It is often the case with policy and analytical documents produced by international bodies that the most important things are to be found in the annexes. In the specific case of the conclusions of the European Council of 23/24 March 2011, there are two long annexes. And you can pretty much dispense with the rest. [...]
Parallel Universes: A Pact for the Euro and an Annual Growth Survey but still no Clear Path out of Crisis
15/03/2011 by
Heads of State and Government agreed over the weekend a ‘pact for the Euro’, a successor to the ill-fated Franco-German Competitiveness Pact. At the next European Council meeting in ten days it will be converted into a binding agreement for the euro area countries; non-EMU members can sign up on a voluntary basis. A bargain [...]
Cross purposes – the Council’s Pact and the ECB
11/03/2011 by
Readers who understand German may be interested in a piece that has appeared in Die Zeit online. In it I place the critique of the ECB’s announcement that it will hike interest rates in the context of today’s Council meeting which aims to put together a Pact to stabilise the euro area. The key point [...]
Incautious Statements and/or Bad Journalism give wrong Message on Wages
21/02/2011 by
It is hard to know whether ECB President Trichet is more to blame or the Reuters reporters. But what is clear is that a wrong message is sent on the key issue of wages by reports such as this one, which muddles up a number of issues. President Trichet is correct, in principle, to stress [...]
Economic Policy in a Parallel Universe
16/02/2011 by
European monetary union has always been haunted by a spectre. That spectre is the irresponsible member country with an uncompetitive economy and a large budget deficit, building up too much debt and having to be bailed out. This bogeyman had a strong hold on the imagination of policymakers from the start, especially in Germany. Hence [...]
From Good-Bad to Bad-Bad
08/02/2011 by
Recent proposals to reform European economic governance – discussed in more detail here and here – have been ambiguous. Simplifying heroically, they can be summed up as being largely positive in terms of process, but mixed or downright negative in terms of content. Clearly the European semester, the proposed surveillance of macroeconomic imbalances involved a [...]
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