Not sentimental, and no France
Until a couple of days ago, I was very nearly incommunicado for two weeks. We took the kids to Italy on holiday, you see, and found ourselves in a place with no television, no internets, not even...
View ArticleClose Call
The reference here isn’t to the actual hurricane (which was far from that if you were black, poor, and lived in downtown New Orleans) but to the economic ‘near miss’ I think we are watching, and to the...
View ArticleEurozone More Exposed?
Chief OECD economist Jean Philippe Cotis wasn’t only proferring recommendations to the Federal reserve yesterday. He was also not backward in coming forward with his opinions about future growth in the...
View ArticleThe End of the Dolce Vita?
Are the good times and the good life still going to continue to roll in the Italy of the twenty first century? This is the core question the Economist’s Europe editor John Peet asks in the latest...
View ArticleTime To Cut Trichet Some Slack?
Am I being a little harsh with Jean Claude-Trichet? Perhaps, it is a hard (if not impossible) job he has on his hands. And in this post I did try hard to think about credible arguments in favour of the...
View ArticleHow anti-American are the French?
Not as much as you might think, argues The Economist in a long, Christmas-special piece about French anti-Americanism (article freely available to non-subscribers) : In one 2004 poll, 72% of the French...
View ArticleGarden Of The Forking Paths?
“Global imbalances matter” seems to be the favoured warcry over at Brad Setser’s blog these days (I’m not sure anyone really disagrees with the idea that they matter, all the arguing seems to be about...
View ArticleThe European culture of free speech
Her lies in the naturalisation process notwithstanding, it seems that, one way or another, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the controversial feminist, Islam critic, and former Dutch parlamentarian, will be able to...
View ArticleA Face That Launched A Thousand Ships
An unlikely Helen, Spain’s deputy prime minister, Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, that’s for sure. Yet outside a few thousand years difference in timing the two seem to have been cut out for one and...
View ArticleMore Sweden, less tidbits
Well, I just lost a long post about the so-called Swedish model due to my own stupid carelessness the combined malevolence of Windows XP and MS Word. Anyway, the main point was to say that the article...
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