What was Europe’s debt problem is starting to look like Europe’s taxation problem. Words emerging from a one-day European Union summit in Brussels show EU leaders aren’t focused just on spending and deficits: they announced an investigation into “aggressive” use...
Read more »New Deal for Europe’s Youth: Learn to Cook in Germany
Europe has a new plan to help get the younger generation their first job. The “New Deal for Europe” offers under-25s in Mediterranean countries any job they’d like, just so long as it’s in catering, and in Germany. The “New...
Read more »EU Popularity Withstands Crisis Test…
… wasn’t the banner headline on this week’s Pew Research Center survey of European public opinion, but isn’t as far from reality as you might think. True, the Pew numbers, derived from a March poll in eight European Union countries...
Read more »Draghi Deposit Rate U-Turn Gets Negative Review
Yesterday, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi sent the euro falling and eyebrows rising when he suggested he was ready and willing to begin charging banks to park cash in a deposit facility in Frankfurt. A negative deposit rate, as...
Read more »Merkel Reigns on Cyprus — Not
Yesterday was the big German parliamentary decision on aid for Cyprus, and the burning question was whether Chancellor Angela Merkel would hold her coalition together or, as in past Bundestag crisis-management moments, rely on opposition votes to pass the package....
Read more »Merkel Shows Germany’s Woodsmen How to Chop
A gathering of Germany’s foresters may not seem like the most obvious venue for Chancellor Angela Merkel to defend her austerity agenda against the encroaching horde of Keynesians. Yet there she was, at first weighing in on the government’s arboricultural...
Read more »Napolitano Says Basta, to Leave Italian Impasse to Successor
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, two months shy of his 88th birthday, has said his work is done as he prepares to hand off the country’s political stalemate to an unknown successor. The role of the Italian president is generally a...
Read more »Brussels and Mrs. Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher spoke about Europe mainly in terms of what she didn’t want: neither a “narrow-minded, inward-looking club” that is “ossified by endless regulation,” nor “an institutional device to be constantly modified according to the dictates of some abstract intellectual...
Read more »Is Cyprus Euro-Exit Talk More Than Talk?
Bailed-out and bankingly challenged Cyprus is a “unique case,” the entire European policy establishment tells us. One under-reported way in which Cyprus is unique is that chatter about eventually leaving the euro isn’t limited to the fringes. It’s part of...
Read more »ECB’s Emergency Cash Becomes Last Bulwark Against Chaos
The euro area has just come as close as it ever has to learning that what the European Central Bank gives, it can also take away. Before euro-area ministers agreed a last-ditch bailout in the small hours of Monday morning,...
Read more »Europe’s Creeping Comeback
Even as dark clouds form over Europe’s economy again, there may be a silver lining emerging from three-years of crisis. From Ireland to Spain, the austerity demanded by policy makers in exchange for aid amid three years of debt woes...
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