There was a consensus in the market that the ECB will announce an extension of its current asset-purchase programme and so president Mario Draghi did it by expanding QE more than expected to December 2017. He also committed to do it even longer if needed.”The presence of the ECB on markets will be there for a long time,” he explained.
Francesco Saraceno | François Hollande will not seek reelection in May 2017. This is rather big news, even it if was all too logical given his approval ratings. But what went wrong with Hollande’s (almost) five years as a President?
After participating in the founding of Astra and SES (which today operates 52 geostationary satellites, capable of reaching 99% of the world population), Candance Johnson leads the European association of ‘business angels’. She is determined to build an online network of investors and provide the European Union with a “nation of investors”…
The European Commission has recently presented its energy plan for the period 2021-2030. The tightening up on legal security for investors will especially benefit Spanish renewable installations.
UBP | The large majority of the NO points towards early elections, before the “normal” date of Q2- 2018; priority will be to rewrite the political law , to vote the 2017 budget and to continue on banks recapitalization. An interim government would probably come just in the few days after Renzi’s resignation.
Referenda stand as a dangerous gamble nowadays. Only the Swiss can manage them with relative ease. Populism can boast of triggering another staggering crisis in Europe as voters rejected by a wide majority the Constitutional reform tabled by the Italian PM. Opposition to his initiative also came from fellow members of the Democratic Party, such as D’Alema, and respected politicians like Monti. Conceding defeat, Mr Renzi has resigned from office throwing the country into utter disarray.
Nick Malkoutzis via Macropolis | Political developments around the western world, from the victory for Brexit to Donald Trump being elected US president, have been a rude awakening for politicians, commentators and pollsters who did not see this shift in voter behaviour coming. So, we might want to consider if there is something going in Greece that we are failing to tap into.
Talgo has been the big railway company protected by all Spain’s governments. So it’s no suprise that Talgo’s Avril – with its own traction power – has just beaten Alstom and Siemens and won the contract to build 15-high speed AVE trains for state-owned Renfe. The German company hardly even flinched, but the French had their doubts about how the calculations were made and have asked for clarification.
Two founding member countries of the European Union are really in a bad way: France and Italy. Both are threatening to turn this giant with feet of clay upside down, when it still doesn’t know how to deal with Brexit or the unknown elements which Trump has in store in “his” new world order.
Francesco Saraceno | This post is nothing new. It is just a reminder for non European readers (or for distracted European readers), about the way things work in the EMU. The German Bundesbank President Weidmann violently attacked the European Commission for failing to enforce fiscal discipline within the Stability Pact.