Articles: Euro %

Here’s something bold. Not only is the European economy not going to recover but a secondary depression is now on the cards. The putative European recovery has evaporated – as anyone with a grasp of Leaving Cert economics would have forecast a few years ago given the policy mix adopted. More

The most striking aspect of racing through the English countryside from London to Bristol is not the green and pleasant land of William Blake’s poetry, but the abundance of Tescos. After every 20 or so minutes of countryside, a massive out-of-town giant Tesco store announces each major train station. William Blake evoked the green pastoral land of rural England as an idyll – a place where the English could build their new Jerusalem in stark contrast to what he described as the “dark satanic mills” of the industrial revolution that he felt were destroying the English character with excessive commercialism. More

Ireland is a country trying to compete with the rest of the world from a position of weakness and that weakness is, in the main, due to choices made by the state. More

Last night we saw not just a football match between two great teams, but two very different cultural, social and economic models battling for supremacy. On one hand we had the frugal but brilliant Germans of Borussia Dortmund, on the other was the free-spending (and also brilliant) Real Madrid. This was a battle between the local, academy-based Dortmund, and the international, chequebook-driven, Real. More

Frequently, and with some validity, business people lambast economists for knowing nothing about the real world. They claim that economists dwell in ivory towers and just don’t get it. Some economists may well live in ivory towers but those of us who work for ourselves and employ people and try to make a living in the private sector are not as removed as the business people might think. In fact, we are business people. Yet the point is valid, as theoretical models of the economy do sometimes seem removed from reality. More

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? More

When all the people you read every week for information are talking about the same report, you know that you should read it. From Paul Krugman on the left to John Mauldin on the right, some of my favourite reads of the week are citing a McKinsey Consulting report on global debt. More

The last flight from Frankfurt to Dublin last Thursday was jammed. I didn’t expect it. In fact I thought a 10.45pm flight from Germany would have been half empty. But, of course, the flight was jammed with returning young Irish people. More

On Monday at a breakfast meeting, I spoke to a group of students who were just finishing the masters in marketing from the Michael Smurfit School of Business at UCD. More

The deal signed last Friday is the beginning of the end of Europe as we know it. The shift is on from a family of nations, with checks and balances, to a German Europe where diktat triumphs over dialogue, and the interest of the strongest wipes the floor with the concerns of the weakest. Luckily for us, the deal looks unlikely to work because they haven’t been able to come up with enough money to prevent another bond crisis early next year, as more than €1 trillion of bonds in the eurozone come up for refinancing. More