Economics Roundtable

The European CommissionÂ’s report on the future of the euro area has not been getting the deserved attention in European newspapers, which is why we are (unusually) running a special edition summarising, and commenting on, some of its key recommendations.

The others big news yesterday was the now ...

Thomas Hoenig, Fed chief of Kansas city, was quoted by Bloombery (hat tip Calculated Risk) as saying that there is a big risk that inflation expectations become embedded, requiring a serious policy reversal. He said consumers were gaining an “inflation psychology to an extent that I ...

The usually reliably informed Jean Quatremer of Liberation writes in his blog that his sources tell him that President Sarkozy favours Jean-Claude Juncker and Jose Manuel Barroso for the two top jobs of president of the EU Council and president of the EU Commission. The only ...

According to a McKinsey study, GermanyÂ’s middle classes are headed for terminal decline, unless there is a fundamental change in economic policy. The reason is that too many middle class Germans make a living in old and decaying industry. To arrest this trend, the consultancy recommends a set of ...

The euro is back to below $1.55, not exactly low by recent standards but not as dizzy as the levels it recently acquired. The reason is, of course, the changed perceptions about the strength of the euro area economy, according to a number of confidence surveys, and the most ...

According to George Will: "The future has a way of arriving unannounced". That was before equity analysts.

In dense, jargon-infected prose splattered with spurious statistics, many analysts are trumpeting that the worst of the credit problems are behind us. Major equity markets have recovered ...

The US housing market is quite clearly the single most relevant issue that will decide shape, depth, and length of the US economic downturn, and its spillover to the rest of the world – hence our continued interest in the subject. The best information source on the US housing ...

The way European newspapers cover the European Commission economic forecasts is downright awful, focusing mostly on some narrow, mostly national, subset. The The European CommissionÂ’s  growth forecast 2008 and 2009 is relatively upbeat. If true, it suggests that the euro area would escape the worst of ...

So this crisis is about to end, right? There are two failsafe ways to justify a solid dose of optimism: define the crisis in a sufficiently narrow way; and, even better, look at the wrong crisis. In that spirit I am happy to state my optimism about the

In its strategy paper about the future of the euro area,  the European Commission will reject any notion of policy co-ordination that includes the European Central Bank, according to a report in Le Monde. The Commission will present its paper on May 7, and it will include a discussion ...