politics, economy and employment & labour
Since the start of this year the ECB has been applying “quantitative easing” (QE), i.e. a program injecting large amounts of money into the economy. Every month the ECB is buying 60 billion euros of government bonds and in so doing injects the same amount of money into the economy. Up to today the total […]
What do the Euro and Schengen have in common? Both are projects that have the same flaw: they’re unfinished business. And therefore they risk falling apart. The Eurozone is a monetary union, with one currency, the euro circulating in the Union and managed by one central bank, the European Central Bank. What’s wrong with that? […]
The Greek drama has entered its endgame. The Greek government has to repay loans to the IMF and other public institutions in the near future but does not have the cash to do so. The lenders refuse to come forward in providing liquidity as long as the Greek government does not accept the conditions they […]
The Greek debt crisis that erupted in 2010 is back and again threatens the stability of the Eurozone. That crisis was the result of two factors. First, an unbridled spending drift of both the private and the public sectors in Greece during the boom years of 2000-2010, which led to unsustainable levels of debt. Second, […]
Slow growth in the Eurozone has become endemic since the start of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010. This is made very clear in Figure 1, which contrasts the growth experience of the Eurozone with the non-Eurozone EU-member countries since the start of the financial crisis in 2007. What is striking is that up to […]
Despite having a positive effect on the economic situation within the Eurozone, the European Central Bank’s Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program has proved controversial, with the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe recently deeming it illegal under EU law. Paul De Grauwe argues that the ruling reflects a serious misunderstanding of central banking on the part of the […]
