MADRID | July 16, 2015 | By Fernando G. Urbaneja | To doubt German solidarity is to deny the evidence. To do it from Spain shows ignorance or bad faith. Merkel has proven she wants and can support the welfare state, firmly established in Germany for decades.
May 21, 2015 | By Benjamin Cole via Marcus’ Nunes Historinhas | If you don’t like quantitative easing, then consider this: The Nikkei 225, a broad measure of Japan’s stock market, is up 45.9% in the last 52 weeks.
MADRID | By Sean Duffy | Investment by Catalan lender may provoke “Iberian battle” for supremacy in the peninsula.
MADRID | The Corner | In spite of, or maybe, thanks to the so-called Spailout (2012), Spain is today one of Europe’s driving forces. The International Monetary Fund’s estimates on global economy point to the country as the outperformer of the Eurozone for the first time in six years. Its GDP would grow by 2% this year and 1.8% in 2016.
ATHENS | By Yiannis Mouzakis via Macropolis | The total amount of loans the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund supplied to Greece between May 2010 and the most recent disbursements last summer stand at 226.7 billion euros. This is equivalent to almost 125 percent of Greece’s economic activity in 2014. There seems to be a general misconception that feeds a misleading narrative in which the loans were used to keep the Greek state afloat, maintain its basic operations and pay salaries of doctors, teachers and policemen.
Japan’s descent into recession has prompted questions of what the country must do to right itself — and many agree that “Abenomics” will not be enough. Most Japan watchers and economists, and even Abe himself, say that to restore sustainable growth, Japan needs sweeping deregulation and structural reforms. But pushing through such changes is proving daunting, despite Abe’s pledges to “drill deep into the bedrock” of Japan’s vested interests.
MADRID | By Julia Pastor | The designs of the markets are unfathomable. Mario Draghi might forget the QE idea and the British housing sector might collapse. These are some of the Saxo Bank’s ludicrous forecasts for 2015. A year ago they claimed there would be a default in the Russian debt and the collapse of the oil price, and they were right. Nonetheless, most of the experts that talked to The Corner agree on a scenario for 2015 led by the ECB’s quantitative easing, the oil price reduction and low interest rates.
MADRID | By Julia Pastor | While the idea is spreading that the ECB can become the European “bad bank” if it finally buys securities from Greece and Cyprus, our readers should note that the ABS market is too small in some EU countries such as Spain. Also, many issuers do not even have a credit rating and those who have it would not obtain more than a BBB-. The reality is that there is not much “junk” to buy.
BEIJING | By Qin Min via Caixin | Government agencies are leading a shift to cloud-based computing to save money and promote a new industry.
MADRID | By Julia Pastor | Mario Draghi has been saying he doesn’t rule out a sovereing debt QE: he reminded it at Jackson Hole, then at the European Parliament and in a euro summit in Lithuania on Thursday. Markets are discounting those eventual state debt’s purchases. But do they make sense? Although the eurozone does not have a liquidity problem, analysts remind that the US didn’t either, and yet half of the QE3 went into govies.