BRUSSELS: A new controversy has emerged between the European Union and several of its main trade partners since the EU decided to include in its CO2 emission-control scheme all flights to and from its territory, including transcontinental flights. (...)
BRUSSELS: For the third year in a row, the Eurozone is the weakest link in the world economy. In 2010, attention was focused on responses to the crisis on the Eurozone periphery — Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. In 2011, the crisis moved to the core, (...)
BRUSSELS: A series of developments over the last few weeks have set in motion a downward spiral for the eurozone. Unless officials — especially German officials — act fast, the verdict of financial markets is bound to be ruthless.
First, the (...)
BRUSSELS: In June, it was Greece. In August, it was France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. In September, it was Greece again — and Spain. In November, France took another turn, before Italy again in December, this time in a major way. Every month, (...)
BRUSSELS: Since the summer, the continuing installments of the Greek crisis have concealed a worrying process of fragmentation in the eurozone. Indeed, there are several grim indicators of this development.
First, the spread between banks' (...)
BRUSSELS: France, which now holds the presidency of the G-20, has chosen reform of the international monetary system as its main priority for the Cannes summit in November. But is the issue worth the time and energy officials will devote to it? And (...)
BRUSSELS: The world was expecting Eurobonds to come out of last week's Franco-German summit; instead, the eurozone will get economic governance. According to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the great leap (...)
BRUSSELS: You can always trust the Americans, Winston Churchill said, because in the end they will do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities. For the last 18 months, this has been Europe's method for confronting its (...)
BRUSSELS: For months now, a fight over sovereign-debt restructuring has been raging between those who insist that Greece must continue to honor its signature and those for whom the country's debt should be partly canceled. As is often the case in (...)
PARIS: In 1989, the wall separating the two halves of Europe suddenly collapsed. Within the space of a few months, a hitherto seemingly immutable order gave way to commotion and impatience. At first, the old countries of Europe were paralyzed with (...)
BRUSSELS: If French President Nicolas Sarkozy had written the prologue to his presidency of the G-20, which has just commenced, he could not have done better. The run-up to the G-20's summit in Seoul was marred by a series of currency controversies, (...)
BRUSSELS: Two years ago, governments saved the necks of the world's financial markets. Yet today, those same markets intimidate governments, or at least some of them.
In Europe, the market for Greek debt has frozen, and interest-rate spreads (...)
BRUSSELS: Guido Mantega, Brazil's finance minister, aptly captured the current monetary Zeitgeist when he spoke of a looming “currency war.” What had seemed a bilateral dispute between the United States and China over the renminbi's exchange rate (...)
PARIS: The dispute that has emerged in the United States and Europe between proponents of further government stimulus and advocates of fiscal retrenchment feels very much like a debate about economic history. Both sides have revisited the Great (...)
BRUSSELS: Two years have passed since the financial crises erupted, and we have only started to realize how costly it is likely to be. Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England estimates that the present value of the corresponding losses in future (...)
BRUSSELS: It is an old debate, but tensions within the euro area have revived it: can a monetary union survive without some form of fiscal federalism?
This issue is of persistent concern for investors worldwide. Holders of European government (...)