The International Monetary Fund is urging Spain to take a page from Ireland and use an independent auditor to evaluate its banks, saying that could boost confidence. Speaking to reporters during the annual meetings in Washington, Antonio Borges, IMF’s European department head, said this should be the right thing to do, since financial market fears of the situation in many European countries have become “excessive,” especially in regard to Italy…
After one of the worst sell-off days in weeks and talking about the “European problem”, some brokers find in Spain reasons for hope: “I think there is some reason for optimism with respect of Europe. Spain is an example. They are taking the hard steps. They are going to have an election in November that will likely make the conservative candidate the new Prime Minister of Spain and they will…
“I don’t mean to get all class-warfare on you… But unless we find a way to spread the burden upward and cut the middle class some slack, it isn’t Greece we will soon be resembling”, writes Ellis Henican for Fox News, “it’s those old Caribbean islands Jimmy likes to sing about. Where a few super-rich families own just about everything. Where the vast majority of others have hardly anything at all.”
NEW YORK- After months of protracted negotiations over the national debt ceiling that brought the US to the brink of default and given the fact that the economy is weakening, Americans are running out of patience with political leaders, according to a Bloomberg National Poll released on Wednesday. 72 per cent say the country is on the wrong track. A majority says it will take at least six more years…
NEW YORK | It seems that there is already a critical mass of economists suggesting that the whole austerity passion that all of a sudden possessed world leaders is just the wrong passion. In this Monday CNN’s interview, Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stieglitz said he thinks the US government has to go away from austerity and go for a growth strategy. The same applies to Greece: if they continue to…
NEW YORK | Financial Times’s interview with Jamie Dimon was intended to create momentum. JP Morgan’s chief executive is now attacking new banking rules by Basel committee, trying to convince against the new regulation to water down Basel III the same way the major US banks have lobbied in Washington to water down Dodd-Frank Act, Obama’s new set of rules after the financial crisis. Dimon’s argument goes like this: the Basel…
You’ve certainly read by now Warren Buffet’s op-ed column in The New York Times “Stopping to coddle the super-rich”. Mr Buffett talked about raising the tax rate to the “rich” and “super-rich” in an effort to reduce the huge deficit in the US. While in Europe some members of the wealthy elite –like Maurice Lévy, chairman and chief executive of the French advertising firm Publicis or multimillionaire chairman of Ferrari…