May 20, 2011
With it being a relatively slow news day, much of the economic and political commentariat has focussed on who ought to and/or has a chance of replacing Dominique Strauss-Kahn as IMF chief. Everyone seems to have an opinion on this; there have been some…
Posted by Open Europe blog team
AKA the ECB…There’s been a lot of handbags between the ECB and EU leaders this week, after some leading EU politicians admitted that there could be some form of debt restructuring of Greek debt. Both Olli Rehn, EU Economics Commissioner, and Jean-C…
Posted by Open Europe blog team
Here’s an encouraging proposal:As we reported in our press summary yesterday, the European Commission has announced plans to revise its Byzantine state aid rules, potentially making life a bit easier for local and regional authorities. Currently, local…
Posted by Open Europe blog team
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EU reform, EU regulation, Joaquín Almunia, state aid, subsidiarity |
We’ve just got our hands on the draft treaty establishing the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which comes into force in 2013 and is the follow up to the original eurozone bailout packages – dubbed the €750bn bazooka back in 2010.As expected, th…
Posted by Open Europe blog team
Usually mild mannered Swedish politicians have certainly displayed an unusual willingness to communicate strong opinions on European political issues of late. After some forthright comments on twitter from foreign minister Carl Bildt on Lybia recently,…
Posted by Open Europe blog team
Pardon for this uncharacteristically jargon-heavy blog-post…Following our event on the proposed EU regulation of short selling in March, we expressed our concerns that political motives were trumping common financial sense at that point in the negoti…
Posted by Open Europe blog team
Last week, the True Finns announced that it could not participate in a Coalition government that supported the bail-out of Portugal, its opposition to which was a key plank of the party’s election manifesto. Announcing the decision, True Finns leader T…
Posted by Open Europe blog team
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bail-out, democracy, eurozone, public opinion, timo soini, true finns |
This is a pretty interesting comment from the Chief Operating Officer of the EU’s diplomatic service (the EEAS), David O’Sullivan. In an interview with EUobserver, he said:”At the end of the day, it’s the member states that decide whether they want t…
Posted by Open Europe blog team
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catherine ashton, EEAS, eu foreign minister, EU foreign policy |
As promised, here is Part 2, which focusses on the Commission’s second response to our two-part series on EU aid – this time our report looking specifically at the EU’s approach in North Africa and the Middle East, the follow up to our briefing on the …
Posted by Open Europe blog team
May 13, 2011
The EU has today released its spring forecast, which updates last autumn’s economic forecasts for EU (and related) countries.Despite our (relatively) chirpy title it’s far from happy reading.The EU now expects Greek debt to reach 157.7% of GDP in 2…
Posted by Open Europe blog team
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