Euro

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. Reading through it,…

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. They are all on their way home, but they’re not coming from Germany; they…

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. The meeting was sponsored by ESB or, as it is soon to be known, Electricity Ireland. The students were optimistic about the future, confident and…

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…

When you walk up one of Ireland’s deserted main streets, it is difficult to reconcile the talk of Ireland doing well and being the model for other European countries to follow with the reality of living here. The reality here is that retail sales have collapsed and are not recovering. Anyone dependent on the domestic…

You know the feeling when you get a text and have to look at it twice to make sure that what you are reading is what you just thought you read. On Friday morning, I got a message from a friend who was caught in a huge midsummer traffic jam at the Swiss border coming…

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…

WE are living in truly historic times and witnessing historic events. Uncomfortably, the massive rally that followed the euro bailout appears to have petered out. The main leading indicator of sentiment is the euro/dollar exchange rate. Having rallied on Monday, the value of the euro has fallen back. One implication of this is that the…

The only thing that will stop Ireland – and a number of other EU countries – from defaulting on their debts is if the European Central Bank bites the bullet and starts printing money to buy up government debt in Europe in limitless quantities. This is what we have come to. Anything less and the…