Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) suffered another poor state election result on Sunday October 28 with 27 per cent, down 11.3 percentage points from the 2013 election in Hesse. Her grand coalition partner the Social Democratic Party (SPD) slumped to 19.8 per cent of votes, down 10.9 percentage points, its worst showing since 1946. […]
Power Is Draining Away From Angela Merkel
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fourth election has turned into a heavily qualified victory. She is facing criticism over how she has handled the refugee crisis and some say that she should not have let in over one million refugees into the country. That sentiment is more widely felt in Germany than the public debate that […]
Does Brexit Pose Danger Both For European Union And China?
The geopolitical impact seems to be a “forgotten dimension” of Brexit. The EU will become far less important and its influence on foreign policy within the UN and in a wider global context diminished. The EU’s own internal power dynamics will also become fundamentally imbalanced: the political and institutional reverberations for the Union itself would be far greater […]
The European Central Bank: A Central Bank Operating In A Democratic Void
To say that the Euro is facing existential threats is no exaggeration. The European single currency was hailed until not too long ago as an aspiring global reserve currency, second only to the US Dollar. But the Eurozone’s handling of the Greek debt crisis is putting the Euro’s future in question. The potential for Greece […]
The ECB’s Troubling Future Policy Conundrum
In the German Constitutional Court ruling on the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) programme by the European Central Bank (ECB), judges said they were “inclined to regard the OMT decision as an Ultra Vires act”, adding that this “creates an obligation of German authorities to refrain from implementing it”. The court judgment has ruled that the […]
Eurozone Crisis Causes Swiss Policy Conundrum
In September 2011 the Swiss National Bank (SNB) introduced measures to manage the country’s exchange rate at a lower limit of 1.20 Swiss Franc/Euro. This commitment to weakening the Swiss Franc will most likely be maintained at any cost. Switzerland before the financial crisis had run large and rising current account surpluses and kept a […]
The Dollar: Exorbitant or Extortionate Privilege?
The US Dollar has probably been the closest thing to a true global currency that the world has ever seen. For decades, the use of the US Dollar has been absolutely dominant in international trade. This has had tremendous benefits for the US financial system and for US consumers, and it has given the US […]
Do we need Credit Rating Agencies?
Now Moody’s has put the UK’s sovereign credit rating on negative watch, it means a downgrade is in sight. The UK government puts great store by the opinions of credit rating agencies. But recent experience suggests that an actual downgrade should have little financial significance. France and the US lost their triple A ratings without […]
Why we need comprehensive Debt Restructuring in Europe
The Eurozone crisis has been a battle over who will ultimately be liable for the billions worth of actual and potential losses on sovereign debt held by European financial institutions. With neither the issuance of collectively backed Eurobonds nor the use of the European Central Bank (ECB) as lender of last resort initially available as […]