Top Page Links

Eurobonds were a bad idea. “Coronabonds” are too

“Coronabonds: Eurobonds Redux in Times of COVID-19” By Bill Wirtz, courtesy of the Austrian Economics Center   As the Coronavirus pandemic continues to affect European countries – and the most affected countries are simultaneously the more indebted Eurozone countries, the issue of mutualized debt has once again been put on the agenda. Spain and Italy […]

Top Page Links

Europeans take the Euro for granted

  By Joris Melman and Giuseppe Porcaro, courtesy of the Bruegel Institute   How can we understand citizens’ attitudes towards the euro and its politics?   A previous research project studied narratives of the euro crisis and explored the blame game that marked these years. The study found part of the answer to why it has been so hard […]

Top Page Links

What’s behind euro-area housing boom… and is a crash coming?

  “Recent euro-area house price increases are dissimilar to earlier housing booms” By Zsolt Darvas, Marta Domínguez-Jiménez, and Guntram B. Wolf, courtesy of the Bruegel Institute   Rapid house price increases are good for homeowners and bad for people wishing to buy. They could also be bad for the economy as a whole if there […]

Top Page Links

Christine Lagarde at the ECB: chronicle of a failure foretold

  By Etienne Chaumeton, courtesy of IREF   In economics, the future is necessarily uncertain, because it is subject to the decisions of a multitude of individual actions. The recent arrival of Christine Lagarde to the presidency of the European Central Bank (ECB) on November 1, 2019, however, seems to mark the first stage of […]

Top Page Links

Bitte nicht! Germany still opposes banking union

  “Germany Remains Firmly Opposed to Banking Union” By Gordon Kerr, Cavin O’Driscoll and Enrico Colombatto, courtesy of IREF   In November, Germany’s Finance Minister Olaf Scholz wrote an article in the Financial Times claiming that he had devised a common European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS)[1] that could be acceptable to both sides of the hitherto […]

Top Page Links

Are Central European countries ready for the Euro?

                  By Zsolt Darvas, courtesy Bruegel Institute     Southern European euro-area members suffered from unsustainable developments after they joined the euro in 1999 and up to 2008, and have had great difficulties since. Inadequate national policies were the main causes of these unsustainable developments, but euro […]

Top Page Links

Is ECB stimulus too late?

                        While monetary “hawks” tend to reject any further monetary easing from the European Central Bank like the plague, doveish types are afraid that the ECB’s latest round of easing didn’t go far enough, and may have come too late anyway. The doves’ point […]

Top Page Links

East Euro econs say “no” to transfer union

      Any financial system reform for the European Union that involves creation of a transfer union, putting Europe’s prudent countries on the hook for profligate counterparts, faces a few rather large obstacles in Central and Eastern Europe. That’s according to the new analysis from the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in […]