying Up Greek Bonds
German Central Bankers Suspect French Conspiracy
gives French banks the perfect opportunity to get rid of their Greek assets
Der Spiegel 31 May 2010

El Pais spoke of a "perverse spiral" in its editorial.
Fitch has not downgraded Spain for lack of austerity
Spain's unemployment was already 20.5pc even before this latest dose of shock therapy.
There are 4.6m people without work.
Dole payments alone account for half the budget deficit
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 30 May 2010

It was no accident that the eurozone created a special purpose vehicle to manage this bail-out.
It is not just the name that reminds us of those notorious financial structures that brought us the subprime crisis.
Wolfgang Münchau, FT May 23 2010

The €750bn financial rescue package
The German constitutional court has still to rule on the package. "natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control"
Wolfgang Münchau May 30 2010

Flera andra euroländer har slarvat med statsfinanserna
Spanien har ett budgetunderskott på 11,2 procent av BNP, Portugals underskott uppgår till 9,3 procent, Irlands till 14,3 procent – och Italiens statsskuld överstiger 115 procent av BNP.
Till det statsfinansiella eländet skall läggas svag konkurrenskraft i vissa länder, bland dem Spanien. Det försämrar förutsättningarna för att högre tillväxt skall bidra till saneringen.
Per T Ohlsson, Sydsvenskan 16 maj 2010

Fundamental doubts have been raised about the future of the euro and even the European project itself.
Barroso gave a keynote address to the Jean Monnet Conference.
With the EU facing what is possibly the greatest crisis in its history here are some of his arguments.
Gavin Hewitt, BBC's Europe editor 28 May 2010

Grekland, Spanien och grunderna i macro
Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-29

Parkinsons lag och ECBs nya skyskrapa, forts.
Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-29

An ABC of financial shocks and fiscal aftershocks
“But they bailed out Greece,” said the boy. “So why all the turbulence?”
The big point is that investors are not altogether stupid: they know these are temporary patches; they know Greek indebtedness is going to worsen; they know that other countries in peripheral Europe will find it hard to grow out of their plight
Martin Wolf, May 28 2010
Highly recommended

The fixed-exchange mechanism had gone horribly wrong
The tragedy of the interwar years in Germany was that the Social Democrats - then the world’s foremost socialist party - became fatally tainted by acquiescing in /accepting/ Bruning’s deflation torture from 1930 to 1932.
They did so, of course, because they dared not confront the orthodoxies of the Gold Standard.
The result in Germany was the Reichstag election of July 1932 when the Communists and Nazis won over the half the seats.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 23 May 2010

Spain lost its AAA credit grade at Fitch Ratings
Standard & Poor’s lowered Spain’s ratings to AA on April 28
Bloomberg 28 May 2010

The Bank of Spain has ordered the country's lenders to face up to bad debts and set aside reserves of up to 30pc on property holdings in a bid to restore global confidence
. Deutsche Bank said Spanish lenders need to refinance €125bn by late 2011. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 27 May 2010

Greece is implementing a sweeping austerity plan.
But the underlying maths of its fiscal problems – with its public debt to gross domestic product forecast to hit 150 per cent – makes it extremely hard to believe that Greece will really fix its woes before the aid runs out.
Gillian Tett, FT May 27 2010

The eurozone’s crisis has blown sky-high the idea that developed countries are 100 per cent safe.
A bank can buy all the Spanish debt (current rating: AA) it likes without having to back it up with a cent of capital
Lex, FT May 27 2010

In an interview with the Financial Times, Pierre Lellouche laid bare the French government’s conviction that the emergency stabilisation scheme agreed earlier this month amounted to a fundamental revision of the European Union’s rules and a leap towards an economic government for the bloc.

Pagrotsky:
Det är inte en grekisk kris som har smittat Euroländerna,
det är en kris för Euroländerna som först har visat sig i Grekland
Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-28

The eurosceptic case for saving the euro
John Redwood, The Times May 27 2010

SNS, Pagrotsky och Greklands återhämtning
Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-28

Joakim Palme tycker att Greklandskrisen belyser svagheterna med valutasamarbetet EMU.
”Det här illustrerar de problem som finns med att ha en monetär union i länder som har helt olika ekonomisk struktur och som också har olika förmåga till att hantera offentliga finanser. Det har funnits väldigt få fördelar att vara med i EMU.”
Joakim Palme i Dagens Industri 2010-05-23

The possibility of a break-up of the eurozone.
Six months ago such a scenario was unthinkable. The political drive behind the euro was formidable and the possibility of its failure was nil. But discord and lack of solidarity over Greece have damaged the credibility of the bloc’s governance. The chance that the eurozone will break up is tiny but it is no longer zero.
Lex FT 23 May 2010

Folkpartiet bryr sig inte om ekonomiska argument.
Folkpartiet vill gå med i euron, helt enkelt eftersom folkpartiet vill gå med i euron.
Katrine Kielos, Aftonbladet 21 maj 2010

Hans tid i karantän borde vara över.
Göran Persson är på en gång vår troligen siste verkligt betydande konservativa ledare och en gestalt rustad med den framgångsrika arbetarrörelsens auktoritet.
Olle Svenning, Aftonbladet 23 maj 2010

Merkel and Cameron disagree on EU treaty change
"wouldn't agree to any treaty that drew us further into the euro area"
EU Observer 21/5 2010

Det är svåra tider för oss som röstade ja till euron.
Tungt för den som sedan länge förespråkat en gemensam valuta för hela EU.
Kanske är det dags för lite eftertanke
Ola Sigvardsson, chefredaktör östgöta Correspondenten, 15 maj 2010

Spaniens centralbank meddelade på lördagen att den tagit kontroll över sparbanken Cajasu
Spanska banker har i stort ridit ut den globala finanskrisen väl, tack vare ett strikt banktillsyn.
Men en sprucken fastighetsbubbla har lämnat de spanska bankerna med 300 miljarder euro i osäkra fordringar.

DN/TT 22 maj 2010

The euro, in its current form, is finished.
The game is up for a monetary union that was meant to bolt together work-and-save citizens in northern Europe with the party animals of Club Med.
No amount of pit props from Berlin can save the euro Mk I from collapsing under the weight of its structural dysfunctionality.
You cannot run indefinitely a single currency with one interest rate for 16 economies, when there are such huge fiscal disparities.
Jeff Randall, Daily Telegraph 20 May 2010

Just 319 out of the 622 members of the Bundestag backed Germany’s €148bn contribution,
Another 195 abstained and 73 voted against.
Financial Times May 21 2010

It was an uncomfortably close call for Mrs. Merkel.
The bill passed by a margin of just seven votes, with half a dozen members of her conservative coalition voting against it.
The left-wing opposition parties refused to support the deal, either abstaining or voting against it.
New York Times May 21 2010

Gnisslet mellan Tyskland och övriga euroländer ger underlag för spekulationer om att tyskarna skulle vara på väg att tröttna på euron och i stället söka sig tillbaka mot gamla D-marken.
Förmodligen rör det sig om helt ogrundade gissningar, men de öppnar ändå för ett dystert scenario där valutaunionen spricker och Europa hotas av ekonomiskt kaos.
Johan Schück, DN 2010-05-21

Det tyska beslutet fattades med stor brådska och utan det breda parlamentariska stöd som regeringen hoppats på.
/> – Ni har ingen linje och inget mål. Ni vet inte vad ni vill med landet eller Europa.
Det omdömet fällde de tyska socialdemokraternas ledare Sigmar Gabriel om Angela Merkels regering i förbundsdagsdebatten i dag.
För Tysklands del omfattar dagens beslut ungefär lika mycket som en halv årsbudget för landet, eller omräknat i kronor 1 500 miljarder.
Ekot 21 ma 2010

Demokratiproblemet:
att den svenska regeringschefen numera fattar avgörande beslut i ett EU-forum som saknar öppenhet och insyn – och att detta forum fått mer och mer makt i EU.
Också som EU-vän måste man tillstå att alltför många viktiga frågor börjat avgöras i slutna rum.
Den förändringen av statsministerrollen är djupt problematisk.
Signerat: Peter Wolodarski DN 2010-05-20

Dagens Ja-sägare:
Birgitta Ohlsson vill tillhöra EU:s absoluta kärna, makt och framtid
Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-22

A big step towards fiscal federalism in Europe
When the euro was born everyone knew that sooner or later a crisis would occur.
It was also clear that the stability and growth pact was – as I have said before – “stupid”
Romano Prodi FT May 20 2010

Romano Prodi:
“If you have a common currency of course you need common fiscal policy,”
“We must have supranational control” of policy “otherwise the euro cannot work,”
Bloomberg May 18, 2010

– Det här reningsbadet kommer att leda till ett starkare EMU, säger Fölster, som alltså inte tror att diskussionerna för eller emot valutaunionen kommer att dö ut.

Han får medhåll av Johnny Munkhammar, statsvetare och välkänd författare och debattör.
I samband med euro-omröstningen 2003 var Munkhammar en av de ledande företrädarna för ja-sidan.
Världen idag 2010-05-12

– Precis det som vi motståndare varnade för har nu inträffat, säger Nils Gottfries, professor i nationalekonomi vid Uppsala universitet.
Världen idag 2010-05-12

Germans are amazed at global reaction to their fiscal proposals
FT Deutschland had an interesting culture shock article in which it quotes several economists as saying that
Germany’s debt rule, if applied to the whole of the eurozone, is much more likely to result in investor panic than solve the problem.
Eurointelligence 20 may 2010

Det är nu vi måste påbörja ett snabbt utträde ur de offentliga underskotten.
Jag har fått Parlamentets stöd för krav på en snabb återgång till balans i de offentliga finanserna och hänsyn till välfärdens kostnader
Gunnar Hökmark, Europaportalen 20 maj 2010

Själv ser /Göran Persson/ faror som är långt farligare än Greklandskrisen.
– Jag trodde en gång i tiden att stabilitetspakten var lösningen på den här knuten, men det visar sig att den inte var det. Så då får man väl hitta en annan konstruktion.
Det är klart att jag vill se hur den ser ut innan Sverige kan gå med.

– Svenska folket har sagt nej till ett euromedlemskap med tydlig majoritet. Vi ska inte aktualisera en ny folkomröstning förrän vi har ett riktigt folkligt krav på det. Och det har vi inte idag
Göran Persson. e24 2010-05-19

Behind the drama in Europe lies a global crisis
The euro is under threat – along with our entire free-market system
In Washington the US Senate voted 94:0 to prevent IMF from using its cash to help countries that are inextricably trapped in a debt spiral.

Edmund Conway Daily Telegraph 19 May 2010

Might the eurozone break up? Until recently I would have answered: absolutely no.
This is not because I thought the currency union a wise idea. But the commitment to make it work seemed fundamental to the policies of Europe’s principal powers.
Martin Wolf FT 18 May 2010

Germany's 'desperate' short ban triggers capital flight to Switzerland
A year ago, Germany's financial regulator BaFin warned that the toxic debts of the country's banks would blow up "like a grenade" once hidden losses from the credit crisis caught up with them.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 19 May 2010

Dagens Ja-sägare
Farlig demonisering av euron
Trots att regeringen konstaterat att den gemensamma valutan är bra för Europa och för Sverige har den politiska processen för ett svenskt deltagande i euron stagnerat.
Gunnar Hökmark på SvD Brännpunkt

Pierre Werner – mannen som för fyrtio år sedan presenterade den första eurorapporten.
En del av hans slutsatser bakades in i Maastrichtfördraget som ligger till grund för dagens valutasamarbete. Det som handlade om gemensam ekonomisk politik har inte tagits fram förrän nu.
Annika Ström Melin DN 29 maj 2010

Sex av tio skulle rösta nej, 29 procent skulle rösta ja,
elva procent vet ej

Novus/TV4 17/5 2010

The euro is in danger, German Chancellor Angela Merkel
said in a speech to parliament
CNBC 19 May 2010

The eurozone came extremely close to a breakdown 10 days ago.
What is completely missing in Brussels – and even more so in Berlin – is an understanding of the urgency of the situation.

Wolfgang Münchau, FT May 16 2010

Banks dump Greek debt on the ECB
Foreign holders of Greek and Portuguese debt have seized on emergency intervention by the European Central Bank to exit their positions, leaving eurozone taxpayers exposed to the credit risk.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 17 May 2010

Europa befinner sig i den värsta situationen sedan andra världskriget,
kanske till och med sedan första världskriget.
Det säger chefen för den Europeiska centralbanken Jean-Claude Trichet
Ekot 16 maj 2010

Jean-Claude Trichet tells us the world faced a second Lehman crash in the days and hours before EU leaders launched their €720bn defence fund.
If the European Central Bank’s president is correct, we are in trouble.
The EU-IMF package is already unravelling. What will the West do for its next trick?
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 16 May 2010

Trichet, Krugman och Birgitta Ohlsson
Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-16

How do America and Greece compare?
Both nations have lately been running large budget deficits, roughly comparable as a percentage of G.D.P
Greece is caught in a trap. Having your own currency, it seems, makes a big difference.
Paul Krugman, NYT May 13, 2010

På bekostnad av nationalstaterna ställdes Europa i förgrunden och försågs med ett mycket operativt mål: freden var tvungen att säkras. Aldrig mer krig.
Det var en både enkel och begriplig målsättning, länge så framgångsrik att unga européer i dag mest rycker på axlarna åt den eftersom de tar fred som något självklart.
Det är det europeiska dilemmat – något nytt visionärt mål annat än just denna fred har Europa inte lyckats ställa sig.
Richard Swartz, DN 15/5 2010

Barroso modig som har vågat röra vid pudeln kärna i debatten om eurons och unionens ekonomiska framtid.
Euroländerna skulle kunna rösta ned ett lands budget med en kvalificerad majoritet
Medlemsstaterna bör ha mod att säga om de vill ha en ekonomisk union, och om de inte vill det, är det bättre att glömma den monetära unionen helt och hållet.
Teresa Küchler om euro-krisen SvD 14 maj 2010

The European Cental Bank's bailout package is just a $1 trillion fig leaf covering the problem and
a better move would have been to arrange for Greece and Portugal to leave the European Union
, Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics and public policy at Harvard, told CNBC Friday 14/5 2010

Frankrikes president Nicolas Sarkozy hotade med att dra Frankrike ur eurosamarbetet
om inte Tyskland gick med på det räddningspaket som ska hjälpa Grekland ur krisen.
Det uppger den spanska tidningen El País enligt DN 14 maj 2010

Italy's outstanding public debt is €1.7 trillion, seven times the size of Greece's.
Italy "is a big systemic piece," said François Chauchat, an economist with GaveKal, a Stockholm-based economic advisory firm.
"If Italy cannot refinance its debt than it's the end of the euro."
WSJ 14 May 2010

”Centralbanker dumpar euron”
- Det finns trots räddningspaketet i helgen
stora frågetecken kring om euron kommer att finnas kvar som valuta om ett par, 3—4 år
Carl Hammer, chefsstrateg på SEB, DN/TT 14 maj 2010

"Eurons roll som reservvaluta är nu ifrågasatt",
konstaterar SEB:s chefekonom Robert Bergqvist
i ett marknadsbrev på fredagsmorgonen.
E24/TT 14 maj 2010
med diagram

I Grekland-krisens kvarnar mals motståndet mot ökad överstatlighet ned. ”Hela krispaketet som beslutades i helgen är ett stort steg mot ökad samordning”,
Klas Eklund, Nils Lundgren och Calmfors uttalar sig SvD/E24 14 maj 2010

Federalisterna, Jugoslavien, Annika Ström Melin och Göran Persson
Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-14

Deutsche-Bank-Chef Ackermann: Greece won’t repay all of its debt
there is no alternative to helping Greece because otherwise the eurozone would have melted down
Eurointelligence 14/5 2010

Exchange offices in the UK have stopped selling 500 euro banknotes
because of their use by money launderers.
The Serious Organised Crime Agency says 90% of the notes sold in the UK are in the hands of organised crime.
BBC 13 maj 2010

Euro remains on the right side of history
At stake in this struggle, ultimately, is the ideology of the omnipotent nation-state.
Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, FT May 13 2010

IMFs dödsdom över Grekland och EU:s räddningspaket
Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-12

Euron: Krisen handlar om EU:s överlevnad och framtid
Den 9 maj 2010, nästan på klockslaget sextio år efter den allra första Europadagen, samlades EU:s finansministrar till ännu ett krismöte i Bryssel.
Den tydliga och nästan ödesmättade symboliken i detta sammanträffande ska inte överdrivas, men nog finns den där.
Annika Ström Melin DN Signerat 2010-05-11
RE: En lysande artikel

Spansk svångrem kan kväsa tillväxt
Sänkta löner för offentliganställda och inga uppjusteringar
av pensioner eller barnbidrag före 2012
Anders Bolling, DN 12 maj 2010

IMF-rapport varnar
Givet att Grekland ingår i eurosamarbetet är en devalvering inte en möjlig utväg för landet.
Tjänstemännen bedömer i rapporten att Greklands "effektiva växelkurs", inom eurosamarbetet, är övervärderad med upp till 30 procent,
och denna övervärdering måste pressas ut ur den grekiska ekonomin i en "lång och smärtsam process"
Washington Post/DI 12 maj 2010

Varje dag kan vi nu via medierna se hur konflikterna och problemen med EMU tydliggörs.
EMU-tvångströjan kommer bara i en storlek och den passar uppenbart inte alla.
Den här sortens förkeynesiansk deflationspolitik provades under 1920- och 1930-talen och var antagligen den främsta enskilda orsaken till depressionen.
Lars Pålsson Syll, Newsmill 2010-05-08

Regain lost competitiveness
Inside the eurozone, this is possible only with falling wages, higher productivity growth than in Germany (and so soaring unemployment), or both
Martin Wolf May 11 2010

The threat that Portugal and Spain might be cut off from credit markets,
triggering a meltdown in Europe’s financial system, was all too real.
The euro zone’s rescue scheme is big and bold but leaves the ECB looking compromised
The Economist online May 11th 2010

Taking on the 'wolf pack'
President Van Rompuy said:
"We can't have a monetary union at the end without some form of economic and political union,
and that is our big task for the coming weeks and the coming months."

BBC 10 maj 2010

How can a loan guarantee solve a problem of excessive indebtedness?
We should remember that, unlike in Greece, the issue in Spain and Portugal is not primarily fiscal, but an excessively indebted private sector.
So unless José Luis Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister, is going to present the mother of all economic reform packages, it is hard to see how the mother of all bail-outs is going to work.
Wolfgang Münchau May 10 2010

How can a loan guarantee solve a problem of excessive indebtedness?
The funny thing is that the Germans, Ms Merkel probably included, really believed in the “no bail-out” clause.
They were shocked by events. They failed to see that Article 125 of the Lisbon treaty is the kind of law that is irrelevant until needed, at which point it becomes impossible to apply.
Wolfgang Münchau May 10 2010

The second, more worrying step is a European Central Bank decision to buy government bonds “to address... malfunctioning... securities markets”.
With this it caved in to pressure from eurozone sovereigns not to tolerate a bond strike against one of their number.
Financial Times editorial May 10 2010

Vargflocken
Giriga finansvalpar är inte grundproblemet den här gången.
Däremot finns det en politisk kris på flera nivåer.

DN 2010-05-11

There can be no more pretence that monetary union respects the premise on which it was sold to European citizens, Germans in particular.
Financial Times editorial May 10 2010 20:41

Fredrik Reinfeldt om folkets nej till EMU:
vi respekterar det till annat meddelas
Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-11

Nu hörs allt starkare röster på mer av gemensam finanspolitik.
En hel rad knepiga val väntar
SvD, Signerat Claes Arvidsson, 11 maj 2010

The two German members of the ECB's council voted against the move
The European Central Bank risks irreparable damage to its reputation by agreeing to the mass purchases of southern European bonds in defiance of the German Bundesbank and apparently under orders from EU leaders.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 11 May 2010

The euro was supposed to lubricate faster economic growth by eliminating the cost and confusion of constantly converting between national currencies. More important, it would promote political unity. With a common currency, people would feel "European."
Their identities as Germans, Italians and Spaniards would gradually blend into a continental identity.
None of this has happened.
Robert J. Samuelson Washington Post May 10, 2010

Quantitative easing
Click here

Grekpaketet handlar om bankstöd och imperiebyggande.
Rolf Englund blog 2010-05-10

Ytterst är euron ett politiskt projekt som syftar till att knyta EU:s länder närmare varandra. Men
fram till dess att euroländerna har visat att de är kapabla att reda ut denna kris råder det ingen brådska för Sverige att gå med i valutasamarbetet.
Expressen 10 maj 2010

The nuclear option
The accord profoundly alters the character of the European Union. The walls of fiscal and economic sovereignty are being breached. The creation of an EU rescue mechanism with powers to issue bonds with Europe's AAA rating to help eurozone states in trouble is to go far beyond the Lisbon Treaty. This new agency is an EU Treasury in all but name, managing an EU fiscal union where liabilities become shared.
A European state is being created before our eyes.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 9 May 2010

A few other comments May 10
Click here

Having announced that interest rates would remain at 1%, ECB president Jean-Claude
Trichet said that restarting a programme to buy up government debt had not been considered.
BBC 6 May 2010

PRESS RELEASE
In view of the current exceptional circumstances prevailing in the market, the Governing Council decided:
To conduct interventions in the euro area public and private debt securities markets (Securities Markets Programme) to ensure depth and liquidity in those market segments which are dysfunctional.
ECB 10 May 2010

What we won't do is provide support for the euro
- that has to come from those countries that use the euro."

UK Chancellor Alistair Darling BBC Sunday, 9 May 2010 17:42 UK

The End of the Euro
How the crisis in Greece could lead to the demise of Europe's most ambitious project.
Alarming is the exposure of other EU banks to Greek debt, which totals $193 billion
Niall Ferguson NEWSWEEK May 7, 2010

Det kommer aldrig att bli möjligt att göra någon entydig nyttokalkyl som visar att Sverige gör en nettovinst på att gå med.
Lars Calmfors 2009

Jag har varit väldigt tydlig med att jag inte tycker att det här primärt är en ekonomisk fråga.
Anders Borg, Ekot 20 februari 2010

Det /EMU/ är ett viktigt ekonomiskt politiskt projekt som svenska folket äger makten att påverka om vi ska vara med eller inte i och beslutet har varit att vi ska stå utanför.
Då respekterar vi det till annat meddelas eller tills det att svenska folket ändrar sig.
Fredrik Reinfeldt, Ekot, 10 maj 2010 kl 15:56

Nu krävs det mycket funderande och utvecklande av europrojektet om vi någonsin ska ställa frågan till svenska folket igen.
Mo