Banks

Financially, Spain is like Ireland but it is much, much bigger. There is little doubt that Spain will need a massive bailout. The question is, who has the money to bail out Europe’s fourth-largest economy, and when Spain topples what happens to Italy and what happens to the euro? The European response to the fact…

Ernest Hemingway was once asked how did he go bankrupt. The great man thought for a second and then replied: “I went bankrupt in two ways, gradually and then suddenly.” When we see the figures coming from the various banks, it is not difficult to see that something similar is happening in Ireland. Whether the…

A few months ago, Ruairi Quinn – a former Minister for Finance and a man who clearly understands the economy – declared that the country was in ‘‘economic receivership’’. It is an interesting phrase, and worthy of some consideration. If a country is in economic receivership, what does that mean for existing state contracts signed…

This week is the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. As a student, in the summer of 1989 just before the whole system imploded, I walked with a few others through Checkpoint Charlie into the twilight zone of East Germany to catch a train from East Berlin’s main train station to Prague….

Anyone who worked in financial markets will know that — at its most base — the “market” is in fact only a coked up, whoring 28-year-old from Basildon on hyper-wages, with a Porsche and a Chelsea season ticket. This is hardly the type of far-sighted leader that we should be depending on, nor the opinion…

The other day, I watched a Few teenage kids knocking around my neck of the woods. One lad in particular caught my attention. He walked like a young fella with haemorrhoids, legs far apart as if in total discomfort. I watched him as he hung around with his mates, trousers sagging down so far that…

Yesterday the IMF published its fifth review of Iceland’s economy since the crisis began. The IMF declared Iceland’s economic progress “impressive” and disbursed a loan tranche of $225m (€136m). Now if this sounds weird to you, it should do. This is the Iceland that defaulted on all its bank bondholders and this is the Iceland…

Is the European Central Bank (ECB) Europe’s AIG? In other words, will the ECB be left holding the can, having lent all this money to the peripheral countries in order to save rich banks in Germany and France, in the same way as insurance giant AIG was destroyed by the sub-prime market? If you remember…

By playing hardball with the French and Germans this weekend, Greece has bravely sparked a liberation which could topple the eurozone as we know it – and not a minute too soon If you have ever tried to learn German, you will know that reading it is much more difficult than speaking it. The problem…

IN the late 1980s, while studying at the College of Europe in Bruges, I was struck by just how pragmatic the European project appeared to be. Many of the lecturers and professors were deep EU “insiders” — distinguished academics from all over Europe who had excelled in their own fields. They seemed to be the…